Let's Play: Hand of Fate 2 - A Game Review

Hello everyone and welcome back to Kralizec Gaming.Today we are going to take a look at Hand of Fate 2. This game that puts together many different genres including a collectible card game, action game and a mix between being the dungeon master and the player in dungeons and dragons with rougelite features. Whether the mix of these features works well is the question we will try to answer today. Hand of Fate 2 is available on Steam for 27 Euros and 99 cents or your regional equivalent.
With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

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Video Review

Text Review

Hand of Fate certainly has a very interesting concept behind it. I really don‘t know who came up with it, but he certainly deserved his Christmas bonuses as the first installment sold about 700 thousand copies (according to SteamSpy). So it‘s no real surprise that we got a follow-up. I need to say that I haven‘t played the first one, but I do remember seeing TotalBuiscit reviewing the first one when it came out. And because I haven’t played the first one, I will take a look at Hand of Fate 2 through a pair of completely fresh eyes, no comparisons to the first one, just a pure review of how well the game stands on its own feet.

Gameplay

And as usually, we will start the review with a look at the game’s mechanics and well, since the game is combining so many different genres into one single experience, there is a good number of mechanics to talk about.

We will start with the part of the game I would describe as a singleplayer Dungeons and Dragons. This statement itself sounds weird, singleplayer Dungeons and Dragons, how does that even work? The very base of D&D is social play, having the dungeon master come up with a story and you making decisions that (hopefully) benefit you the most. The way Hand of Fate makes this happen is through cards. The cards you gather as you explore more of the game serve as scenes for the action and story parts of the game. They also serve as equipment and characters. The cards are essentially the D&D rulebook of Hand of Fate, saying what encounter will have which features.

The thing I like the most about this concept is that you are both the adventurer in this scenario, but also the dungeon master to a degree. There are 22 separate campaigns, each with its own story and special encounters, but you also get to add a good chunk of encounters of your own choosing. You do this when starting a new campaign by choosing cards you have gathered in previous campaigns. And you can either choose to add cards making the campaign easier for you, for example: You could add a card that adds a friendly innkeeper to the deck and he gives you the option to buy some food or healing potions when you get to him or you could add an encounter card, potentially making the game harder for yourself because you added more foes to defeat, but also giving yourself the chance to get some of that sweet sweet loot.
The amount of the cards is almost ridiculous, giving you plenty of options on how exactly you want to handle each campaign and the amount of the cards you have only grows with each campaign as completing one adds about 10 cards to your choices. Another way to gain more cards is by completing certain encounters that have a token on them, these usually provide fewer cards but on the other hand, their rewards are often significantly better. Also, of course, not all of the cards are encounters, some of them will be equipment that you can find through your journey or even specific kinds of equipment that you can use straight off the bat.

The last thing that should be mentioned when it comes to the cars is that there are three types of them: common cards, which are obviously common and don’t provide anything special. Secondly, there are platinum cards which you can recognize because of their silver glow and are cards that only provide a benefit to you, for example, my favorite platinum card is the Elder’s Gift, which provides you with a piece of platinum equipment. The third and last type of cards are brimstone cards that are the opposite of platinum cards. Where platinum cards provide only benefits, brimstone cards only have negative effects, but come with great rewards. And I already mentioned this before, but some of the cards have a token associated with them and if you manage to beat the challenge associated with them, you get more cards towards your collection.
Obviously, you won’t get to choose at which order you will get these cards when in a campaign, as you are essentially drawing them from a deck and then they get randomly placed on the world map, but that only makes the game actually feel more like dungeons and dragons, because the DM would never just make a clear path for you, where everything lines up perfectly for you.
Apart from the actual drawing of the cards from your deck, creating a map from them for you to explore and giving you things like loot and events that happen to you - like how much damage you take from a random thing, there are is a lot more RNG in the game. For one thing, often you will be faced with actual dice rolling, where you aim is to beat a certain number to be successful. In these you will always be presented with an option to re-roll one of the die (well unless you straight up roll enough) or even, if using the right companion, will be presented with the choice to add an additional die.
Then there’s are the random failure or success cards, where you will be presented with 4 choices and you need to pick one and hopefully it will be a success card. And here, I gotta say, I don’t mind a certain amount of RNG in my games, but in Hand of Fate the amount seems almost ridiculous at times like it feels like every second encounter is purely RNG based. I didn’t mind the dice encounters that much, as you have the option to re-roll, but the cards, those I wish would have some sort of skill test added to them. What would I personally like to see is if the random cards would be turned into a game of three shells – you know the one where there is a ball hidden under one of three cups. And the speed could be even faster where the encounter is supposed to be harder, even to a ridiculous degree, but it would still be a test of skill and not just blind luck.
Talking about skill based tests, there actually are two in Hand of Fate 2, one is the spinning wheel where you have to stop the wheel on a success card. Just look out, you might be expecting that it will stop exactly at the spot where you push the select button, but it continues to spin a little while longer. The second skill test is the pendulum, where you just select when the pendulum stops and this time it stops right away.

