A few weeks ago, I covered the demo of HellSlave II, and I had a lot of fun despite having a few relatively minor issues with it. Well, the full game’s out now, so here are my thoughts on HellSlave II: Judgment of the Archon now that I’ve played it for several more hours!
NOTE: I received a review copy of the game and have been playing it on and off prior to release.
Time, Tactics, & Triumph
HellSlave II is a turn-based RPG with a twist, and just as I noted in my demo coverage, it’s very reminiscent of Ruined King‘s “timeline” combat. Instead of traditional turns, you and your opponents follow a timeline on the top part of the screen, with most actions consuming valuable seconds on the clock.
With smart decision making, you can maximize your turn by using several actions that take little to no time, dealing tons of damage before your opponent can make a move. Does it sound silly in practice? Kinda, yeah.
In most fights, my beefed up elemental mage can cast 3-4 spells before the other party can react, which would undoubtedly be humorous if reenacted in real time, but I digress. I love that this combat system rewards builds that are tailored towards nuking enemies before they can act, and that’s not to say that the game is entirely easy, especially if you raise the difficulty (obviously).
Against trash mobs, you’re not going to have much issue at all, and certain builds can obliterate entire groups before either of you can even take a turn. Against elites and bosses, though? You’ll find yourself struggling if your entire build is centered around a huge initial ability dump.
Power Fantasy Galore
As mentioned earlier, I’m currently playing through HellSlave II as an elemental sorcerer. My entire build is such a stupidly simple “dump every stat point into Magic Power and pray”, but it works so well because of how other aspects of the game enable such silliness to thrive.
The gear system and talent/power trees help you compensate for holes in your build, whether it be survivability, damage, or sustain. In my case, I’ve compensated for my pathetic defense with temporary shields, heals, and mana regen, all enabled by the game’s easy-to-digest point allocation system that’s designed to let you freestyle and respec whenever you please.
It’s like my character’s a walking miasma that just kills most enemies by simply existing, with the only exception being bosses that have too much health and the ability to summon adds. On that note…
Rollercoaster of Difficulty
As much as I enjoy HellSlave II, it does seem to struggle a bit with difficulty spikes, at least when it comes to important fights. Trash mobs like the ones you encounter out in its open world are just punching bags that take little to no effort to beat, and most elites are the same if your character isn’t extremely poorly optimized.
But when it comes to boss fights, they tend to act like brick walls that punish you for even the slightest gap in your build. What would normally destroy regular mobs, even those above your level, suddenly do little to put a dent into the life bar of actually significant targets.
This is compounded by some of them being among the few enemies who have other brutal mechanics, like the ability to advance their turn or continuously heal or even summon more bodies on the field.
I’ve only really had trouble with a single fight so far, but there have definitely been times when the combat’s pace suddenly slows to a crawl because of such boss fights. My “nuke everything” build can only do so much with limited mana and cooldowns, so some fights devolve into a battle of attrition where I’m clearly winning, but it’ll just take more time than usual.
Maybe it’s a user issue and not really the game’s fault, but the gap between regular fights and bosses is truly immense, to the point where I’ve had to respec for that one fight where I actually struggled (so far). Mind you, this is only on normal difficulty.
Lots of Freedom (For Better or Worse)
Combat aside, the game does offer a lot of freedom once you get through the opening sections and start exploring the world. So much so that it gets a bit confusing sometimes, as there often aren’t clear indicators for where you’re supposed to go.
I’m not saying we should have large, bright arrows pointing the way to every quest objective, but it’s easy to get lost in the relatively tight open world that the game offers. More than once I’ve accidentally veered off course because of how obtuse certain quests can be.
There was a point where I just accidentally walked through a location that’s clearly meant to be visited a little later in the main story. It looks like a failed siege just happened in that area, yet there is no real explanation as to why there are tons of bodies scattered on the ground and piled up at the gates.
Turns out, I wasn’t supposed to visit this yet, but I’ve already cleared the way and pretty much just walked in when I finally did get the quest to go there.
I’ve also accidentally stumbled into story beats that I wasn’t even trying to trigger. As I’m writing this, I got lost looking for a side quest objective and ran into at least four important encounters for the main story (let’s just say I slew a significant demon)… I still haven’t found what I was originally looking for.
There seems to be a lot of that going on, with characters going “Okay, now let’s go to x” without much context as if you’re expected to know where that is in the map.
Overall, Pretty Good
All in all, I’d still say HellSlave II: Judgment of the Archon is well worth the affordable asking price despite the issues I have with it. The gameplay itself is exceptionally satisfying once you start leaving the early zones where everything can be killed instantly if you sneeze at enemies with a half-decent build.
The steamrolling of regular enemies doesn’t truly stop, but the power fantasy aspect does add to the game’s overall charm. Part of the story involves inheriting the power of a demon due to spoiler-y reasons, so I don’t mind it too much. I just hope that the developer finds a balance between turn 1 obliteration and sudden slow elite/boss fights in future updates.
If the Steam reviews are anything to go by, plenty of people do find the game sufficiently challenging once they reach the introductory archon fight. Maybe I should play through it in hard instead? But if that was a requirement for more “challenging” combat, then the lower difficulties become pretty pointless outside of the story.
What keeps me hooked outside of that is the game’s beautifully macabre comic-style art, which is present in every cutscene and dialogue exchange. The open world also features a lot of handcrafted environments, and while I do appreciate the explicit lack of generative AI, I don’t think that’s much of a selling point because that should be the bare minimum.
I’ll continue playing the game ’til completion, but I’ll be slowing down a bit as I have a lot on my plate right now. It doesn’t help that Tokon just came out and I’m already obsessed with it despite sucking at fighting games.