Hades II’s new combat options enhance an already great game

Here at Ars, we were obviously excited by the late 2022 announcement of Hades II as a follow-up to our favorite game of 2020. But when early coverage of that sequel suggested major changes to the game’s core combat, we were a bit worried that the developers at Supergiant risked messing up the core gameplay loop that made the original game so satisfying.

So far, it seems like those worries were unfounded. After spending a few hours playing through the game’s recent technical test—which covers content up through the game’s first major “boss” character—we found a confident sequel that keeps the original games familiar flow while adding just enough changes to avoid feeling like a rehash. If anything, the new systems in Hades II make the original game’s positional combat more satisfying than ever.

Spoiler warning: The rest of this piece offers minor spoilers for the early parts of Hades II.

Magical mystery tour

After the grueling ordeal of the original Hades, Zagreus gets a break as protagonist in Hades II in favor of his little sister Melinoe. In the new game, the young goddess in training is facing down the Titan Chronos—Hades’ father and Melinoe’s grandfather—who has escaped his imprisonment and usurped Hades’ throne.

Melinoe was raised by Hecate, the Goddess of Witchcraft, and was trained in a variety of magical abilities that her brother lacked. In gameplay terms, this change in upbringing manifests itself in a magic meter as a new exhaustible resource to keep track of during the game’s hectic positional battles.

Much like Hades, the two main attack buttons in Hades 2 still offer two different combat options—generally one that’s quick and weak alongside another that’s slower and more powerful while offering a longer range. But after holding down either attack button for about a second, releasing that button will produce an alternate magical attack that drains your magic meter. These attacks do additional damage, but they’re more useful for controlling screen real estate; one might send a spread of powerful throwing knives in an arc in front of you, and another might hurl a powerful beam of energy along a line that can take out multiple enemies at once.

Magic power restores itself at least partially between rooms in the technical test, meaning there’s little reason to hoard your magical power for upcoming fights. And many of the godly boons and between-run upgrades you find along the way further encourage magic use, offering attack bonuses when your magic is low or refilling the magic meter within a single battle under certain conditions, for instance (this is especially useful for the longer boss battles, where the fight can last a lot longer than a single full magic meter).