Slay the Spire 2 Early Access Review

The fact that Slay the Spire 2's Early Access debut plays so similarly to the groundbreaking original deckbuilding roguelike makes this one of the easiest recommendations I've ever given. If you never played it, you're missing out and should jump into its turn-based combat immediately if the concept is remotely appealing to you; if you've sunk 1,000-plus hours into the original like I have, the sequel's new character classes and extensive reworking of the founding trio make going up against its even tougher bosses feel refreshed and less predictable. On top of that, the novel co-op mode gives us a new way to play and share all the thrilling highs and tragic lows of a great run. It may not be the most ambitious sequel when it comes to reinvention, but this is an excellent reinvigoration of a brilliant game.

After a week of playing, I've now clocked a little over 43 hours of Slay the Spire 2 and have completed full, three-act runs as each of its five classes – but of course the ever-escalating Ascension difficulty modifiers and unlockable cards and relic upgrades mean I've only really scratched the surface of the challenges it offers. The Ironclad, the Silent, and the Defect (my personal favorite) all play similarly to their old incarnations, to the point where most of their established strategies will still work just fine, but now there are more options available that let you take them in different directions. The Silent, for instance, now has cards that include the Sly label; discarding these has the same effect as playing them (much like Monster Train's Offering cards), so you can use that to make a build that goes a lot farther on fewer energy points per turn. That's part of why Slay the Spire 2 seems much less dependent on upgrading your energy limit than the original, where if you didn't end up with a way to do so you were likely to have a bad run.

Slay the Spire takes some of the best parts of deckbuilding games, roguelikes, and dungeon crawlers and mixes them into a wholly new and extremely satisfying package. It encourages experimentation, gives you time to make mistakes, and will challenge you immensely as you navigate your way through floor after floor of entertaining, puzzle-like fights. It’s an idea so good that it’s inspired a dozen games like it before it even left early access, but is executed so well that none of them even come close to matching it. - Tom Marks, January 25, 2019

Read the full Slay the Spire review.

[/url] The new characters, as you'd expect, play completely differently. I'm a fan of the Necrobinder, a glowing skeleton with a giant hand as a sidekick. Its Doom mechanic effectively lets you attack both sides of an enemy’s health bar at once (they’ll die after the rising Doom level passes their falling HP), and your buddy Osty serves as both a second layer of defense that absorbs damage after your armor fails, and an attack that starts small but can be built up to devastating levels. There are also the Soul cards that can be extracted from enemies and then used to draw an all but endless number of cards from your deck to keep raining down attacks. After a few experimental runs I was finding satisfying success with those new tools.

What about the other new class, the Regent, you ask? Well, this starfish-faced royal riding around on a weird living throne with legs became my white whale. It took me nearly 40 tries over more than 15 hours to finally pull off a win thanks to lucking into an extremely powerful combo of cards and relic modifiers. When he clicks, he really clicks: by quickly building up his special Star currency at the start of a fight I was able to unleash some wildly powerful spells that hit as many times as I had Stars to fuel it. That was then boosted by one of the sequel’s new card upgrades that made it do 50% more damage at the cost of inflicting two damage on myself. Add in a few relics that inflicted the Vulnerable status on all enemies in the first turn and gave me Vigor for +8 damage on my first attack, and I ended up annihilating the third and final boss on the second turn – and it only took that long because this particular boss has a multi-stage mechanic that prevents you from killing it in one.

I was still having fun banging my head against that wall until it finally, cathartically crumbled. All of my prior attempts, though, ended much less spectacularly. I had limited luck with the Forge mechanic that summons and then builds up a floating sword (it's expensive to cast the attack and the sword has to be re-drawn before you can use it again) and I nearly succeeded on a run that looped an attack that places itself back on top of the draw pile. There are also some risky mechanics around filling your deck with junk debris so that you can then transform them into disposable minion attack or defense cards, or just use a card that does damage based on how many cards you’ve created. So the Regent has plenty of options and mechanics to play around with, I just found them trickier to use effectively than the other characters.

That said, I've seen other people say that he's their new favorite and their best character by far. I think that speaks to the way Slay the Spire 2 is currently balanced: it's tougher than the original, and perhaps a bit too tailored to an elite group of players with a very specific set of skills – the type who'd crawl over broken glass to playtest a sequel to Slay the Spire. But smoothing out that experience for everybody is what Early Access is all about, and it's not as though I wasn't having fun banging my head against that wall until it finally, cathartically crumbled.

