Hand of Fate 2

Genre: Action-RPG / Interactive Story-Driven Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Hand of Fate 2 is an Action-RPG with strong Interactive Story-Driven Adventure elements, with the game’s battles interspersed with “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style choices. This is all presented in the guise of a card game played between you and a mysterious magician or otherworldly posthumous gatekeeper or something (it’s not entirely clear who he is or what he represents… in fact, I don’t even think he has a name other than “The Dealer”).

The presentation here is superb, with wonderfully detailed characters and environments, great lighting effects, and the game does an overall wonderful job of giving the entire experience a surreal, otherworldly experience. However, this comes at a bit of a price – the game’s environments are all tightly contained and don’t give you much free reign to control the camera, and the frequent loading times can get frustrating. In the sound department, I can’t say I found the music to be very memorable beyond just being decent fantasy game mood-setting fare, but the voice acting of The Dealer is very good, and does a great job setting the tone for the game.

The story itself is actually pretty underwhelming beyond the framing device The Dealer provides – I felt like I was playing through a not-especially-imaginative Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and the conceit that this was all a game representing my character’s life only highlighted this. I didn’t feel my choices mattered all that much to the story, nor did I feel a particularly deep sense of history or personality to the world of the game. Where everything in The Dealer’s wagon is enticing and interesting, the contents of “The Game” itself were completely lackluster for me.

The gameplay itself has players moving through multiple scenarios laid out on a card table and represented by the cards themselves. You may find yourself making choices in the story, dealing with a local merchant, gaining or losing one of the game’s resources, or getting into a fight. The fights themselves play out in a style similar to the Arkham series of Batman games, and they’re decent, but not as good as the combat in those titles, feeling a bit more stiff.

Hand of Fate 2 adds in a few things that weren’t in the first game, such as challenges to complete and companions that can assist you. However, I think my complaints about this game are much the same as the first one – the game’s structure is disjointed in a way that makes it hard to feel invested, the choices often feeling random or not giving you much of an indication what your choices will lead to, and this lack of feeling of any useful and deliberate utility saps much of the fun out of the experience. At the very least I can say that this disjointed presentation is probably at its best on the Switch, where you can partake in a few battles or snippets of the game at a time without needing to concern yourself with any greater story or long-term goals.

In the end, Hand of Fate 2 does provide gameplay with a decent combat system and an interesting overall premise. I just feel like, without any meaningful long-term story or gameplay goals you can really sink your teeth into, it ends up being a shallow and, again, disjointed experience. If you’re looking for some decent action in a fantasy setting, Hand of Fate 2 gets the job done, but not in any sort of way that will likely stick with you.

tl;dr – Hand of Fate is an Action-RPG with “Choose Your Own Adventure” elements, represented as a card game between you and a mystical “Dealer”. There’s a decent combat system here, and the conceit is intriguing, but the game’s disjointed nature and underwhelming story make the entire experience feel shallow. There’s fun to be had here, but don’t expect this game to pull you in.

Grade: B-

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