I am Rather Fond of Slay the Spire 2
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I played a lot of games. Being in a semi-lockdown and working from home left me able to boot up whatever during my break and play a quick round. One game that was still relatively new (if you ignore the 2-year alpha phase) was the 2019-released Slay the Spire, a roguelike deck builder where you choose a character and climb the aforementioned spire, battling through all kinds of creatures to reach the spire’s heart and then perish.
Nowadays, roguelike deck builders are way more common, and in no small part due to the success of Slay the Spire. So it is only fitting that it has a direct successor, which has been in its alpha phase since last year and is set to be fully released whenever it feels right for the developers. And because I ended up having a bit of time on my hands recently, I played it a lot.
How does Slay the Spire 2 compare to the first one? I would say it is better, even if not completely polished yet. Mega Crit, the studio making the game, clearly learned and grew since releasing the first one. Animations are smoother and more complex, backgrounds and scenes are richer, and even the sound design has a higher fidelity. The new characters are fun to play with cool mechanics that do give them a unique play style, and the old ones are kept fresh by having their kits updated and partially reworked, like the sly mechanic for the Silent. I particularly like the inclusion of the ancients, where at the start of each act you get healed and a choice of cool effects, some of which are pure chaos and can either make you way too strong or throw you to the wolves if you choose poorly.
The core gameplay loop is the same as Slay the Spire 1; you select a character to go through three layers of the tower, aka Acts, each with a boss fight at the end, fighting enemies, collecting relics, and building your deck along the way. Slay the Spire 2 keeps what made the first game good and expands it instead of simply retreading the exact same path. I mentioned the updated kits already, but it really is a treat to see not only the next iteration of old themes like the Ironclad with his block-to-damage build, but also new styles that still fit the character like the Defect with his status generation and usage.
The new multiplayer feature is a great addition, so you and up to three of your friends can Slay the Spire 2-gether. It has special cards that allow players to strategize more; also, you can heal other players at the campfire instead of taking another action, adding to the cooperative nature. The difficulty in multiplayer comes through enemies HP scaling with the number of players. This can lead to a few problems, as damage between characters is not equally distributed, and some strategies do not work as well on enemies with very large health pools if only one of four people is trying it. But overall it works, and multiplayer sessions are fun, especially when you work out combos between the different characters or all take the same character and exploit its kit as much as you can.
Besides the fun to be had, there are also a few bugs and smaller annoyances.
Balancing is ongoing and has this year even led to a wave of angry reviews from mainly Chinese players whose main strategies became suddenly less viable.
The randomness factor is, of course, a staple in any roguelike, but because some events in the game are basically a pure resource drain, while others have only good options, that means that a run can get hairy outside the players influence.
My complaint here is less about RNG and more about the fact that events seem not that balanced when compared to each other, like hitting an event that forces you to switch a relic can be a real blow to your strategy, whereas one that gives you some gold is never bad.
Also, some minor annoying bugs exist, like the Silent’s “Tools of the Trade” power being a bit wonky in multiplayer, where its discard prompt sometimes only appears when you try to play a card.
Lastly, there are some technical things that feel weird but are not necessarily bugs but rather the outcome of gameplay systems working not like you might expect them to, but those are rare and have so far not let to my demise.
Playing a game like this during its alpha phase is interesting because of all the changes and balances you can witness, which a player of the finished game might not know even happened. For example, there is an enemy that spawns little self-destructing minions. At some point, it spawned more and more minions every time, becoming a threat fast and ultimately being a damage check because you needed to kill it before its minions recreated 9/11. Now it only spawns one minion but also adds a status on the player such that they can play at most one skill per turn, thus limiting the player’s options to block, making it still a check for damage output but less punishing than before as the health of the minion is reasonably low. Cards, of course, also get nerfed or buffed over time, depending on community feedback and playtesting. Balancing a roguelike is hardly an easy task, but I have to say that so far (ca. 80 hours of game time at the moment), I never felt like things became worse for my playthroughs after a patch.
While in Slay the Spire 1, I ended up not even getting close to the maximal ascension; in Slay the Spire 2, I am currently sitting on ascension 7 for most characters and probably will hit 10 on all of them before the game is completely released. This is in no small part due to how the different characters and playstyles keep it fun and engaging. A single run can take about 40 minutes, but that is if you make it all the way to the boss in Act 3; so early losses mean you can jump right back in if you feel like it. And due to the multiplayer, I can inflict my madness onto others when I feel like it.
All in all, I would say that I am rather fond of Slay the Spire 2. So fond, in fact, that I made a small edit.