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A sequel to the smash-hit original,Hades 2is a roguelite dungeon crawler action game with a huge amount of content to wade through. Playing as Melinoe, your goal is to descend into the depths of the underworld and take down Chronos, the titan of time who has your family captive.
As you’d expect from a roguelite, there is a great deal of difficulty to contend with here - thankfully, there are ways to improve your abilities without resorting to trial and error. With these helpful pointers, you should be able to make the first hours go by a bit smoother.
Defence Over Offence
Sources of healing in Hades 2 are very rare, especially towards the beginning of the game. When you take damage, that Life stays gone for a long time. The upgrades that add healing rooms and improve the post-boss fountains' healing come later.
As a result, making it far into a run will meanavoiding damage. Learn how Melinoe’ssprintworks, the timing and range of herdodge, and howenemies attack. An ounce of prevention is a kilo of cure, after all. The cleaner you can make your fights, the easier a time you’ll have in the long run.
This extends to the choices you make. Consider the following tips:
Treat Early Runs As Resource Opportunities
Towards the beginning of the game, you will beresource-poor. This means you won’t have manyincantationsto cast,Arcanato unlock or activate, orweaponsto experiment with.
As a result, your priority should be togather the resources that are required for these upgrades. Ash, Psyche, and gatherable materials should be the highlight of your runs rather than making it a little bit further every time.
Of particular importance is Ash, which allows you to unlock Arcana cards and strengthen Melinoe to great heights, and Bones, which are used to purchase important items from the Wretched Broker.
Best Keepsakes To Grab First
Early on in the game, you’ll unlockNectar, a precious amber liquid that the characters of Hades enjoy very much. Melinoe can gift this to her friends to make them like her more, and more importantly, give her aKeepsake.
Keepsakes are accessories that provide Melinoe with a bonus, often a temporary one, that can significantly help her on her journey.
Since Nectar is slow to acquire, you shouldprioritise giving it to the characters who provide you with the best Keepsakes. Those include:
Hecate
Silver Wheel
Restores your Magick automatically. This is fantastic for builds that rely heavily on Omega Moves.
Arachne
Silken Sash
You will begin a run with some Armour, and as long as you have it when you leave a room, it will increase passively. This will extend your runs quite a bit, if you sustain the armour as much as possible, letting you grab more resources.
Nemesis
Evil Eye
This Keepsake gives you a damage boost against the enemy who killed you on your last run. This is fantastic for moments where you’re struggling with a particular boss who keeps beating you, especially if you can get them almost dead.
Charon
Gold Purse
You begin a run with a good deal of money. Shops offer a great opportunity to power up, so having more money is always a boon and can mean avoiding money rooms in favour of more useful rooms when presented with the choice.
Schelemeus
Luckier Tooth
Once per run, this Keepsake will revive you from the dead with some Life. Treat this as a Death Defiance if you’re familiar with that concept. Like the Silken Sash, this will prolong your runs significantly.
Many of these Keepsakes will only work once or until they are exhausted. Eventually, you’ll be able to change your Keepsakes in the transitional areas between bosses, meaning you can gain the powers of multiple Keepsakes over the course of a single run.
Best Boons To Prioritise
As you gain experience with the combat system and the various Boons that the gods of Olympus can grant you, you’ll start to get an idea of which ones are the most useful. We’ve foundthe following Boonsto be the key to getting the edge on our foes:
Don’t Be Afraid To Prime Magick
Unlike Life,Magick is quite easy to restore. You’re filled to maximum Magick whenever you enter a new room, and there are plenty of Boons that let you recover Magick either quickly or easily.
Poseidon’sBoon, Fluid Gain, which creates Magick Bubbles from regular hits, is absolutely fantastic for this and almost guarantees that you’ll never be without Magick for very long.
Thanks to this,you should be on the lookout for Boons that require that you ‘Prime’ Magick. This will eat up a chunk of your Magick bar, effectively reducing the amount of Magick you can actually use, but often provides you with very powerful buffs in return, such as improved Power for your attacks.
Prioritise Unlockables At The Cauldron
While it’s possible to make a fair amount of progress just heading down into the underworld and going as far as you can each time, it pays to bestrategic with your goals. Take a look at the variousincantationsyou have available to you, and make a note (possibly using the Forget-Me-Not feature) of those that unlock new things.
Whether they be related to the nightly runs or the Crossroads themselves, these unlockables will help Melinoe vastly and improve your ability to make it further to the underworld.
Take care before a run toequip the right toolfor the resources you need, picking theright route(once you have two routes available to you), and use theForget-Me-Notsystem to remind you which doors you should be going through when applicable.
Always Be Wary With Bosses
One thing that can catch you off guard is aboss fight suddenly being quite different to usual. To keep you on your toes, boss fights havealternative strategiesthat they may employ, forcing you to pay attention and learn a whole new set of attacks to dodge and counter.
For example, Erebus’s boss will use many different spells during her phase transitions, and Oceanus’s boss can elect different ‘soloists’ during their second phase.
Be Brave With Chaos
Chaos is back, and like in the first game, you may go meet them and receive a Boon from them only bysacrificing a small amount of Lifeand entering the colourful gates that sometimes appear during a run.
While these gates require some Life and Chaos’s Boons require atemporary debuff, they are oftentimes well worth the risk. Thebuffsthat these Boons can grant range from helpful to run-saving - just be wary when a debuff’s duration would also affect the current region’s boss fight.
Entering Chaos’s realm and talking with them is also the only way toacquire many important pieces of lore and rare and crucial resources.
