For something that only happened due to a coin flip, I’d say the folks at Mega Crit have scored another, ahem, mega crit with Slay the Spire 2. And this is with it being Early Access!

As a veteran of slain spires myself though – 235 hours in Steam, likely 4x on mobile, A20 clears on all characters – my first impressions over eight hours in the sequel has been… weird. Strange, even.

Perhaps I should say: whelmed. I am very, very whelmed.

For starters, three of the original classes have made a return, along with the majority of their original cards. On the one hand, this is good. Why mess with success, especially when the theming and power fantasies were such a hit the first time around? On the other hand, as an OG fan, a lot of the novelty is already pre-digested. There are certainly new cards, and some of the original cards have been tweaked in different ways. But things don’t quite hit the same walking into your first Silent run knowing that you’re going to see Shivs, Poison, and Discard as primary synergies.

The other off-putting things at the moment is balance. Now, this is literally the first few days of an Early Access launch, and there will likely be (bi)weekly balance passes for the next year or longer before StS2 hits 1.0. My concern at this stage though, is that things certainly feel tuned to the level of infinite and/or bomb combos. It was always fun to stumbled into good combos in the original game, but it never felt completely necessary outside of an A20 Heart run; you could still feel reasonably confident heading into most encounters with merely a pile of mostly-good cards. Here in the sequel though, the average (non-Ascension!) encounter will be ready to deal like 35 damage to you right off the bat.

Again, we can imagine a world in which the devs tone down the overall enemy damage and player damage in tandem. But are they going to leave in the bombs? Look at Thrash+ in the picture above. By default, it will deal 6 + 6 damage, and then exhausts an Attack in hand. If that Attack was a standard Strike, not only is it doing you a favor by (temporarily) removing a bad card from your deck, the next time you draw Thrash+ you will be dealing 12 + 12 damage. Imagine instead it removed one that normally dealt 32 damage. How do you tone that down? Make Thrash deal 1 + 1 damage by default? Only add half the attack’s damage? It’s still a run-defining card.

…and maybe that’s OK? Getting the ole Corruption + Dead Branch was a (hilariously fun) run-defining combo in the original as well. All I’m saying is that I’ve scrubbed out on the first boss – and sometimes before then! – on some characters at zero Ascension by virtue of not seeing any bombs/combos. I’m just hoping that once things are tuned appropriately, the game doesn’t still feel so swingy.

Aside from all that, the rest of the game looks very impressive. Some of the card art, in particular, is amazing. Unlocks are governed by an “Epoch” system which are basically achievements plus some worldbuilding elements. Speaking of worldbuilding… well… yeah. Less is more, and more is less. Some elements felt cool to read about (Silent taking back a piece of the Heart) and other bits kind of made the world feel less cool. I didn’t need to know the world is named Preon and is “that which tells stories,” for example. This could be placeholder text too, who knows.

Anyway, I suppose a lot has changed in the last eight years. Would Slay the Spire 2 have blown me away in 2018? Of course. Is it blowing me away right now? Ehh. I’ll do a few more runs with the characters that haven’t beaten Act 3 yet, and give the devs some more time to cook.