I’ve not waddled back over to solid CCG/rougelite combo Hand Of Fate 2 since reviewing it last year, but the sound of goblin trumpets drew me back today. HOF2’s Arkham-lite fighting was always a lot less interesting than its deck-building and choose-your-own-adventure progression, but that had a lot to do with seeing the same few types of Bad Man time and again.
The free Goblins update, out now, shuffles new threats into the deck, those being pint-sized, pea green murder-bastards with far too many teeth. Equally homicidal gnomes, with a few straight outta Lilliput combat tricks, seem to have been lumped in under the gobbo umbrella too, confusingly. Read the rest of this entry »
Hand of Fate 2, that weird, brilliant blend of solitaire deck-building RPG, roguelike and hack n’ slash action game has been improving steadily since launch. Free new characters, mod support and now an endless challenge mode with global leaderboards. Can you hear the heart of the cards? Well, you shouldn’t, that’s another game entirely, but this is a great reason to come back and ask The Dealer for a fresh hand.
Card-collecting action-RPG Hand Of Fate 2 has launched mod tools to let players make their own campaigns with new cards and events and whatnot. Defiant Development say these are the same tools they used to create Hand of Fate 2’s own campaign, so there’s your bar; now hurdle it. The tools are free to download, and the game now has a Steam Workshop for players to easily install mods from. Your challenge is to create an RPS-themed campaign, with boss battles based on our strengths and horrible fatal flaws. Read the rest of this entry »
Hand Of Fate 2 is a nail-on-the-head sequel (and one of our 2018 GOTYs), hanging onto what made the first game’s card game/roguelite/brawling combo so compelling while expanding in smart ways that save it from repetition. However, one thing it arguably didn’t do was make the best of HOF’s excellent sneering narrator/nemesis figure The Dealer, who in HOF2 has an altogether more chillaxed thing going on.
The good news is that the game’s first DLC, due out tomorrow and which is also free, is very much Dealer-centric. The news I genuinely don’t know what to make of is that he’s being cast in a new and very different role from before. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature
Better in every way except the most important one
The great rage is dead within me. I no longer feel hatred. In the first Hand Of Fate (review), a sly and effective singleplayer collision of roguelite and collectible card game, I fought onwards primarily due to a deep and burning desire to wipe the imagined smirk off the face of The Dealer, an AI-controlled dungeon master and nemesis rolled into one, whose e’er-taunting voice was the exact sound of a perpetually-raised eyebrow.
Hand Of Fate 2 is a superior sequel in many respects, but either he’s mellowed or I have. Now, we play the game together, fond old sparring partners rather than eternal enemies.
“I HATE YOU SO MUCH RIGHT NOW,” Alec shouted in his Hand of Fate review, proper riled by its personification of procedural generation. He is the Dealer, and it’s his gnarled hand laying out our hardships in the action-RPG. All locations, enemies, items, battles, and decisions of an adventure are represented by cards he deals from a deck, see, and he’s a right smug git about it. Well, we’ll soon be cursing him again, as developers Defiant Development today announced that Hand of Fate 2 [official site] will launch on November 7th. Read the rest of this entry »
The Dealer, surely one of the best game villains of recent years, is back. I don’t even know the guy’s name, to be honest. Does he even have one? Doesn’t matter. For he is my NEMESIS. The great wizardry of solo CCG vs RPG Hand of Fate [official site] was that you were faced throughout by a more-or-less evenly-matched opponent. The guy didn’t do much in terms of outright acts of evil, or even much in the way of overtly wicked scenery-chewing: it’s just that he was trying really hard to beat me, with an effective line in downplayed psychological warfare as he did. And now he’s back. He wants revenge. I.e. he wants to play cards again. And this time it seems an empire is at stake.
A sequel to deck-building action-RPG Hand of Fate [official site] is in the works, creators Defiant Development have announced, coming our way next year under the snappy name Hand of Fate 2. Adam and Alec were both quite taken with the original, or at least determined to beat the dastardly dealer who turned their decks of items and encounters into an adventure to battle through in hack ‘n’ slash combat. I’m sure they’ll be delighted to hear the git’s back.
