Slay the Spire 2

I played 450 hours of STS1 and more on my phone (a lot more but it's not recorded). I absolutely love STS1 and I see a ton of potential in 2, which is why I feel so bad about leaving this review. It makes me wish for a 'neutral' review option, but that doesn't exist so here we are. STS2 has a problem. It's small, it's sneaky, and realistically it also existed in Spire 1, but it wasn't bad enough to make me write a review for that game. Basically, since 1, STS2 has less floors, far more cards, and a lot more enemies that don't just punish certain strategies but basically completely kill you for using them. Now, these things all need to exist (minus the less floors bit, add one or two to each act and it would help a lot) but the balance was super delicate. You add a few cards, make the enemies a little more single-solution-specific and tougher, and now you've got a really frustrating game. I have each character (minus Regent, because quite frankly I don't like him very much) at a10, I've gotten all characters on 1 to a20, so I would say I know at least a little bit what I'm doing. I feel at this point, unlike the first game, a lot of the time when I lose runs it basically comes down to one thing: RNG. Yes, sometimes I needed to take that ♥♥♥♥♥♥ aoe card for a specific fight (sow into exoskeletons in act 2 for example) or I needed to take another damage common to get through act 1, but with the card bloat, it is now very possible I'm walking into fights like Lagavulin Matriarch or Soul Fysh with no good answers into them. It is very possible I really if I needed a solution that scales was not offered one that works well into Aeonglass or something and now I just die because I wasn't offered the tools to win. A lot of the bosses now have way more RNG mechanics in their fights, like Vantom (who I see as a parallel to slime boss from STS1) giving unremovable statuses, and less off turns. Or Soul Fysh, who basically says if you draw 2 or more Beckons on an attacking turn, you lose. Or the Insatiable, now having an energy tax and draw tax built in that you cannot ignore or you automatically lose, regardless if your deck would have the output otherwise. Or queen, basically saying if you weren't offered draw (which except for clad, feels much more rare in this game) you are at quite a high risk of losing, or taking a ton of damage due to bound card RNG. A lot of the enemies feel way too strong, like Hunter-Killer, if you have the wrong build. Or, to a lesser extent, the floating statue guys in act 3. Pretty much all of the hard hallways in Act 1 except for smoke guy and triple seaslugs, and I guess sometimes the inklets. The ancient bonuses are way more varied, which on paper sounds good, and eventually it will be. Unfortunately right now it means I'm building decks with a bunch of random crap in case I see one ancient bonus act 2, for example I remove less strikes because soup, I need to add cards like afterimage or stone armor or p-strike in case I see clone, I need to add more 'generalist' stuff in case I see Prismatic Gem, I need to add lots of random cards in case of Yummy Cookie or Sandcastle, etc. Vaaku can sometimes brick, and a lot of runs with him it feels like I'm picking the least bad option. It makes me wonder why they removed the ability to skip the ancient relics, as we could skip boss relics in the first game. I think I'd almost never click it but it feels bad that the player choice to skip is now no longer present. Basically, what I'm saying is, because there is less floors in the game, everything has been tuned up, and there's more cards, RNG plays way more of a factor in Spire 2 than I personally ever feel it did in 1. It feels less when I lose like "♥♥♥♥, guess I really did need to pick up card I didn't want for this specific fight', or 'guess I needed to avoid elites', and more like 'guess I needed a better ancient relic, or to just never fight anything ever until the boss and win with health.' Which I think is fundamentally flawed for a game like this. The main fix to this in Spire 1 was shops. If you spent your gold wisely, because of the size of the card pool and all the other factors, you would always find something at least useful in a shop, but in this game, the relics are more expensive, you are more likely to brick a shop, and somehow they do just feel worse than in 1, in a lot of ways I can feel but I'm not sure I can articulate that makes them feel less like a bailout when your run is going bad, although they still serve that purpose but just not as well. I also think the difficulty curve is kind of bad. This was also a problem in Spire 1, where basically Act 2 was the hardest by far, but in Spire 2 it's worse because Act 2 is still ridiculously difficult, but now Act 1 is even harder so scaling up for it is very difficult as well. And act 3 is kind of a cakewalk because 1 and 2 are such a gauntlet I rarely feel like I'm weak enough by 3 for it to be a challenge, as if I was going to be in that position, I probably lost by then. Act 1 needs to be a little easier, just things hitting for slightly less damage or something. Act 2 could probably do with being easier, I'm thinking in a very specific way though, like Hunter-Killer having a capped debuff stack that increases during the fight and Prism having less health (he has comparable health to act 1 bosses, what the heck is even that).