It also took me a little while to realize that my playstyle had to change a bit when it came to choosing my path through each act's map. The approach I've used successfully in hundreds of Daily Climb challenges (which of course return in the sequel) is based primarily on going wherever I'd get to take on the most Elite miniboss battles, and then beat the loot out of them. Those extra relics can be the foundation of some incredible builds. However, that hasn’t served me well in the sequel because the risks of tackling these powerful enemies have outweighed the rewards. One of my least favorite to encounter when I'm at less than 100 percent strength can only take 20 damage per turn no matter what, so you're in for a drawn-out fight even if you lead with your big guns. Go up against too many like that in a run and you're in trouble: even if they don't kill you outright, since your health is persistent, the damage you take there could doom you in the next fight. So, I've had to rethink my strategy and pick my battles more carefully – which I must admit, I prefer to what had become an automatic process for me.

Instead, I’ve started to prioritize things like special events, some of which can give you a sort of quest that spans across acts (think a more formal version of the first game’s Red Mask interaction). I've gotten a map in Act 1 that led me to a huge treasure pile in Act 2, and a key in one act that opens a chest in the next. There's also a bird egg that must be hatched at a rest site (so it comes at the opportunity cost of not healing yourself or upgrading a card). Those are represented by unplayable cards until their quest is resolved and the reward handed out, so there's at least a minor consequence to carrying them with you because they take up space in your deck and hand that could've gone to something useful in the moment.

Co-op is a great test of how well you and your friends can control your chaotic impulses. There's another notable change in that instead of just picking a modifier from the weird big whale thing Neow in the beginning of a run, each act begins with a similar choice between three rewards that often include significant downsides. These have probably been the biggest bellwethers for how a run will go for me – if I get a major one, like something that grants extra energy, I'm going to have a much better shot than something that grants me a normal card reward and a random potion. It's another roll of the dice, yes, but one that's thrilling to win big but doesn't take the legs out from under you if you don't.

Other than the new, more lively art style that includes a lot more combat and death animations, the big feature that truly sets Slay the Spire 2 apart from the original is the up-to-four-player co-op mode. It's a great test of how well you and your friends can work together and control your chaotic impulses. Within each turn of combat, it's a real-time free-for-all where everybody plays their cards at once, so if you're not coordinating your attacks over voice chat it gets crazy extremely quickly as the cards stack up and wait their turns for their animations to play out, and potential attacks are wasted on enemies that're already effectively dead. If you plan on getting anywhere as a team you'll definitely want to make sure you're taking a moment to think things through, because Slay the Spire 2 balances out the presence of multiple players by dramatically increasing enemy hitpoints (and their attacks hit your whole team at once), so you'll need to focus fire to take out priority targets quickly. Given there's no matchmaking to find random people to play with, though, it's safe to say you'll be in some form of communication with your teammates. (Sadly there's no local same-screen co-op.)

Things are made a little more forgiving in co-op in that downed players are automatically revived to 1HP after a battle (assuming at least one person survives) and you can use your rest site action to heal a teammate instead of yourself. You also get the same number of random artifacts as you have players each time they're handed out, which lets you choose the best fit for each of your builds (with any disputes settled randomly). That gives you a major leg up in how you want to build your character, compared to simply having to take whatever single item pops out of a chest. Each character also has multiplayer-specific cards that allow them to help out their teammates, such as giving them a random card to play in combat or summoning an Osty for everybody.

Of course, the difficulty ramps up pretty dramatically as well, and requires even more planning of your order of operations than you have to do alone. It's deliberately designed to make you and your teammates hash things out in conversation: You can't see a teammate's entire hand, but they can mouse over one card at a time and it'll be displayed over their character's head so you can see what they're talking about. I also love how you can draw on the map now, plotting out where you're going as a group or just doodling. (That works in single-player as well, if you want to leave yourself a note.)

Even if it left Early Acces today, it would be no slouch. I will say that it would be great if Mega Crit could find a better solution for what happens when someone in your party has to bail mid-run, because right now your options are to save and quit until they come back or that person's character just stops and you have to abandon your game with nothing to show for it. To be fair, a typical run isn't going to go more than an hour and everybody should know what they're getting into before setting out on a group adventure, but things happen.

Another reason it's so easy to recommend Slay the Spire 2 even in its Early Access state is that it at least appears to be largely "complete" in terms of how much content is here. Who knows how much bigger Mega Crit plans to make it before 1.0 (we can, I think, at least expect a fourth act to be tacked onto the end, and alternate versions of Acts 2 and 3 to match up with the two versions of Act 1 that are already available), but even if it were left as it is today it would be no slouch. Outside of the balance changes we've been told to expect, the only real indication that this is an Early Access game is the goofy MS Paint-style placeholder art you'll see on a handful of cards and in the progression tree that serves up bite-sized bits of lore (which, like the first game, is fairly nonsensical, vague, and silly) as you unlock new cards, potions, and relics. And the one significant bug I encountered that ended a multiplayer run because I'd gotten too many potion slots has been patched out already – other than that, it's performed pretty much flawlessly.