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

Slay The Spire 2 sticks closely to the original but adds co-op, new characters, and more variety. Here's whether it's worth playing on Mac.

- CLIFF JOSEPH

There are more than 2,000 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.

WHAT'S NEW

Slay The Spire 2 doesn’t make any major changes to the format of the original game. The central task 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 you have to start all over again, rather than just saving your progress as you complete each room.

The Necrobinder is a new character who wields the power of the undead.

WHAT’S CHANGED

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-favorite 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.