I wanted to give this game some time since it's Early Access, but the direction for the last few updates has been pretty clear, and I think the developers are, for some reason, intentionally creating the most boring and frustrating roguelike deckbuilder experience. The crux of the problem for months now has been the third boss slot in Act 3. The Queen and the Test Subject are broadly fine. Test Subject in particular is a threatening final boss that can still be reasonably accounted for in both deckbuilding and your strategy within the fight. Queen is maybe a little easy, but not a complete pushover. The third boss, however, has been a complete train wreck since the start and they've made several attempts to change it, up to and including *deleting it and replacing it with a new boss,* and yet at no point during any of these stages was it a fun, rewarding fight. At first it was way too easy, as it effectively did nothing. Then they kept adding gimmicks until it was a bloated monstrosity that had 3 phases it cycled between every turn, each with a unique debilitating debuff that punished certain types of deck strategies. The main problem here was that many strategies were hard-countered by ALL 3 of the phases, making those strategies effectively not exist within the context of the game at all, and the card rewards that lean you towards that path were just "pick this to lose the game" options. This problem got so bad that they just deleted the boss. So what'd they replace it with? A new one, Aeonglass, who did... absolutely nothing, just like its predecessor's first iteration. Just sat there throwing out attacks and getting hit, like it was a very large version of the floor 1 enemies. Obviously this couldn't continue, so they gave it a gimmick and buffed the ever-loving hell out of it. Now it's a massive HP wall that gains armor, nullifies debuffs, adds unplayable status cards to your hand every time you play X number of cards, and also has turns where it shuffles even more of them into your deck while increasing the damage that all of them do to you at the end of your turn if they're still in your hand. They managed to recreate the exact same problem as the previous boss immediately, and to an even greater degree. Doormaker (the previous iteration) was certainly annoying in its deckbuilding restrictions, but wasn't fundamentally that much harder than the other two bosses. For the last whole beta cycle and major patch, Aeonglass has both been incredibly oppressive towards deckbuilding on top of being astronomically stronger than the other two bosses. As a result, every single run from before you even set foot on floor 1, you are just thinking "how do I not immediately lose to Aeonglass." Every card reward, every relic, every event, every Ancient, all of the decisions you could be making throughout a run collapse into the singularity of Aeonglass insurance. And the worst part is that some characters get punished far more than others by this gimmick, to the point that several sub-"archetypes" within classes, like Shivs on Silent, or Souls on Necrobinder, feel like they're completely unpickable from the start. Is the boss unbeatable? No. Should the final boss not require any deckbuilding consideration? Also no. But is the game fun when every decision you make through an entire 45min-1hr run is solely through the lens of: if I pick this, do I die to Aeonglass? Also no. Not even close. The start of a run in a roguelike is supposed to be the most magical part. You're back to square 1 with the entire game's branching possibilities at your fingertips. Maybe this run, I'll end up with a wildly different strategy and loudout than the last one. Maybe this run, an ability that is otherwise not great will end up being key to my success because I was presented with a unique challenge that wasn't there in a previous run. Maybe I'll get some kind of ability or relic that breaks something and I can diverge off into a new path that's completely different from what I was planning on. Slay the Spire 2's boss design takes this magic, and smothers it to death with a pillow before it can even get off the ground. Before I even begin a run, I'm already sighing at the prospect of building "the Aeonglass deck" yet again. Card rewards, relic rewards, Ancient rewards, they all lose their excitability because there is a correct answer for every run, and if you're not given the correct answer, it sucks to suck. This problem had already demotivated me from playing the game at all for this last month or so, and the new Beta branch update not only leaves Aeonglass as it is, but actually guts one of the few counters the fight had in one card on one particular class. As if the cardinal sin of Slay the Spire 2 is having a run where Aeonglass isn't the be-all end-all. The very idea of a card game final boss punishing you for playing cards is already dubious, but STS1 had one as well that wasn't nearly as oppressive, and nobody was clamoring for them to make Time Eater's 12 card limit into a 5 card limit, or to give him 100 more health. I had a lot of fun with this game to begin with, but if this is their design philosophy going forward, I'm not interested in seeing what they have in store for the future anymore. If Aeonglass is severely reworked or outright deleted like its little brother the Doormaker, I'll give it a second look. But as it stands, it's simply not enjoyable to play outside of unga bunga Ironclad decks.