Well, well, well. It took me almost two months to complete my finished business with the original Hades, but now here I am with the sequel at last.
More often than not, I’m a player who likes to find a favorite strategy and stick with it. Of course, this changes wildly from game to game, but if I had to define it as broadly as possible, it would be HULK SMASH.
Some of us are great with swift, combo-centric weapons like daggers, dashing in and out while maintaining a relentless flurry of blows. This has never been my strong suit, and I’ll tend to eat a lot of unnecessary retaliatory damage when using weapons like that.
What I can do quite well is read enemies’ movements, line up a slow, heavy swing, and let rip for huge damage. I knew nothing about Hades 2 prior to its 1.0 launch, having diligently avoided it in Early Access, and so was delighted to find that not only is it predictably brilliant but it features a weapon perfectly suited to my playstyle: The Moonstone Axe.
On unlocking it, I instantly headed off into Erebus on a new run. With my very first wide sweep with the axe, I destroyed a bunched group of Spindles and knew that this would be my weapon.
Needless to say, I got a little carried away with charged versions of my regular attack and special. This is a very magically-intensive weapon to use in this way, and you can leave yourself very vulnerable when doing that.
My first Night with it, then, didn’t last very long at all, but it was a blast nonetheless.
It reminded me very much of Zagreus’s Aspect of Arthur for the Stygian Blade in the original Hades (my favorite Aspect in that game, unsurprisingly): A slow, increasingly damaging three-hit combo and a very handy special to back it up. Yes, I missed the slowing and damage-reducing aura that the Aspect of Arthur produced, but the huge shockwave from a fully-charged special in this game is great too.
You Could Say I’m Having A … Smashing Time
Mid-way through that first run, I picked up the Daedelus Hammer upgrade Hell Splitter, which boosted my Attack damage by an enormous 300 but changed out my three-hit combo so I only had the biggest and slowest smash attack. It was as fun as it was destructive, but not really the most practical choice for the faster-moving foes.
Still, learning to manage agile and evasive targets with a weapon that takes 7-10 business days to land an attack is what much of my gaming career has been about.
In ARMS, I mained Master Mummy with the Megaton/Megawatt. In my innumerable playthroughs of Bloodborne, my favorites were always Strength builds, using the likes of the Logarius Wheel. I even focused on rocket launchers as much as humanly possible in a Brick playthrough in the original Borderlands.
If it’s slow, destructive, and wonderfully ridiculous, I’m probably going to pick it.
This is exactly what drew me to the Great Sword in the Monster Hunter series. For me, there’s nothing more gratifying in all of gaming than landing a fully-charged slash to the weak point of something swift like Nargacuga.
There’s an art to it, and that’s exactly the point. Some games make their big, slow weapons’ swings uninterruptable, or give them some kind of armor. Others don’t (Lies of P did not want me to have fun with the Greatsword of Fate at first, but I persisted), and when they don’t, you’ve got to be extra strategic with them.
Huge potential damage numbers count for nothing if you repeatedly get poked by mobs and fail to complete an attack. Similarly, the comparatively much lower numbers of far faster weapons aren’t a weakness if they’ve hit ten times before you’ve got an attack off.
In this series, of course, there’s also the Weapon Aspects system to vary things up. I’m looking forward to sinking much more time into leveling up each one. Aspect of Melinoë’s simple Attack Power and HP boost seems perfect for me, but I’m also intrigued by Aspect of Nergal and the Berserk mechanic it adds.
My beloved slow, heavy weapons keep changing things, and I just keep coming back for more. To see them in what may be this year’s best game is a particular joy.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