Okay, it seems we have sufficiently talked about the mechanics of Hand of Fate that happen outside the combat phase. And the combat phase of the game is the last thing we will discuss in terms of mechanics in this review.
Combat in Hand of Fate is probably it’s the weakest part. While it certainly isn’t bad, it’s also incredibly simplistic. You will find yourself using a grand total of eight abilities over and over again. So let’s talk about them. First, pretty obviously is your attack and what kind of an attack you will use is solely based on the type of a weapon you’re using. Things like dual wielded daggers attack quickly and thus are best for quick enemies, one-handed weapons are somewhere in the middle but allow you to use a shield to boost your defenses and heavy two handed weapons are there for those who enjoy pure power over everything else. Secondly, there is the bash attack used to break armor on enemies that have it. Attacking builds up your combo meter which allows you to use the third of the abilities at your disposal, your special attack. These are based on the specific weapon you are using and vary quite nicely from just a stronger single target attack up to AoE effects that can stun multiple foes around you.
But beware if you get hit, your combo-meter resets and you need to start building it up from scratch. The way to prevent being hit is by using your defense ability, which just needs to be timed correctly, sort of like in the Batman Arkham games, but in a much more simple way, whenever you see a green icon appear, just push the button. The second way to avoid damage, this time the type that is being shown by a red icon, is by dodging. And the principle is pretty much the same, but usually, you are given more time to avoid the incoming damage than when the green icon is shown.
Some enemies also require that you use your finisher ability to actually kill them, otherwise they just stand there, regenerate health and will eventually join back in the fight. But the principle for this is the same, whenever an F icon is above them, just use the ability to kill them.

If you manage to get your hands on one of the artifacts, you will also get the ability to use one of them. These are powerful attacks with quite varying effects ranging from straight up dealing damage to things like mind-control for a set duration of time. But what you need to keep in mind is that these artifacts have a limited number of uses.
The last ability you get to use is associated with your companion. Each of them has a unique ability, usually on a cooldown. For example the first companion has the ability to grant you a magical shield that protects you from taking damage one time.
That’s it for the abilities and you can see, there really isn’t a great deal of them and all of them boil down to pushing a button at the correct time. I’m not saying that’s inherently wrong, but I do wish there would be a bit more to them.
The thing that prevents the combat from becoming overly repetitive are the enemies. There is good variability to them and except for the very basic ones, they do come with pretty interesting attacks. These will range from bombs being thrown at you, enemies disappearing and appearing out of the blue or charging attacks. Then there are the bosses. Each campaign and certainly encounters provide you with a boss. There have always high health, sometimes even a bit of armor on top of that and have special abilities that are often unblockable and need to be interrupted by dealing damage to the boss.

Sadly, the last thing we need to talk about in terms of combat is the thing that makes the least fun part of Hand of Fate 2. The camera. For reasons that I don’t quite understand, each combat encounter has a fixed camera. Because of that fighting enemies can get quite confusing, especially in encounters where you don’t start at the bottom or whenever you have to protect someone. Seriously, just make the camera face the same way the character is facing.