Hand of Fate’s [official site] Wildcards DLC isn’t a major expansion but it could be reason enough to revisit one of 2015’s early surprises, or to shuffle the deck for the first time if you’ve never played. There are many ways to incorporate cards into a game – Hand of Fate deals ’em out and constructs adventures with them. There are cards representing monsters and flipping one of those leads to a short hack and slash session. There are cards representing items that alter skills or add buffs. There are cards representing events that test your luck. It’s a beautifully crafted game with the year’s second best narrator (Darkest Dungeon takes top spot there) and the DLC should increase replayability.
Hand of Fate [official site] is a CCG/roguelite in which a masked, magical figure challenges you to play an increasingly deadly card game against him, switching to high-speed, stabby third-person combat whenever you get into a fight. It’s out now.
The reason I so often want to play boardgames despite having a hard drive full of more videogames than I could ever hope to complete isn’t simply because occasional contact with other human beings is unfortunately necessary in order to remember how to talk. It’s because having an opponent who voices their frustration and exhilaration as the game goes for or against them makes it seem so much more than it is. It becomes a true contest, its cards and dice these physical extensions of your will to defeat another lifeform. Videogames, usually, offer us the canned, meaningless soundbytes of a hundred thousand slain foes, but they don’t often offer us a single, overarching opponent who lets slip irritation or indulges in crowing. They’ll often offer us someone we want to defeat because they’re shown to do terrible things or have a skull for a face, but they very rarely offer us someone we want to defeat purely because they are our rival. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve peered at Hand of Fate [official site] through a one-way mirror over its journey from Kickstarter through Early Access, scribbling words like “impressive” and “promising” onto my clipboard. It’s a dungeon-raiding, decision-making, monster-murdering fantasy action-RPG where each adventure is generated from cards you collect and build into decks. Cards drawn become weapons, artifacts, locations, encounters, choices, and 3D battles with Arkham-y combat. Fancy. This week it left Early Access, becoming an actual properly-released game.
If I’m to make my millions in indie development, it will almost certainly be by ripping off one of the many great deck-building games I’ve played in paper. There’ll be no new ideas from me, just stone-cold stealing of others’ work. I won’t have the smarts to do something new with it, unlike Hand of Fate which takes the concept of combining cards into a deck but then has you adventure through it at random, roguelike-like. Adam posted about the Kickstarter at the end of last year, but I’ve only just discovered it through the remarkably compulsive Steam queue. It’s been in Early Access for a couple of months, and boasts some fresh ideas.
Hand Of Fate is a handsome Kickstarter project, a Tarot-themed RPG that looks like a tactical ARPG twist on Card Hunter’s deck-building formula. Despite the headline above, the game has nothing to do with the 1966 film Manos: The Hands of Fate, but too much time spent watching irredeemably terrible films in my teenage years has left the connection hardwired. With less than three days to go and $8,000 Australian Dollars to raise, victory is far from guaranteed for Defiant Development, but the premise is solid and the work that has already gone into the game is evident in the videos. A recent update announced that David Goldfarb, of Payday 2 and Battlefield fame, will be a ‘guest designer’ should the project go ahead.
WarCo took us by surprise; a first-person game from a new studio where you play a journalist filming a civil war in a third-world dictatorship. We spoke to Morgan Jaffit from Defiant Development about the game and what message the team were trying to convey. Read the rest of this entry »
Warco – which has been in development for a while but recently seems to have surfaced properly in a small surge of publicity – looks intriguing. Australian devs Defiant describe their UDK project like this: “In the role of war correspondent (‘warco’) Jesse DeMarco, the player must capture battle footage and edit together a news story, while trying to make it out alive.” The proof of concept video, which I’ve posted below, is quite something. Surviving this stuff could be genuinely more exciting than firing back. It’s like Beyond Good & Evil: Call Of Duty Edition, but apparently the real game will be in splicing together your footage at the end and deciding on the story you want to tell about the events you have filmed.
