I needed Slay the Spire 2 to be good. And by “good” I mean almost exactly the same as the original Slay the Spire, but with a few twists to prove to friends I didn’t have such an addictive personality that I only wanted to just play one game for days on end.
Slay the Spire 2 is good, minus the part where anyone thinks I’m doing anything else but playing Slay the Spire again. If that pisses off people who hoped for a transformative, definition-altering sequel that would reimagine the very fibers of the deck-builder, that’s fair.
Like the 73,000 reviewers who took to Steam to declare their “overwhelmingly positive” love for Slay the Spire, I sank deep into the strategic calculations and monstrous battles of Mega Crit’s hit 2019 game. I climbed the tower of boss stages over and over and over and over and over with a variety of heroes, deploying every type of build, struggling to walk into the final fight so that I could be capped at the knees with no mercy by the Corrupt Heart. Then, one day, I just stopped. I looked away. I touched grass. (Sike, I started Balatro.)
When news broke that Mega Crit was at work on a proper Slay the Spire 2 — and then again when Mega Crit was redoing all of its work on Slay the Spire 2 due to being royally screwed by Unity — I was ecstatic… without knowing where things could go next. The answer, as it turns out, was small expansions in every direction. The early access version of Slay the Spire 2 that launched on March 5 reintroduces three characters from the first game (The Ironclad, The Silent, and The Defect) and adds two more: The Regent, whose cards mine a second resource, and the Necrobinder, who summons a li’l skeleton hand to fight by their side. As you navigate the splitting pathways of monster encounters, rest stops, merchant stores, and question-mark surprises, you still build out your deck one card at a time, praying all the while that you’ve balanced attacks and defense well enough to fend off any slobbering, goopy fiend.
