Hades II Review: Supergiant Refuses to Coast on a Sure Thing

Following up one of the most beloved roguelikes ever made is a thankless job. Every design decision gets measured against a game that redefined what the genre could be. And yet Hades II doesn’t play it safe — it takes the foundation Supergiant Games built with the original and pushes it further in almost every direction, resulting in a sequel that somehow manages to feel both comfortingly familiar and genuinely new.

The Basics

• Developer: Supergiant Games
• Genre: Action Roguelike
• Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2
• Average Playtime: 40+ hours to see the main story through, well over 100 for full mastery
• Tedony Score: 9 / 10

A New Protagonist, A New Enemy, The Same Family Drama

Expectations for this sequel were always going to be complicated. The original Hades wasn’t just a critical darling; it became something of a cultural shorthand for what a roguelike could achieve when writing, art, music, and mechanics all pulled in the same direction. Any follow-up risked either playing it too safe, delivering more of the same dressed up in a new coat of paint, or overcorrecting so aggressively that it lost sight of what made the first game special in the first place. Supergiant threads that needle about as well as any studio could reasonably be asked to.

This time around, you’re not playing as Zagreus. You’re playing as Melinoë, Princess of the Underworld and Zagreus’s own sister, a witch raised specifically to hunt down Chronos, the Titan of Time who has seized control of the Underworld itself. It’s a premise that immediately signals ambition: rather than simply re-running the “escape the Underworld” structure of the first game, Hades II inverts the geography entirely. Melinoë fights her way upward and outward from Chronos’s icy domain, through the Underworld, and eventually into the surface world and beyond, chasing a villain whose control over time itself becomes both a narrative threat and, cleverly, a gameplay mechanic in certain encounters.

The returning cast is handled with real care. Familiar faces from the original — including Zagreus himself — appear in ways that feel earned rather than fan-service pandering, and the new characters, particularly the coven of witches who train and support Melinoë, are written with the same sharp, occasionally very funny dialogue that made the first game’s mythological soap opera so compelling. Supergiant’s writing team continues to understand something many games miss: that dialogue variety, reactive to your specific run and your specific failures, is what turns repetition into a feature rather than a flaw.

Combat: More Weapons, More Style, More Ways to Break the Run in Your Favor

Melinoë’s combat kit expands meaningfully on the “Boons from the gods” formula that defined the original. She wields a broader range of weapons — from twin blades to a staff, a rapid-fire torch, and a scythe that doubles as both a melee weapon and a spellcasting focus — each with its own moveset and its own interaction with the Boon system. Boons themselves return largely intact conceptually: gods offer buffs that modify your attacks, dashes, and special abilities, and stacking synergistic Boons from compatible gods is still where the game’s signature “oh, this is busted, and I love it” moments live.

New to Hades II are Arcana Cards, a meta-progression system that lets you slot passive bonuses drawn from a Tarot-style deck before a run even begins, alongside a Hex-casting system tied to Melinoë’s witchcraft that introduces charge-up spells capable of turning the tide of a bad encounter. Combined, these systems give runs a noticeably different texture than the original: more setup-dependent, more build-crafty, and arguably more forgiving to players willing to invest time into understanding the meta-progression layers rather than raw reflexes alone.

A World That Finally Moves Above Ground

One of the most striking structural choices in Hades II is how much of its runtime takes place outside the Underworld’s familiar chambers. Surface-world biomes bring genuinely new enemy types, environmental hazards, and boss encounters that feel distinct from anything the first game offered, and the shift in scenery does a lot of heavy lifting in keeping repeated runs from feeling stale. The overworld hub, Melinoë’s home base between runs, has also been expanded significantly — there’s more to do, more relationships to build, and more side content to chase between dives than there ever was in the original’s House of Hades.

