Past the thirteen gates at the end of the world rests a cabin. Inside, a wandering vagrant plays a deadly game of cards with a mysterious dealer. This is a game of life and death, and I want to put a heavy emphasis there on death. You’ll almost certainly meet your demise in Defiant Development’s Hand of Fate, perhaps even with some alarming regularity.
Hand of Fate could best be summed up as a roguelike action RPG mixed with a card deck building game, and if you’re having trouble picturing that I certainly wouldn’t blame you. The game is another example of a Kickstarter going right, maybe to the letter. The developers asked for a reasonable and modest amount of money, and they made almost their exact budget. The game has been in early access for awhile now and is just now releasing as 1.0 on the PC as well as also coming to Xbox One and Playstation 4 a little later in the afternoon today.
While the game bills itself as a card game don’t walk in expecting Magic The Gathering. In the game’s story mode you’ll be tasked with eliminating 12 different bosses, before each attempt to take down a boss the players is asked to put together two decks from the cards they have earned up to that point. Cards come in two flavors, first you have equipment which initially includes simple things like axes and shields but will eventually expand to weapons with higher damage and special abilities, and armor that grants you all sorts of different bonuses from doubling damage against certain enemy types to increasing the amount of supplies you earn. The second deck consists of encounter cards which will determine the actual events that transpire during the game.
So an average run basically works like this, you’ll arrange two decks with the types of equipment and encounters that you want to use and then the dealer will shuffle in some of his own encounters and lay the cards out in a random pattern on the table. You move your token to one of the cards, flip it over, and resolve the encounter. There are tons of different encounters but they generally fall into three categories, there are cards that gain you something, such as The Maiden which will give you a bonus to your health, your gold, or your food. Next are the most common cards which will force you to fight a set of enemies, sometimes you’ll be given a choice as to what type of enemy you’ll fight, or maybe whether or not you fight them at all. Lastly you’ll run into several different types of shops where you can purchase items, supplies, and remove some of the curses that the game will place on you as you progress.
Upon encountering a group of enemies or one of the game’s bosses you’ll find yourself teleported into Hand of Fate’s action RPG side. When it comes to combat the game does its best Arkham impression with varying degrees of success. It’s relatively straightforward, one button to attack, and if you have a shield then you’ll be able to counter incoming strikes as well as stun enemies. Things never feel quite as silky smooth as say Shadow of Mordor or Arkham City, but it’s still enjoyable enough to progress through. It’s also worth mentioning that while you can play with game with a mouse and keyboard, everything really feels better with a controller.
While you’re going to want to become proficient in combat a lot of the stress can be alleviated by learning the cards and building your decks effectively. If there’s an encounter that you know you struggle with, remove it from your deck before starting a run. If you’re going up against an undead boss, make sure you put plenty of holy weapons into your equipment deck. When the game starts you won’t have a lot of cards, and thus won’t have a lot of options, but as you progress and unlock new cards you’ll find yourself formulating better battle plans.
The game’s roguelike origins show through in that once you die you’ll lose any equipment or blessings you’ve earned along your journey. What you don’t lose however is any new cards you may have earned during your run. Some cards have a “token” icon on them, which means that after resolving the card you’ll earn a token which will add new cards to your collection once the current run has ended. You’ll want to make sure that a healthy portion of your encounter deck has tokens so that you’re always unlocking new options to move forward.
There is a rather large luck component to Hand of Fate. Once you’ve selected the cards in your deck most of how the game plays out is beyond your control. One bad decision can cause you to completely wipe on a run, you can see a great example in our hands on video where I was doing great and then had my total HP reduced to a single point after resolving one card. It can be frustrating, but repetition is also the name of the game when were’ talking about roguelikes. I do wish the dealer had a little more to say, you’ll find him speaking to you often as you play, but it doesn’t take long for him to start repeating himself. A couple of extra pieces of dialogue per encounter could have done wonders here.
A strong word of caution if this sounds like your kind of thing, the game runs just fine on PC (even my relatively modest rig that’s still rocking a GTX 560), but on the Xbox One we noticed significant load times and graphical hitches that had a pretty negative effect on combat. If you want to see just how bad it can get skip to 14:30 in our hands on video. We didn’t get a chance to test the PS4 version but if you’re considering picking Hand of Fate up I would very strongly advise that you avoid the game on consoles.
Hand of Fate is a great concept, and one of the most unique titles I’ve played in a good while. If you generally enjoy roguelikes and deck building this is going to scratch an itch you may not have even known you had, and for $24.99 it’s definitely worth checking out.
This game was reviewed using retail code provided to us by the publisher.
