Recent reviews by Cazhu

This game taught me how to write this review.

Going into the game, I expected more Hades with the same high quality the first game had. But Hades II turned out to actually be a huge upgrade compared to the first installment. Enemy variety, weapon play, power progression, storytelling, biomes, essentially every aspect of Hades 1 - which was a great game already - was improved upon for Hades 2

This one is really bad. It's all about acceleration and top speed, and no finesse. You can just use the guide rail to get your car around a corner, it will barely slow you down. This results in a very boring and tedious experience.

This is a very good one. I was unsure about whether I was going to like Leon's more action-oriented parts, but the split narrative does wonders for the game's pacing and arc of suspense. Grace's parts are incredibly tense while Leon's give some reward and relief for making it through her's. And there weren't any corners cut for either of them, the polish is there. As it is concerning performance, which is important because, for a change, ray tracing actually does something in this game. The reflections look incredibly cool. This one is very easy to recommend

Makes me look forward to the full game a lot

It's a good one with potential to be great in the future. It's an intense game, but the devs created a good "arc of suspense" with base reinforcement into looting with light engagements into grabbing the sword with heavy engagement and finally the high-intensity raid itself. You can definitely see they took inspiration from other games, there's Apex Legends in there, raids are a light version of Rainbow Six Siege. But it's unique enough to stand on its own. I've seen complaints about it being 3v3 and the world being too big, don't agree with either. 3v3 leads to pacing where a team wipe is always within reach without being too easy to achieve. The relatively high time to kill helps with that as well. The open world is quickly traversible using the mount and ziplines, you just need to know where you're going (i.e. you need to learn the maps). I had some problems distinguishing enemies and friendlies, the difference needs to be more visible. It's hard to tell who's on your team when you mave mirror matchups especially. Movement and gunplay feel good, optimization needs work.

The game suffers from multiple design missteps. For one, it is built around being played with companions, who have the irritating habit of commenting on everything you do and babysitting you through navigating the world. You can turn these comments off in the settings, but doing so will only make you realize that these companions also trivialize combat encounters by drawing aggro and dealing high amounts of damage. You can again just not bring a companion along at all, but then a good number of the skills available to you lose their purpose. Still, exploring with no companion seems like the way forward.

So you explore alone, and soon realize that around every corner there will be an enemy trying to gank you. Enemies laying traps is a good way to make players stay alert if used sparingly. FromSoft's games are good at this. Code Vein overdoes it by a lot. The ganking quickly gets to the point where it's not keeping you on edge, instead annoying you, especially because you will often see the enemy before you can lock onto it. So you react and instead of focusing on the attacker, the camera spins around in the direction you were moving.

Combat itself is alright, nothing to write home about, but not badly made either. Sometimes the range of both your own as well as enemies' attacks isn't communicated well, but by and large it works, and the skill and ichor system gives it an interesting spin by making you switch between powerful skill combos which use up ichor and basic attacks, parries, and backstabs which fill ichor back up. The equipment system is a bit obtuse, but that's par for the course with soulslikes. Unlocking new skill sets is a good motivator for exploring the environment.

The environment itself kind of isn't. You will see lots of bare concrete, streets, empty buildings and the like. I suppose it makes for good contrast with the blood theme, but it's really not very interesting to look at. The writing is bland. You'll encounter lots of clichés, hollow phrases and platitudes. The setting and story are serviceable but not more. If you expect the amount of depth in lore you would encounter in Dark Souls or Elden Ring, don't.

The character designer is well-made at least, though other than your own, characters will still mostly end up looking boring. The guys all look the same and the gals are in their underwear, it comes with the territory, I guess. What they have to say can sometimes be interesting, but more often than not it's standard fare you'd find in an action anime show, think Tokyo Ghoul.

I haven't played the DLC, but they apparently feature no new story and are generally content-sparse. So if you decide to buy the game, maybe get the standard edition and skip the DLC.

Don't let the edginess deter you, the writing is excellent. It didn't take long before I was engrossed in the game's world and its characters are intriguing. Add to that monetization which doesn't get in the way of the meat of the game (no missing out on lore due to timed events, no FOMO for gacha-able content), and you end up with a great experience. The English translation (text only) is also excellent, for one in the quality of representing what was said originally. With other games I would often run into text which just doesn't quite feel right, with things formulated in a way that nobody talks and with sentences which don't form a coherent whole. It's also good in how the the auto-scrolling is timed. Reading along with the Korean voice acting works perfectly

As most people will tell you, it's a downgrade from Alan Wake 1 in all aspects but combat. The Mr. Scratch lore is required for Alan Wake 2, so if you want to get the full picture, play this game. It's quick enough to get through, you'll be done in a couple hours. As a game of its own I would not recommend it though

I'm usually not one for extraction shooters, but this one turned out to be a lot of fun. Very polished, especially great with friends, and extremely tense solo