Yeah I couldn't get it firing very fast so it seemed DPS would be low. Plus I just prefer melee I think.

All the weapons are good when you learn their ins and outs.

If you want to cakewalk the game I recommend either taking the Adamant Rail and the Zeus Trinket and and getting the boon on attack, which will make it ridiculous, or the Hera Aspect of the Bow and the Dionysus Trinket, and taking the boon for cast. Both of those are really simple ways of outputting huge damage will take the stress off, and let you focus on learning dodges etc.

Permanent Record is looking good now, I want 10 clears with 'em all!

Vsync + vrr is not a happy mix in this game at least. Turned off the former and it's now smooth as and much better.

The icons  on the leftmost are, in order Attack, Special, Cast, Dash, Call - you can only have one of each, the game will tell you if you are replacing when you pick them up as it will say "will replace". 

The rest are all passive, no theoretical limit.

Got ruined by hades again. I need to be a bit more patient.

Woke up at 6am so started playing this again. Finally managed my first clear, at the 27th attempt.

I’ve only played around 6 runs and it’s quite hard! Or maybe I’m just shit. 

Absolutely loving the characters and dialogue etc. Voice acting pretty ok. Dionysus my fave atm.

I haven't been able to play much in the last few days. I unlocked the gun on my last run and got a big special boost early on that helped a lot. It got through the Elysium bosses for the first time and all the way to the big guy. I wasn't in any shape to beat him by the time I got there, but that was still much better than I'd managed before.

The power progression in this reminds me a lot of Isaac, in the way that your build slowly snowballs towards insanity, which is a big draw for me in rogues. I love when roguelikes don't force challenge over the player at all costs. Sometimes it's nice to get decent RNG and absolutely stomp a run out. It's really satisfying for me, that sort of swinginess that you get when items are randomly selected. Same at the other end of the scale as well, clearing a run with an anaemic build has it's own satisfaction from overcoming the odds. 

I don't think Hades is going to get close to the extremes of where Isaac runs can end up, but it definitely is going a lot further that the likes of Gungeon and Dead Cells.

It's a shame that the game makes players wait a while before it unlocks the Heat system and lets players toggle up the difficulty by mixing and matching different modifiers to make runs more difficult in exchange for more rewards. I'm currently doing runs at Heat 3 I think the heat gauge might go all the way up to 25 or 30 and I'm starting to feel the game pushing back, I can get to Elysium most of the time, Styx some of the time, but the final boss is proving a handful as most of my death defies are gone by that point.

Styx as far as I can tell is the last area, although there is a whole set of rooms that are like Chaos portals that I can't open (yet) so I don't know if those lead anywhere different.

This game is very strange in overall size, because the narrative size, is huge, I'm way past the end credits and the story is still going, and I don't mean the little side convos with other characters, I mean the main plot of the game. I've said elsewhere that it feels like the point at which the credit rolls was picked because I think for a lot of players who just want to enjoy the game and move on, that was a natural break point to do it, but I'm nearly 60 hours in and a new thing appeared in the palace, that I have no idea what it does, I still don't have the final form of all the weapons, I know from Tempy, the resident Hades don, in his screenshots that there is a whole extra type of item that I still haven't unlocked yet. ]

I think there's a decent amount of variety left for me to explore with all the different weapon forms, the heat runs, the rest of the story post credits, the new stuff that keeps appearing in the palace (one thing I will say about Hades is it's very good at making you think "Oh keys are redundant now I'll just trade these all for nectar so I can get diamonds and stuff", only for keys to become a necessary item once again further down the line). But in terms of new areas, I don't think there's much left to see, there's the sort of procedural room layouts on each floor to keep things looking too repetetive, and there are some significant changes to the bosses that happen under certain circumstances, and there's a special room type I can't get in for now, but I don't think the game has any new areas beyond Styx, but then, I could be completely wrong about that because I wasn't expecting completely brand new "thing" to show up in the palace the other day after all this time.

Yeah. It's a masterpiece for sure, but for me it's not gonna last. The incremental upgrades at the start of most runs are not exciting enough and can be very samey, and having to trawl through the same bosses over and over has become tedious for me.

All i’m seeing here is a lot of wobbly lips who can’t get a sub-20 minute clear above heat 5.

Yeah, except you control the specific challenges you want to put on. Each challenge applies an amount of heat.

I do find it interesting that the takes are divided though, I had a vague period where I was sort of done with the early levels but that was in early access where there was less variety - we didn’t even have weapon aspects at one point! I remember when there was no fists!

All the bosses have also had big revamps apart from T&A who only received some minor tweaking that occurs late game thanks to story reasons. There are now new miniboss options in all the levels where before there was only one, a few of the heat choices like Extreme Measures and Middle Management open up a lot more variety too as you play, there’s even a whole hidden mechanic where elite enemies (the ones with little skull icons and armour) get Diablo III style perks from a specific pact of punishment, when it all starts layering together the variety and difficulty just keeps increasing.

I say this I guess as someone who has like 80+ hours into it, with 100+ runs and 30+ clears now. I can’t see myself getting bored because the core loop is so good, and for every run where I am just exploding with damage because I picked the right boons and power ups, there are runs where the bosses and heat debuffs are making those combos less and less effective, and the core combat of dodging and figuring out how to maximise damage without taking a face full of pain creeps back in. It has a wonderful back and forth relationship between your scaling power and the higher difficulty of heat which pushes back, especially as you start to cap out your titan blood upgrades on weapon aspects and have to start relying on skill over raw numbers to get by.