![]() A very minor quibble: Steam pop-up would not disappear from the corner of my screen for some reason. All of this is fairly typical fantasy fare, but each monster design feels fresh and interesting, and there’s more than enough variety in the game’s encounters and boss battles to keep things engaging. Combining the hit-counter-dodge system perfected by the Arkham series with the tone and aesthetic of Fable, the game pits you against a variety of ranged and melee combatants, from skeletons, to bandits, to rat-men. ![]() Rather surprisingly, for a game which is ostensibly about cards, combat is fantastically fluid in Hand of Fate. I personally hated encounters which required me to have a lot of gold on hand, so tended to swap them for new cards or combat encounter cards. In this way, Hand of Fate sticks to a fairly rigid structure and rule set, whilst still allowing an awful lot of player freedom and agency. Things get much tougher from here.Įach level is a chance to defeat one of The Dealer’s most valued and dangerous henchman, all of whom possess more sinister versions of classic picture card names (King of Dust, Jack of Scales etc.) These levels offer up new challenges, though decks can be tweaked beforehand to include more helpful cards, and weed out those you might find troublesome or boring. One of the relatively few helpful cards in the game. Each move the player makes consumes food, but regenerates health, and gold can be used at chance encounters or shop cards as a means for purchasing food, equipment or other boons. From here, the player can move around the board and overturn cards – some good, some bad, and many occupying a space somewhere in between. Before each round of The Game, the player builds a deck of item cards and encounter cards which are then placed upon the board along with The Dealer’s random set of cards to “spice things up”. ![]() They set about playing “The Game of Life and Death”, a sort of cross between traditional playing cards, tarot cards and choose your own adventure games. In Hand of Fate, the player sits across from The Dealer, a mysterious, aged figure with a deck of cards. Not only does Hand of Fate manage to seamlessly blend the world of hack-and-slash games with the much denser world of card gaming, but in doing so it has become an early contender for my personal Game of the Year. If CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate were invented to provide typical RPGs with more visual context, why then should card games be any different? Hand of Fate looks to combine both the unpredictability of card games with the fast paced combat and visual feedback of a typical action-RPG, and unbelievably, it succeeds with flying colours. I usually shy away from videogames that attempt to recreate the strategic depth and often frustrating randomness of a card game, particularly when the game renders cards simply as “cards”, rather than as the monsters or spells they purport to represent. ![]() Review Copy Provided By: Defiant Development ![]()
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