Art and Sound: Darren Korb Doesn’t Miss

Supergiant’s signature painterly-comic art style returns looking sharper and more varied than ever, with new biomes offering striking, distinct color palettes that keep the visual identity fresh across a long campaign. Darren Korb’s score, meanwhile, continues to be one of the strongest reasons to play a Supergiant game in the first place — a blend of folk, rock, and orchestral motifs that shifts fluidly with the tone of each region and boss fight, anchored by vocal tracks that rank among the best original game music released this decade.

Meta-Progression Done Right

One of the quiet triumphs of the original Hades was how it made permadeath feel low-stakes by wrapping every failed run in meaningful, persistent progress — new dialogue, new relationships, new gear. Hades II builds on that formula rather than replacing it, layering the Arcana Card system and a deepening web of relationships back at Melinoë’s base on top of the familiar mirror-of-night-style permanent upgrades. The result is a game where losing a run to Chronos rarely feels like wasted time, because you almost always walk away with a new card unlocked, a new conversation triggered, or a clearer sense of which build you want to attempt next. It’s meta-progression as narrative delivery system as much as power fantasy, and it remains one of the smartest structural decisions in the roguelike genre.

The witches’ coven that trains Melinoë deserves particular praise here — each member offers not just gameplay-relevant boons but genuine character development that unfolds gradually across dozens of runs, giving you real reasons to return to the hub between dives rather than treating it as a pure menu screen. Supergiant has always understood that a hub area needs its own reasons to exist beyond shopping, and Hades II’s version might be its most fully realized yet.

Balancing Old Fans and New Players

A sequel to a genre-defining hit has to walk a careful line between rewarding longtime fans and remaining approachable to newcomers who never played the original. Hades II largely succeeds at this. The core Boon-stacking loop is intuitive enough to pick up within a single early run, and the game does a good job of gating its more overwhelming systems — Arcana Cards, Hex-casting, the full weapon roster — behind a gradual unlock curve rather than dumping everything on you at once. Returning players will recognize the DNA immediately, while new players get a gentler on-ramp than the sheer density of systems might suggest at a glance.

Technical Performance and Post-Launch Support

On a purely technical level, Hades II runs remarkably smoothly across every platform we tested, maintaining a consistently high frame rate even during the most chaotic multi-enemy encounters where Boon effects, particle trails, and Hex spell casts all overlap on screen at once. Load times between runs are close to instant, which matters enormously for a genre built entirely around rapid retries. Supergiant has also been transparent about its post-launch plans, treating the full release as a foundation rather than a finished product, with balance patches and additional content already promised in the months following launch — a continuation of the studio’s approach during the game’s extended early access period, where community feedback visibly shaped several major systems before the full release ever arrived.

What Works

• Melinoë is a compelling protagonist with a combat kit that feels distinct from Zagreus, not a reskin
• Arcana Cards and Hex-casting add real strategic depth to run planning
• Surface-world biomes meaningfully diversify the game’s pacing and visuals
• Writing remains sharp, funny, and emotionally resonant across dozens of hours
• Darren Korb’s soundtrack is, once again, genre-elevating

What Doesn’t

• The sheer volume of new systems can feel overwhelming for players new to the series
• Some early-game runs feel slower-paced than the original’s tighter early loop
• Meta-progression grind before certain late-game content unlocks can feel like padding

Hades II doesn’t just live in the shadow of one of the best roguelikes ever made — it steps out of that shadow, expands the family, expands the map, and somehow still makes every single run feel worth one more try.

Final Verdict: 9/10

Hades II is a rare sequel that understands exactly what made its predecessor great while having the confidence to change nearly everything about how you engage with those ideas. Melinoë’s story, combat kit, and expanded world make this feel like a genuine evolution rather than an expansion pack, and Supergiant’s writing and music continue to operate on a level most studios, indie or otherwise, simply can’t touch.

Whether you’re a veteran of the original chasing another few hundred hours in the Underworld, or someone who’s simply heard the acclaim and wants to see what the fuss is about, Hades II earns its place among the best roguelikes of the generation, and quite possibly among the best games Supergiant has ever made.