Recent reviews by owon

Story, dialogue, lore, and art/design are fantastic. The gameplay is pretty good but I wish it incentivized using different abilities for different situations or enemies. The launch ability is the main one hands down. The controls feel nice and responsive though.

Incredibly grateful this eventually made it to PC because it is wonderful. With that in mind, I can say this is still not quite optimized for PC which is something I had to get used to while playing it. I'm using a 980 gpu and 4790k cpu and it was playable (1080p, medium-ish quality settings) although I felt obligated to let it do it's "Optimizing shaders..." process on startup. This means if I planned on playing it, I let it sit around 5-15 min to finish each time so it would chill tf out on my CPU usage once it finished the shaders stuff.

Now specifically onto the game:
- The story is A-tier; it has an incredibly fascinating world and lore. I also have an attachment to the map since I actually live in the area it's based off of.
- The dialogue is very hit-or-miss, but with Aloy nailing everything and the Frozen Wilds DLC being a marked improvement in that department.
- The combat is ruthless, rewards planning fights ahead of time, and knowing which weapons would be most effective for each enemy. Whoever designed the combat intended to avoid the 3rd person hack-and-slash playstyle as much as possible and it worked brilliantly.
- The controls are probably best on controller, but I got attached to my KBM keybinds so I stuck with that.
- There's a decent amount of bugs that break immersion, but nothing that I can think of made me blame some bugs of ruining parts of the game.

This game takes the best from Bastion and Transistor and adds a fresh take with how the story/gameplay progresses. It matches your commitment that you want to put into the game. Whether you want to gradually enjoy the new aspects it offers each run or meticulously research the optimal way to make it further, Hades delivers what you want from it.