Hand of Fate 2

Solid Enough Game, I really like the Axe. I have only completed the tutorial so far but I really enjoy the game.

It combines the arpg the dungencrawler and the deckbuilder games in a boardgame like form. The style and the atmosphere is perfect. It is not to hard but challenging. It is a hidden tresure.

I liked unlocking things and making progress. I hated everything else: sluggish unresponsive combat, character switching targets when I'm trying to finish something off, hitting one of the special attack buttons and being ignored. Maybe you're supposed to be able to tell where the cards are being shuffled in that gambit, but it seems like it's completely random. I didn't care at all for the pendulum gambit or card wheel. Maybe I could have gotten better at them, but I hated them. And then whenever the RNG or the combat unresponsiveness gets you, the jerk running the game makes fun of you for it. I liked the idea enough to keep at it for a while, but after 20 hours uninstalled and deleted the save to make it stop.

Played around 6 hours and would say it is not as good as I hoped. It starts great, but around 6th challenge goes down hard. All the core mechanics are there, they were significantly improved, and that is good. What is bad is a lot of new additions: pointless minigames — dice is ok, it is pure luck and you learn to accept it (they also can be rerolled which is good). Cannot be said about other two games — pendulum (which is dull) and wheel of fortune (which is almost pure random, which is awful). bad combat — the combat system of the first game was deeply flawed and unpolished and was probably the weakest part of the game, sure... Here they promised to improve it and did a Souls-like system with general swings, rolls and such. Point is it is unpolished as hell. When you fight single targets it is extremly easy — swing, roll, repeat ad nosia. When you get a fairly large group it is a nightmare — the camera is unruly, so you do not see what is going on, the animations are unbreakable, meaning if you commit to a swing, you cannot dodge or parry, the enemies can kick you when you stagger from a strike (when you cannot do nothing again)... the cards — I may be totally wrong but it seems that there are more pointless cards, which do not give you new tokens and thus do not enrich expirience. Anyway, I will continue to play but for now it rather more frustrating than fun. A lot of accomplishments here come not from skill, but from random luck and that is rather... dissapointing. But hey, at least there are no lootboxes :D

Repetitive graphics and play. No story to speak of. Impossible to succeed without a controller I think. The options allow selecting a controller, but it does not work on my Mac with my properly connected wireless controller that works with other games.