Hand of Fate

First of all, there are lots of things about this game that I enjoy. The atmosphere of a gaming table, the animations of the Dealer shuffling his cards with magical gestures, the notes he makes over the course of the game, the storytelling itself - those are all extremely amazing and satisfying. The core idea of the game to switch from a table with cards to a battlefield where those cards become real creatures or items is kind of innovative... but that's exactly where problems start. The combat is bad. The combat controls, first of all, require some inhuman finger flexibilty to make use of all options they provide - those being movement, rolls, attacks, counterattacks, shield bashes and up to 3 active abilities from your items. The worst part is that you really have to use all of it if you want to succeed in battle - which means first counterattacking with Q button, then immediately rolling away from an attack that you can't counter with spacebar + direction, then using item ability with 1, etc. Then, despite aforementioned complexity, combat doesn't have much depth. You basically spam attacks, then you counter those that you can or roll away from those that can't be countered, then you roll back to some enemy and keep attacking - repeat until enemy dies. But worst of all is the camera. It never turns around, always pointing one direction, and it's far from vertical, so major part of combat arena is going to always be out of sight. Not only it means that you sometimes don't know if an enemy is a meter away from you or not, but that you often don't even see where you are going to roll. Which, considering that some arenas are littered with traps, often leads to you taking damage in unfair way that couldn't really be avoided. I, personally, am able to get over this fact most of the time, but it still spoils the whole experience somewhat. For some, it might make the game completely impossible. For some, it won't matter at all.

Hand of Fate can give you a lot of enjoyment... if you do not overdo it. This game is designed to play it once in a while in relatively short sessions. If you decide to complete it, it can become tedious and annoying, as it can be very RNG-heavy. It is probably enough to say that while I had tons of fun playing it, I had not touched the game since beating it. Still, while I did play it, i have enjoyed it a lot, so there. My rating: $8

This game is a textbook case of being more than the sum of its parts. Cliched expression, but that's the best way to describe it. This game innovatively combines elements of a action, rpg and card game into a unique package. While the graphics aren't exactly spectacular, combat not as good as the Batman: Arkham series it borrows from, and the music can get repetitive, the end product is a joy to play over multiple times. From a indie studio, I am excited to see what the sequel holds in store.

For me, this game was a let down. In my first time fighting, I instantly wanted to be able to change the camera location while I fought, but this is not something you can do. Depending on the map and where you move your character the camera will move to accommodate but otherwise it's fixed. This really takes away any trust I have in knowing where I will end up when I dodge roll. That is very problematic at later levels as there will be enough enemies on screen that you can't block all attacks incoming. Also, the red flash to tell you, you have to dodge because you can't block seems to come too late. It comes a little after the little slo mo that happens so that if you plan to block it, then see you can't, it is too late. Traps are also really annoying as I will accidentally role into them because again, the rolling isn't really reliable when it is fully dependent on WASD alone to know where to go. I think a grid turn based combat system would of been more fun. Now to the cards and the card dealer. The card dealer was really a joy at first before he started repeating his lines. He is now just kind of annoying and unskippable. The cards and the deck building also seem a little pointless to me. Some you can make choices and get the same outcome every time, and determining what other cards to keep is as simple as figuring out the rewards you can get from the card and its success to failure rate. The only real difficulty is trying to remember what all the cards do if you play infrequently like me.

Game has charming style, good story and voice acting, interesting deck building system, but the combat controls and difficulty spikes on Kraken and final boss can just make you rage quit this game and ruin all positive impressions. I chose easy level of difficulty to travel throug the small card stories and have fun, not to repeat final level endlessly in frustration and despair. Finally I was able to defeat Kraken in my third try, but the final boss fight just too hard and inbalanced even on easy level for me, so I beat it only with cheats. I call it a bad game design.