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It has been released on Steam, Xbox One, PS4, and a release is also planned on PSVita.
Hand of Fate is a card game but it is not quite your usual card game. It combines elements from card games, board games, RPGs, and also Hack and Slash games.
The beginning is set in some mysterious location where you are challenged by a mysterious dealer to sit on a table and play his life and death game.
You are given a deck of cards—consisting of a customizable set of equipment and events—and after this is mixed with the dealer’s and shuffled the game will start.
Instead of drawing a hand and playing cards as one might expect, the cards are placed face-down on the table, forming a simple dungeon map. Each pattern of cards on the table features a starting point and exit and each one represents a location on the map—a forest, a dungeon, a town, and so on.
As the player’s token moves onto a card—this flips face-up, and the events described on the card take place.
Some cards will be a kind of 'choose your own adventure' mini-story, such as an encounter with a peasant, or a nobleman. Others will throw the player into a battle, requiring to make clever use of the equipment collected on the journey so far. During these battles the game becomes a third-person action-role-playing game, with a parry-and-combo oriented combat system and on screen indicators that help you understand what the enemies are going to do. In addition to health, any pattern of cards on the table must be resolved by taking accounts of the remaining gold—mainly used to make purchases in stores—and food—consumed every each move on the board.
If the outweigh is bad the table gets reset and cards get shuffled—hoping that the next time will be better—but some progress made—in the form of metal tokens awarded by successfully beating a card—is not lost.
The game features two modes: Story Mode and Endless mode.
Let's first talk about Story Mode.
Overall, the player has to beat twelve dungeons each guarded by a boss and featuring special rules.
The dungeons are organized by rows and columns. By the end of each row, the player will become stronger and the difficulty of the game is permanently raised.
The further you progress in the game, the more cards to build your deck are earned. So, that's what Hand of Fate is about—build your own deck and beat the odds!
In Endless Mode, the player will have to face the game as is meant to be—playing with the cards that get unlocked through Story Mode—with the level difficulty that gets increased the further you are in the game.
As the name suggests, the game can proceed as long as the player is alive. After that, a score and a rank get assigned according to other players' performances, so that you can compare yours to theirs.
Progresses get saved after every move, so that you can resume your game exactly where you left it.
Overall, I found the game to be a nice breath of fresh air in a game industry nowadays full of too many similar games. It's always great to try something new and Hand of Fate is certainly an original mix between tabletop and role-playing genres—without seeming out of place.
Its art and atmospheres are great, though, there aren't places that you may explore or lands to travel. You are just sitting at a table, but at least there's the dealer that does well his job by narrating and commenting your successes and failures throughout the game. I found him to be a very well made character, surrounded by an air of mystery. Some dialogues shared with him have a pretty good and fun writing and help making him very charismatic.
Each gameplay is a different experience—given the large amount of variability that can decide your fate. The constant is that the first stages of the game will offer only a small amount of challenges and battles, while on the later stages you will have many more encounters, different behaviours of the monsters and more equipment. These are all elements that give a good replayability value to the title—especially in Endless Mode.
Despite that, the game does not have any cooperative or multiplayer mode. That would have been much appreciated in my opinion.
The cons of the game is that in the long run the random encounter cards will likely stop to play the surprise factor because of your increasing knowledge. The battles, too, may end up being repetitive.
In some unlucky circumstances the difficulty of Hand of Fate seems to be more based on luck rather than on skill, resulting in an apparently impeccable run ruined by a 'critical-failure' card.
Concluding, I think Hand of Fate is a unique experience, a successful mix between different genres. It may not graphically excel over other games but the gameplay has no need for an ultra HD game.
In the end, it's a matter of 'either you love it or hate it' but if you're into this kind of games, you can rest assured that it will provide plenty of hours of replayability without boring you.
You can buy the game on:
Steam
Playstation Store
Xbox Live
Official Facebook page:
HandOfFateGame
