Slay the Spire 2 Early Access Review
Slay The Spire 2 is scarily reminiscent of Dr Dre. After his first solo album in 1993, Dr Dre went on a lengthy hiatus and didn’t return until 1999. In that time and in his words many people “Forgot About Dre”. When he returned in 1999 with The Chronic 2001, it was the same Dr Dre, but more refined and highly polished. It reminded people that Dr Dre was one of the best and the album is largely regarded as one of the best in the genre.
With Slay The Spire 2, it’s a perfect parallel. It’s been nearly a decade since Slay The Spire hit EA in 2017. The experience isn’t different, now it’s just more refined, polished, expanded and it will without a doubt eventually be regarded as one of the best of the genre.
There have been a lot of excellent Roguelike Deckbuilders that have released since Slay The Spire, but Megacrit is back with a sequel that returns to its rightful spot on the throne as the Roguelike Deckbuilder to beat, but now the bar has been raised. Outside of replacing placeholders with finished art and adding more content, it’s perplexing to see how the experience could get any better during early access.
If you want a little more nuance, check out the video or keep reading below
STILL S.L.A.Y
Let me ask you a question. Can you think of another genre where one game is unanimously regarded as best-in-class like Slay The Spire is considered to be the uncontested greatest roguelike deckbuilder?
About the only other genre that comes to mind is the platformer, which belongs to Super Mario. So how does Megacrit follow up on a game like Slay The Spire? Oddly enough, the solution is fairly similar to Super Mario, as you don’t mess with the formula or reinvent the wheel. You simply iterate and improve the incredible foundation that already exists, which made the original a resounding success. It wasn’t flashy and it didn’t have a big budget, but it had a near perfect balance with an incredibly addictive gameplay loop full of infinite possibilities.
Just like early Super Mario, the most noticeable thing is how much better it looks than the entry before. It’s still unmistakably Slay The Spire, but the animations and art now pop off the screen and make the world feel much more alive than ever before. How an enemy gets pulled into the underworld with enough doom or how a boss can disenchant cards in your hand. It’s a lot of little things like this that make the world feels more immersive than ever before.
It might be labeled Early Access, but there’s already more content in Slay The Spire 2 than there was in the final build of the original. There are more relics, events, cards, bosses, enemies, characters and just about everything else. There’s around 600 cards across the five heroes (two of which are completely new), almost 300 treasure chests, almost 300 relics almost 60 unique events, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Slay The Spire was in Early Access for nearly two whole years and Slay the Spire 2 has just started.
There is no telling how much bigger Slay The Spire 2 can get, but what this massive increase in quantity means right now is that after about a dozen hours of early access, each run has felt unique. Possibilities are much more varied and the gameplay is more emergent. The experience is much less predictable, which demands more skill from the player as you need to learn to adapt to a wider range of outcomes.
One of the more marquee differences in Slay The Spire is the addition of two, completely new characters: The Regent and The Necrobinder. The Regent is the heir to the Throne of Stars who wields cosmic powers, but sits in a throne the whole time while he gets his minions to do the work. The Regent uses the standard base energy form to do actions, but he also uses cosmic stars, which is required to do more advanced skills and learning how to harness this is a unique twist.
The other new character is The Necrobinder who uses the dark powers of the underworld with the help of a giant skeleton hand. The big focus of Necro is her ability to apply doom, which works similar to poison from The Silent, except it doesn’t do damage every turn, you need to keep applying it and once their health falls under the applied doom, they will be pulled down into the underworld in a very satisfying manner.
As much as I like playing as The Regent or The Necrobinder, the addition that moved the needle for me was the timeline, which is basically how Megacrit is adding story to Slay The Spire 2. There are some people who say why do you need a story in a roguelite or a deckbuilder and it’s the same reason why you would want a plot in an action movie, which is that it elevates the experience.
Think of something like John Wick or James Bond. The action in these movies is incredible, but no matter how incredible the stunts are or how big the explosions get, pulling everything together with plot, reasoning and motives results in a much better experience where the audience becomes more invested and this extends to Slay The Spire 2. These epochs that you are given on the timeline provide back story for the world, the characters and also provide plenty of teases that create intrigue.
SLAY THE SPIRE 2 CRITICISMS
Slay The Spire was already a near perfect game with a few minor flaws, but every one of my criticisms from the original have been addressed. Even though the art looks very similar, it has moved from looking like it was developed with minimal budget to now being designed with a strong art direction.
Megacrit created a unique world, but we had no idea why everything was happening? What were the motivations of the explorers of the spire and why was Neow bringing people back? With the addition of the timeline, players are at least given a lot more lore and background of this world. It might not be a full narrative, but it’s plenty for people to create their own theories.
There are a few art placeholders throughout, but this is an early access game and to be honest, outside of those placeholders you wouldn’t have any idea that it’s Early Access. It already has more of everything that Slay The Spire did when it was fully finished.
Final Thoughts and Score Predictions
Sequels are always an incredibly difficult tight rope to walk, especially when the original is already considered to be best in the genre. If you’ve played any roguelike since 2017, there is a good chance that it was inspired by Slay The Spire in one way or another, especially if it was also a deck-builder.
It’s ironic that this is just the beginning of Early Access because what Slay the Spire 2 feels like is the 1.0 version of Slay The Spire. It’s expanded, polished, refined, updated, and iterated. It might all be incremental, but when it happens across the board, a lot of little things equate to a big difference.
