GOL Cast: Dangerous Card Games In Hand Of Fate

You may remember me praising Ziggurat for being an awesome Early Access title. Well, here's another one that I've been pretty interested in for a while that is quite a mix: Hand of Fate!

Hand of Fate by Defiant Development is an indie action-RPG that almost feels like a table-top RPG for over half of the time you play it. The whole world is based around randomized cards that contain events of all sorts. You might encounter a band of goblins that try to steal your equipment and gold, a sandstorm that you get lost in or a maze full of traps and treasure. You must traverse through the levels and overcome the obstacles that are thrown in your way. And when your solution includes violence, the game jumps into a 3D battlefield where you will fight your way through your enemies in real time.


The thing I most like about indie games is that they are often made by people who don't simply want to create the same thing all over again. And that shows with Hand of Fate as well for it's an RPG that's not quite like any I've ever played. It works a bit like Rogue, but has real-time combat and the card game mechanics make it feel more like a boardgame or a table-top. It's innovative to say the least.

The basic idea is simple: you need to stay alive and go through the levels and if you are playing story mode you will also have a boss on the final level. Each level consists of a varying amount of cards that are laid in different formations. In the table-top mode you control a game piece, which you move accross the cards. On every step the card you are standing on is revealed and will cause an event of some sort, which you solve by either making the correct decision, by luck or by fighting. When you complete an event successfully you will often be rewarded with gold, food, health or various equipment, like swords, helmets, maces, tokens and so on. If you fail, you will either die, lose health, gold, food or equipment. You play until you either complete all of the levels or you die and when you die, you will need to restart that segment of the game all over again, losing all of the stuff you've gathered so far.

The combat differs from the table-top view quite a bit. Instead you get a 3D battlefield, where you put your action-RPG skills to the test and duke it out with different enemies. The battlefield also changes based on the event you've stepped into and all of the environments I've fought in look good. It's a shame you only get to see them during combat, but I guess that makes you appreciate them even more.

As every card on the board is randomized, you will get a different set of events and enemies every time you play. The game also rewards you with tokens every time you complete an event the way the game wants you to and those tokens are used to unlock even more equipment and events. When playing the story mode you can also make changes to the event and equipment decks to change the contents of that run to some degree. This gives the game a lot of replay value and you will need tons of luck and hard work to unlock every token in the game. I really like this idea and so far all of my runs have been full of surprises. Eventually you will of course start to run into the same cards but the game will still stay interesting for a good while.

This game is definitely one of my favourite Early Acces games. It's not missing in any important content and the only bug I've found in it so far is the inability to play using a gamepad. The game says that using a controller gives you the best experience but at least my controller isn't getting recognized at all by the game. Not a big issue for me, the game works just fine using keyboard and mouse. I do however see the combat working a lot better with a controller though. Everything else in the game seems to work just fine and what they have going on in there at the moment is already really good.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.