A great game — but the pacing stumbles.

Hades is absolutely worth its price and the time you initially invest. I won’t list every visual or audio strength — they speak for themselves. The art direction and soundtrack are fantastic, and the gameplay, especially in the early hours, is gripping. It impresses with its depth and makes you think strategically about each run. The core loop is highly engaging at first, and the story sets up enough intrigue to keep you interested.

However, one of the few but significant drawbacks lies in how poorly the story and gameplay progression are paced. The narrative is stretched out far beyond the point where gameplay offers anything truly new. Around the 15–20 hour mark, the mechanics start to feel repetitive, while the story may still take 30–40 hours to fully unfold — depending on random and which story events happen to trigger.

By the time you fully understand the game’s formula, you’re left with many more hours of story content, but very little fresh gameplay to support it. This imbalance eventually killed my motivation to continue. The runs stopped feeling meaningful, and the combat loop no longer evolved. Even the “Pact of Punishment” modifiers didn’t do much to change this, they mostly just restrict your options rather than create new dynamics.

Had the story been tightened by 5–10 hours, the overall experience would be far stronger. There’s already plenty of endgame content for players who enjoy farming and grinding — dragging the story out for everyone else only weakens the pacing.

As of 2025, the quest design and core gameplay haven’t stood the test of time. It’s aged poorly and I’m not even convinced it was particularly good back in 2012.