Slay The Spire 2 review: The best deck-builder just got better

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£19.99

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• Who it’s for: Fans of the original.
• Wait if: You haven’t played STS1 yet.

There are more than 2000 deck-building games listed on Steam, but only a tiny fraction of those run on Macs. Fortunately, Slay The Spire, which has been the king of the deck-builders in recent years, was available on the Mac right from its launch back in 2019 (and still runs on Apple Silicon Macs as well).

The sequel has just gone on sale on Steam for $24.99/£19.99, and is already soaring up the sales charts, despite the fact that it’s actually still in ‘Early Access’, which means that it’s essentially a beta version of the game that is still being tested.

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What’s new in Slay The Spire 2?

Slay The Spire 2 doesn’t make any major changes to the format of the original game. The central task of the game is to fight your way through a series of rooms in order to reach the top of a mysterious spire, using a deck of cards that provide your character with different skills and abilities. It’s also a ‘rogue-like’ game, which means that dying sends you right back down to the bottom of the spire so that you have to start all over again, rather than just saving your progress as you complete each room.

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What’s changed from the original?

A popular feature in the first game was the ability to play as any of three different characters – the sword-slinging Ironclad, a nimble assassin called Silent, and a fan-favourite robot called The Defect. Those characters are still included in the sequel, but you also get two new characters called the Necrobinder and the Regent.

There was a fourth character called The Watcher who was added to the first game in 2020, but there’s no sign of the Watcher in the current Early Access version of Slay The Spire 2.

The secret of the game’s popularity was that – like many great games – it’s easy to understand the basics so that you can dive straight in and get started, but it takes longer to master the complexities of the game and understand the ways that all the different cards, skills and abilities can work together to make you more powerful.

Slay The Spire 2 sticks with that approach, but it adds more of everything – more characters to play with, a wider range of skills and abilities, as well as magical relics and rare cards that provide special powers.

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What’s game play like?

At the start of each game, you are shown a map of the spire, with a number of different paths that you can choose as you climb to the top. Each path takes you through a different series of rooms, with most rooms containing monsters that you have to defeat. However, there are also rest rooms where you can sleep and recover some of your health after a challenging fight, or spend the time upgrading your cards instead.

To add variety, there are also rooms that contain merchants who can sell you new cards or weapons, and even special quests for you to compete. I found a magic egg in one room, which could give me a powerful new card, but only if I first found a rest room where the egg could be hatched. This forced me to alter my path through the spire – as I was initially heading towards a merchant to top up on potions – but the detour was worth it as the new card gave my armour a big boost.

Like its predecessor, Slay The Spire 2 also includes a daily challenge and a custom mode that allows you to modify the game settings for each run. However, it also includes one entirely new feature, introducing a multiplayer co-op mode that allows up to four people to play together as a team – although there’s no pvp mode that will allow you to compete directly against other people.

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Where the graphics fall short

My only real disappointment is that the game’s graphics aren’t terribly exciting. The 2D graphics are a bit more detailed this time around, but your character and the various monsters mostly just glare at each other across the screen, with simple effects used to indicate attacks and injuries each time you play a card.

Games such as the Darkest Dungeon series have similar 2D graphics, but have a more distinctive gothic artwork style that really adds atmosphere and a sense of menace to the game.

How does it run on Mac?

The relatively simple graphics do mean that the game will run well even on older Macs with Intel processors, as long as you’re running macOS Big Sur (11.0) or later.

Should I Buy Slay The Spire 2?

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If you’re a fan of deck-builder games then Slay The Spire 2 is a must-have addition to your library. Some people have argued that it’s a fairly unambitious sequel that doesn’t make many changes from the original game. Even so, there are still enough refinements and small additions to make it a very enjoyable update for anyone that has already played the first game. And, if you’re new to the genre, the original Slay The Spire is currently on sale, making it a great place to start before moving on to the sequel.