There's also a "vengeful" quest chain, which features new encounters and a selection of new gear to unlock for use in later adventures. But now your captors seek to drag you back to their cruel fighting pits, and the monstrous beast you serve demands more and more of you in order to achieve his ultimate goal - revenge against his conspirators and the reclamation of his throne."Īs a companion character, Veles will join players on quests and in battle, and is imbued with a range of "dark and terrible" powers - including the ability to vanquish downed opponents. "In the depths of despair," reveals Defiant, "you struck a bargain with a strange new ally: your blood for freedom. This latest DLC offering is out now on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One (it will be released on Switch "soon"), and adds a new campaign challenge and companion character to the core game, this time in the form of Veles the Shadow Beast. Hand of Fate 2 is out now on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.Defiant Development's excellent deck-building dungeon-crawler, Hand of Fate 2, has just received its second helping of paid DLC, known as The Servant and The Beast.
The structure of the game makes it a perfect fit on the Switch, and it’s something literally everyone can enjoy. Yet, Defiant Development have not only made it work, they have made it sing. It combines deck-building strategy gameplay with action RPG mechanics and procedural generation in ways that, in a normal world, just shouldn’t make sense.
If there is one thing I can with utmost certainty about Hand of Fate 2, it’s that there’s nothing else like it (except, you know, the first game). A lot of the time, the Dealer just doesn’t shut up, which can be very distracting when you’re trying to read the story text or dialogue. The only problem with the voice acting is that there’s perhaps too much of it. The game also has some pretty serviceable voiceovers to boot, though the Dealer himself sounds appropriately creepy all the time. The weapons all sound beefy and chunky, like each axe swing is tearing off a bit of flesh from your enemies. The audio is solid overall, with an excellent soundtrack befitting the fantasy setting. The only worry is that the load times whenever the game goes into and out of combat scenes can be a bit long. While it definitely doesn’t look as good as the PC or PS4 versions, it still looks great and runs really smoothly in both handheld and docked modes. Visually, Hand of Fate 2 looks gorgeous on the Switch. Some of them attack bosses for you, others protect you with a shield, and so on. Combat encounters can be made somewhat easier by recruiting soldiers and special NPC’s who assist you in battle. And since health is persistent throughout the run, getting damaged in combat will make overworld exploration more difficult and vice versa. You consume 1 food every time you take a step in the overworld, and some random hazards - like blizzards - will siphon away your health. Through every run, you’re managing two resource pools: health and food. The beauty of this is that the combat and the deck-building, while not deep enough on their own, serve as welcome breaks from each other to make sure neither overstays its welcome. Sometimes, you’ll happen upon a combat encounter, which shifts the game into a small arena where you brawl it out using a very stripped down version of Batman: Arkham Asylum’s combat system. Once you pick a card any narrative elements play out like a text-adventure where you choose alternate paths, dialogue options, and engage in the occasional dice-roll to decide chances of success. These cards can be treasures, weapons, NPC encounters, combat scenarios bosses, or even villages and towns for you to explore. You sit opposite a hooded gentleman who calls himself ‘The Dealer’ and lays out a path in the form of cards taken out from your deck. The game itself is kind of what you get if a game of Dungeons & Dragons involves only two players: the game master and one player. The narrative doesn’t really pick up after the first, having played it doesn’t offer up new rewards here, and the overall game is just visually and mechanically so much better. You see, Hand of Fate 2 is one of those sequels that is a marked improvement on the original in very specific ways, that renders the original completely pointless. Before I move on, I need to answer the most obvious question regarding this sequel: do you need to play the original? And the answer is a resounding ‘not really’.
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