14 DAY TRIAL // When picture collectible card games and deckbuilding, you don't naturally factor some third-person hack-and-slash action into the equation, and you're hard-pressed to think of dungeon crawling outside the now defunct World of Warcraft TCG's encounter decks.
Nonetheless, that's precisely what Hand of Fate aims to offer to its players, a combination of deck building and endless adventuring that becomes progressively more complex as you advance through its challenges.
Defiant Development is a team of industry veterans, and you can pretty much see that while playing the Early Access version of Hand of Fate. Even though its mechanics are pretty basic, it's a pretty well thought-out experience, one that starts up slow, allowing you some wiggling room while you get used to its mechanics, and gets progressively more complicated as time goes on.
Although the game can't easily get a genre stamp, it's somewhat of a hybrid between an action role-playing game, a roguelike and a deckbuilding game, that plays like a board game with hack-and-slash intermissions.
The way you play the game is by putting together a series of cards and forming a deck, which is then used to lay out the dungeon floors through which you venture. Once you stumble upon enemies, the cards in your hand fly into the air and transform into an avatar carrying various pieces of armor and weaponry, and the enemy cards become assailants for you to dispose of.
The options you have at your disposal when you start out are pretty limited, but as you get more gear, you start piling up special abilities, and depending on your equipment, you can employ shields to block incoming attacks or employ devastating area-of-effect abilities.
Some of the weapons have special abilities that allow you to perform various attacks, such as massive hammers that can crush through enemy shields so you don't need to kick them off balance first, or allowing you the option to hit enemies that you knocked to the ground and deliver deadly finishing moves.
The game basically takes place on a tabletop where the dealer lays out the cards you put together, alongside the ones that are unique to each encounter, and you then have to carefully make your way through them until you reach the final challenge, a boss that every chapter tasks you to defeat.
At each step, you can stumble upon a different encounter card, ranging from battles against lowly creeps, such as skeleton ambushes, and more interesting events such as saving a damsel in distress or navigating a labyrinth full of traps in order to get to a chest full of loot.
After each battle, provided that you're still breathing, of course, you get a number of reward cards from the rewards deck you assembled before embarking on the adventure, and you get random pieces of armor and weapons that you can equip or sell to merchants that you find during your journey, in exchange for healing, food, blessings and other such things.
The more you progress through the tiered challenges, the harder they get, requiring that you build larger decks and that you to pass incrementally more difficult trials. And once you defeat an adventure's final boss, you get to unlock new cards that you can then use in your deck in order to better your chances of success, but you also unlock the possibility to meet that boss again later on, as a casual encounter.
Probably the best thing about the game is the fact that it's so weird and new that, although you're likely to have played every aspect of it separately at one time or another, it feels like an entirely new kind of experience.
As with any deck building game, there are a lot of customization options, so that you increase the odds of getting stuff that's tailored to your preferred builds, and the wealth of variety in encounters and monster types makes every playthrough a similar yet different experience.
Hand of Fate will definitely appeal to boardgame and action game fans alike, and it offers a pretty fun, unconventional and rich experience even in its Early Access form.
