L.G.C. |Reviews| — Hand Of Fate

Your intrepid heroes visit their old friend Torgo, loose control, and take on a procedurally generated non-card game / card game / choose your own adventure brawler …the game.

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CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Hands of Fate
Webzone: http://defiantdev.com/handoffate.php
Devel: Defiant Development
Engine: Unity
Price: $24.99 / €22.99

Wazzat: Deckbuilding comes to life in Hand of Fate! An infinitely replayable series of quests – earn new cards, build your deck, then try to defeat it! In a cabin at the end of the world, the game of life and death is played. Draw your cards, play your hand, and discover your fate.

Makes with the working

V-

Runs at a steady 30/35 @ 3840 × 2160 /w everything on YOLO
60+ @ 1080

J-

P-

~~58-60FPS with everything on 11 at 1080p on the 970!~~
- ~~Someone figured out optimization on the Unity engine!~~
  - I spoke too soon, the later levels really bring the ferps count down to 40

S-

I ran well enough but I really took a framerate hit on loading between the card table scene and fight scenes. It dropped down to a whole 10-15 FPS but once textures and everything load stabilized at 38/39 Ferps for combat while the card game scene shot me up to 60fps.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

See, this game looked horrid for the first few days because it was showing 3840 × 2160 but running at 1080p.
Only today did I tinker /w the res and went “oh, brilliant”
Kids, don’t do faux mo-cap. It looks like cheapsauce /w a side of me too!
The brawler areas look okay and the models are reasonably well done
Same /w the dealer/cards
Had to nope the dealers audio

J-

It’s certainly a unity game
The graphics seem a bit dated and the faces are a bit….eugh
The Narrator dude does a pretty good job, I’ll give him that

P-

Damn good audio-visual presentation.
Graphics have all the markings of a Unity game, including the random shadow flickering.
But the way everything is presented and how the game mechanics and lore are introduced are very well done.
Awesome job on the narrator/evil wizard guy, at least audio-wise. Good job covering his mouth so you couldn’t possibly screw up the lip-sync’ing.

S-

It’s Unity so I didn’t expect anything amazing here.
- I really enjoyed the HoF’s soundtrack as it did get me into the games setting, so huge props for that.
- voice acting was solid.
- I like how the devs set up boss battle as good boss battles.

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Control

V-

If you have the ball-organs to show me “A to continue” that’s what I’m using.
How will we control movement? Will it be the D-pad or left stick? Who knows!
Oh, and just because fk you that’s why there is a 1.5/2 sec lag (after you play card) that makes you think your controller-organ noped.
Fighting works although a bit sloppy.
The enemies are pants on head retarded sooo not a deal breaker.

J-

Standard action game fare

P-

It claims full controller support.
- But it takes a special kind of dev to achieve that with a Unity game.
Using XBoxDrv allows the DualShock 2 to actually control the game with reasonable success.
- Still couldn’t be arsed to sit down for an hour to figure the right input mapping for the NVidia Shield controller.

S-

Zero issues with my Logitech F710 on both Xinput and Direct input when it came to having it work.
- I am please that this game was catered to controllers.

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FUN

V-

Procedurally generated non-card game card game choose your own adventure brawler …the game.
Card games can DIAF but hey, this this has a 3’rd person action thingy!
Well other Venn, that might break up the mind numbing card bits!
Combat was FK all boring. There was almost no threat at all. Attack, roll, special REPEAT.
“But Venn once you get into deck build…” Nope!
I’ll try to put a bow on it for you type like myself who never really got into the whole card games bit.
You get cards that will give you weapons, magic, chance encounters etc.
When you finish a card dungeon you can pick and choose what cards to equip for the next.
You don’t actually keep the items but you have the chance to get them again?

J-

The combat is pretty monotonous. Strike strike dodge, strike strike dodge
Honestly, that’s the biggest weakness of the game.
The map element reminds me a bit of FTL
I like the deckbuilding element and I’d like to see it explored more in procedurally generated games
You can go through one of the games in about 15 minutes, so it’s nice and digestible, but I get really bored after that amount of time. I come back the next day, have 15 minutes of fun and then I’m bored again.

P-

Saying combat takes inspiration from the latest Batman games is a pretty damn big understatement.
Unfortunately, while the aforementioned Batman games have a metric fuckton of money to throw at Motion Capturing animations, Defiant Development does not.
In order to maintain some fluidity in the animations, they made a compromise by limiting your characters ability to turn on the spot.
- And by limiting I mean he doesn’t fuckin’ do it.
- Which in turn makes combat an exercise in guessing where, in the middle of the clusterfuck, is your character going to swing or dodge when you push the key.
  - It manages to be slightly worse than the Witcher 2’s dodge mechanic.
That aside and, as Jordan mentioned, the Deck mechanic is the strongest of its points.
It makes it only semi-procedurally generated, since it is always going to be generated based on the cards which you choose when you make your deck.
- In my opinion, a damn genius twist on the Rogue-Lite elements!
Combat is definitely the weakest part of the game, thankfully it ends quickly. Unlike my previous rant.

S-

Like Jake and the fat man have already established, Combat is weak overall. When compared to the new Batman games, there is not much fluidity in movement controls.
The concept of the game is overall wonderful and I would love to see a sequel to this with much more refined combat and maybe a new engine other than Unity maybe UE4.
- I want more loot, heathens.
Music, voice acting was a treat in this game adding more theatrics to each choice you had to make.
The card mechanics was “ok” at best. If you pick certain event cards that will force that prick mage to bet tokens and learn the proper choices to win the tokens thus getting you a higher chance for better cards.

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Final –