So… when it comes to the mechanics and general feel when playing Hand of Fate two, it really boils down into two very different conclusions. The part of the game when you are building your deck, exploring the map and just generally playing a singleplayer version of D&D is awesome. It really is. The only complaint I would have towards that part of the game is the fact that there is a bit too much RNG in it for my taste, but often there are ways to work around that and some people might even like the amount of RNG there.
On the other hand, the combat is sort of “meh” not bad by any means, but also not great. A few more activatable abilities, especially some that you would gather through cards and would be a long cooldown would help a ton. And the choice behind making the camera static is plain weird. You will get used to it as you play for sure, but a different set-up for the camera would fit the game much better.
In the end, whether you will enjoy the gameplay of Hand of Fate 2 really depends on how much time do you plan spending on combat and how much time you plan to spend on the rest. If you don’t need the most complex combat system to have fun, you will surely get it with Hand of Fate 2.

And last thing should be added here. Apart from the campaigns currently in game, there is an endless mode in the plans and while I wasn’t able to find a set date for it to be added into the game, it is surely coming.

Graphics

So that’s enough for the gameplay and it’s time to talk about graphics of Hand of Fate 2. And here I think they need to be separated into two distinct sections. First there’s the combat section and the second is the rest of the game.
So… the combat sections…. Honestly aren’t that great. The graphics do look a few years old, with low resolution textures, effects that most won’t likely impress you in anyway and the animations are pretty repetitive. On the other hand, the designs of the enemies, weapons and the environments are very nice and fit the tone of the game very well.
Luckily, because of the fact that the combat isn’t that great looking, there’s the rest of the game. Here the devs obviously had more time and probably even more experience to make it look great. As the rest of the game is largery pre-rendered, including the dealer, dice and everything else. But what is seriously beautiful in Hand of Fate 2 are the cards. Seriously, the art on them is gorgeous. It makes me wish Hand of Fate was an actual board game.

Music

The second tool Hand of Fate 2 uses to create atmosphere apart from the graphics is the music. And, it’s standard. You know, just your regular fantasy music. It certainly not bad, but it doesn’t really stand out either.
Then there are the sound effects, which actually do stand out quite nicely. The sounds the monster, weapons and even abilities make are very nicely done.
And lastly, there’s the narration by the dealer. To be honest, it’s probably the best feature of Hand of Fate 2, just because how well it is done.

Performance

Before we bring the review to a conclusion, let’s take a quick look at the games performance. Straight off the bat, it ran well, but that’s not that surprising considering how dated the combat graphics look and that the rest is pretty much pre-rendered. To be honest, Hand of Fate 2 could probably run on many phones and tablets these day and to be even more honest, I would love to see a release for phones in the future as well.
Also, I haven’t encountered any bugs or crashes during my playtime, but there was one weird behavior of the game, which could be potentially abused. I had to leave in a hurry one time, so I ALT+F4 from the game and when I came back, all the encounters on that map were reset, as if I never did them. So if you ever just get unlucky or get bad, that might be an easy way to get a second chance on the encounters.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion: Hand of Fate 2 is a really fun game. The fact that it manages to mix all these different genres into one single game and that the game actually works is a testament to the developers skill in terms of game design. The game certainly has flaws, the combat is pretty repetitive, there’s a bit too much RNG included and if you are a graphics whore, you most likely will be disappointed with Hand of Fate 2. But if you can get over these things, a great game with many hours of fun is waiting for you. The price tag isn’t really the lowest, but I do think it is well worth the money. So if you think you might have fun with Hand of Fate 2, I will definitely recommend it to you.

So, that’s it for today guys. Hope you like the review and if you did, please consider upvoting the review and following my blog. And comment, if you have something you would like to add. See you guys later with more gaming content.

Disclaimer: All the images have been taken directly of the Steam game page