izigame.me

MAJOR UPDATE IN COMMENTS: After my hype died down and the honeymoon was over, I was surprised by how little fun I had with this, Hopefully they do see and apply feedback. For what it's worth, I adored the first game and find it extremely re-playable. I just did a near 100% save file in anticipation of this release and enjoyed immensely.
After having played that, this one's core gameplay loop feels terrible. It's SO slow, and everything seems stacked against the player compared to the first. You have one less dash. The boons are less effective. The meta progression is slower, and the gain of resources for that progression is slower. The numbers tied to all of these mechanics are lower, and the damage some bosses can output is much higher. Maybe it's a skill issue, but I'm good enough on 1. I could clear 32 heat and comfortably streak at 10+ heat, yet 20 hours in and I don't have even one successful run here. A higher difficulty curve and demand can work well (like Doom Eternal), but it requires that the interactivity still be fun, and I think that's suffered here. It's not just more difficult. There is only so much skill ceiling to circumvent some of this stuff. It is strictly slower and more tedious.
More important than success, I only have like two runs where the build ended up providing the power fantasy fun factor you hope that variance can, and one of those builds was so mechanically awkward to play it still wasn't that fun despite its power. Almost every build falls within like 10% of power levels to another, to the point where deciding what rooms to go into for the reward feels like a shrug. That's IF the room reward balancing goes well in the first place. I've had many runs where I'm severely lacking boons deep into the run because of meta resource spam. There's even a biome where you can explicitly choose to rush down the boss or risk more optional rewards for more scaling, and in that biome I can't bring myself to risk more rewards because there just is so little upside. The build diversity is terrible.
If they want to scale the difficulty up and make the journey to level up your character a longer one, then fine. I could like that a lot, as I'd hoped to play this game a bunch, it's just that the actual meat of the game in turns of runs is not dynamic enough to keep me coming back for a slow grind.
If this was the final release I'd be extremely disappointed, as large sections don't just need a numbers tweak (although that would help), but entire mechanics need a rework to me. The biggest issue is probably finding a healthier balance of how magick and omega actions interact with everything. As it stands now, it creates this really awkward rhythm of slow charging over and over to take any advantage of it, and that's IF you found something mid-run to let you consistently interact with it. There's very few clean ways to weave in and out of magick use. The Poseidon and Zeus sprints are about the only good applications imo. The axe has a hammer that makes it's spin charge faster and that works well enough. Just feels like a huge mechanic so much of the game is built around for it to be undesireable to interact with unless I get quality of life upgrades I'm not guaranteed to see mid run.
The weapons also need some re-working. The staff's attack and special don't seem to synergize at all, to the point where I find myself not using one or the other entirely depending on upgrades. There's no flow there. The axe is meant to be slow, but even still its too much to be pleasant. The daggers don't interact well with the magick system to me. The wands are outright awful, despite arguably being the most consistently powerful. The skull is the closest to feeling like a Hades 1 weapon, especially the aspect I was able to use at this point in my time with the game. It's still quite clunky. If you compare retrieving it's ammo to the Rail in 1, and its charge to the shield, it just feels like a clunkier version of those, but at least it has the DPS potential to add fun.
Some of the combat encounters need some work as well. Depending on your weapon or hammers, there's encounters in the second and fourth biome that feel extremely clustered in a way that you just can't interact with. Enemy density needs to come down or there needs to be more effective AoE options. I've complained a lot, but I must admit I think the third biome boss is a real highlight, and much improved over the first game's boss design.
That being said, the first biome boss can play keep away a little too long. Feels like I never really "get a turn" with the way some of their attack patterns work. The second biome boss is a couple notches too hectic imo. Way too easy to get overwhelmed by overlapping things. Some weapons and builds may go against it cleaner, but generally too hard to avoid. The fourth biome boss is a bit overtuned and the camera in that fight is horrid, which is strange given that the third biome boss camera work is generally quite good. Trying to avoid spoilers, so this is vague, but there's opportunities for other bosses than those, and some of them don't feel great either.
Some of the gods just don't feel like they do anything. to the point where I'm really scratching my head how they landed on their designs. Poseidon went from knocking the enemy you're targeting back for bonus damage to....knocking the enemies behind the target back?? That additional layer of obfuscation to every combat interaction is the approach they went with for nearly every god and it's just bizarre. It's like they were determined to not let god interactions make the player OP, even though I think the potential for that is an appeal of the first game's design, and in some ways, kind of the premise of the whole game? Like you're a competent fighter on your own, but only through getting a fraction of the absurd power of the gods themselves can you take on these great foes.
I don't understand the game handicapping the player for more difficulty when the first game had such a nuanced approach with the heat system. Some of the numbers on these god boons would make sense scaled down this hard...as a heat punishment. The base effects should just feel much more noteworthy. There's some synergies that you can rarely notice in the first biome like Zeus, and others like Hestia that don't seem to add much at any point in the run. The dot damage of Scorch is so impractical that it feels like it wasn't tested at all. How we went from Dionysus's hangover adding a total dot tick to Scorch adding total time to a lower base tick number is bewildering to me.
The game just seems to demand so much more of the player for less reward in this one. You go from seamless weapons to charging attacks to add value. You went from a ranged cast that stayed longer for bonus damage, to near melee range application and little uptime. You went from a call mechanic that was straightforward and easy to apply to a hex one that in some instances isn't usable at all and rarely worth the trouble when it is. You went from choosing a door reward for a basic meta currency that had wide applications, to one with only specific use cases and severe diminishing returns.
If it wasn't for my leftover love for the first game, I would not have made it THIS far. I would have dropped it. One too many "eh" feeling runs where the final result was a handful of meta resources, none of which added enough to actually let me do anything new. I just kept plugging away hoping that I'd finally unlock some last new feature that would ramp it all back up, like new defensive mechanics, or better weapon aspects (kinda, but not enough to overcome build woes) and 20 hours in it has not come. I'm not sure just how far along the game is within this early access. I hope it's not far, but its rough enough that I actually think it was a mistake to make it available this early on. Not a strong enough first impression coming off the heels of such a lauded first title.