After three years of development, the time had come on May 6, 2024: Hades 2 has been released in Early Access. In view of its predecessor, a question quickly arises: How well does the roguelite already run on it? Steam Deck?
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After all, the first Hades can be played easily on Valve's handheld PC, runs smoothly at all times and doesn't even cost a huge amount of power. Fortunately, there is good news for the successor: Hades 2 has been for the Steam Deck from the start verified and offers a buttery smooth experience that is only minimally overshadowed by a small flaw.
Hades 2: Performance on the Steam Deck
Of course, we went back to the world of Greek myths just in time for the release and installed Hades 2 on a Steam Deck OLED. We can completely confirm the verified status after several runs: Hades 2 runs perfectly on the Steam Deck, without us having to adjust anything. All you have to do is start the game and enjoy.
Fits perfectly on the Steam Deck: Hades 2 has no technical problems even in Early Access.
At any time, even when many enemies and effects are presented at the same time, we were 90 frames per second displayed – we looked for jerks in vain. There are only brief reload stutters when moving from one region to another, but these are minimal and almost never significant.
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Incidentally, Hades 2 directly supports the Steam Deck resolution of 1280×800 without the image quality suffering. If you want, you can also set it to 720p or lower, although this is not absolutely necessary. Just one thing is not necessarily perfect: The font of the individual descriptions for gifts, souvenirs and so on can sometimes be a bit small. It would be nice if developer Supergiant Games offered an optional expansion.
The best settings for Hades 2 on the Steam Deck
There aren't too many options at the moment, but that's not necessary anyway. We have decided on the following settings, with which you can have both one optimal image quality as well as high performance achieved:
- Graphics quality: High
- VSync: At
- Resolution: 1280×800
- Full screen mode: No
- Frameless: No
- Brightness: 70 percent
- Crosshair speed: 1,800
- Tolerance zone: 19 percent
Essentially, these are the standard settings, with the exception of brightness and tolerance zone. With these, Hades 2 runs smoothly throughout and only needs up to nine watts on average. According to the ad, it lasts Steam Deck OLED battery That means between five and six hours, which is quite impressive.
You hardly have to tweak the settings. Nevertheless, you can see our selected options here again.
In addition, the roguelite hardly takes Storage space away. In total, only a little over four gigabytes are required, which makes it definitely one of the smaller games and can therefore be installed on any version of the Steam Deck, even without an SD card.
Anyone who owns a Steam Deck and would like to take a look at Hades 2 despite its early access status, you can tackle this without any worries. However, keep in mind that Melinoe's adventure is still being developed, i.e. a few more in the next few months content and technical updates will follow.