Parry and dodge cues are clear, and managing the timing of your attacks and moves requires active attention. It's not a unique system, and the game lacks variety in both enemies and tactical possibilities, but it's now much more satisfying to take on a group of enemies. It discards the ineffective camera, clunky controls, and unclear parry cues for a system that feels much closer to the Batman: Arkham Asylum fighting system that so clearly inspired it. Hand of Fate 2's combat has gone through an overhaul. Thankfully, until you reach the very end, you'll have multiple unfinished missions unlocked at any given point if one is giving you grief you can usually jump into another. But the individual missions in Hand of Fate 2 often ask you to fight the same battles repeatedly, and replaying the more difficult ones over and over is a strain. In a typical roguelike, where heavy randomisation makes the game feel different each time you enter, this wouldn't seem like a big deal. It also took me many attempts to beat the Strength mission, which starts you at low health and takes away your ability to heal by eating food. It's hard to pull yourself back into retrying a mission when these things happen. It's tremendous fun, but less so when you're killed an hour into it, right at the end of one of the many, many intense battles you've been made to fight. A prime example is the Justice mission, in which you travel around the 28 cards laid out on the table, gathering resources and dodging enemies through games of chance, continually traveling back to your base card to use said resources to strengthen your fort. However, while the game gives you plenty of opportunities to escape bad situations or reasons to rethink your deck if your current plan isn't working, the start-over-if-you-die structure can sometimes be excessively frustrating in certain scenarios. Each mission has a strong sense of identity and purpose, and many of them are clever. These can include challenging you to work out which character of three is plotting a murder, or tasking you with escorting an innocent potato farmer. You usually still have to find and kill a boss, but each mission now has its own gimmick. While in the first game you were constantly on the hunt for the boss card, in Hand of Fate 2 there's far more variety in objectives, and the game is better for it. There are also several cards that throw you into combat, at which point the game briefly turns into a third-person action experience until all your enemies are downed (or you die, failing the mission). The outcomes of several situations are dictated by games of chance and skill-rolling dice, perfectly timing a button press to an on-screen pendulum, stopping a spinning wheel at the right time-and there are various stats you need to follow and maintain, as your character can run out of money or starve to death. As you move across the table turning over one card at a time (usually either looking for or moving towards a specific card), you're issued challenges that might or might not help you achieve the mission's goal. The cards are scattered onto a table face-down, although the shape and structure they form changes on a mission-by-mission basis. These are then mixed in with the Dealer's deck to form the card base you're playing with. In each of the sequel's 22 missions, you select several encounter and equipment cards from your personal deck. It was a good game crying out for a great follow-up thankfully, Hand of Fate 2 has delivered just that. It was a great idea, but had some major issues that held it back from reaching its full potential. It combined the rules of a roguelike with a deck-building card game to create something unique, and the devious, ever-present Dealer made the whole thing feel like a single-player Dungeons & Dragons experience where the Dungeon Master was actively trying to stop you. The original Hand of Fate succeeded largely on the strength of its concept.
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