I love the idea around Dungeons and Dragons, the idea of roleplaying a story with chance and rewards is fun. Hand of Fate is quite similar, except instead of stat cards you build your own adventure by implementing story cards and equipment cards. Story Cards really bring out the DND from this game. After each boss battle depending on the choices you made during your adventure, you will get these tokens. Every time you unlock a different coloured token you get a card which continues the story you started. Each coloured gem represents a different story, for example the blue gems and cards tell the story of a mighty Minatare which you are trying to track down and kill. These cards make up short but interesting stories which are very well written!

Card Overview
You then have your basic cards which tie everything together, these include merchant stops, crucibles and things like that. These fill in the gaps when you’re not continuing a story. And finally as I mentioned before, you have your equipment cards. The equipment cards that you put into your deck make up the equipment that you will find and unlock during each session of the game.

Combat/Gameplay
I really like the deck building component as it allows you to choose which stories you like and want to continue and what equipment you would like to use during these stories. Eventually you will earthier get ambushed or attacked by something and this is when the game changes from a DND card game to a third person hack and slash. Now I’m going to be honest I felt that this was the one area in the game that needed improving. There were times when the combat felt a bit slowly paced for me. I would have liked to see them try a system similar to Shadow of Mordor where they have finishers that happen but don’t stop the combat from progressing forward. When I hit Q to counter an enemy in Hand of Fate, time instantly slows down which in my opinion puts the combat to a halt instead of letting it progress. I know some people might enjoy these sequences but for me personally, it felt too slow paced. The easy solution for this problem would be to add a feature in the settings which allows you to turn it off.

Music
As for the music, I found it be very good! I loved that when you landed on a merchant card, the music would instantly swap to the merchant sound track. I even found myself humming along to quite a few of the songs, they were catchy and fit very well with the games overall theme. We need more music like this in gaming today, bloody excellent!

Atmosphere
One of my favourite parts about this game, besides the deck building because im a sucker for anything card or DND related, was the atmosphere. The game, over the course of 16-20 hours builds this ever changing atmosphere. The candles around the table, lighting up the dark and gloomy catacombs and the spiders rushing across the table towards the dealer. The developers knew how to transport you into their game’s world through any means necessary, hell even the dealer continues to speak while you’re in combat because if he was talking then immediately stopped because you got attacked that would instantly break your emersion in the game, Defiant Development has done a stellar job with creating this world of Bandits, Rats and mages and honestly I wouldn’t change anything to do with the games atmosphere as in my opinion it Is right on the money with no compromises in sight!

Boss Battles
Finally, before I conclude this review, I would like to talk about the bosses in the game. Each time you play Hand of Fate, you will eventually encounter a boss. Now the bosses in this game are very well done, before you dive into the boss fight the game provides you with a few details which include: The boss’s weaknesses and the boss’s abilities. I’m also very glad to say that the bosses in the game are very different in character design and in combat. It’s very refreshing to see a game that doesn’t just slap a different coloured model in front of you and call it a boss fight.

Conclusion
In conclusion, Hand of Fate combines Dungeons and dragons Deck Building with third person, hack and slash combat and does it successfully may I add. Hand of fate from Defiant Development gets an 8.5/10. I really enjoyed this game and I struggled to really find any problems with it and the problems that are there are very minor and aren’t game breaking in the slightest. Also……its 24.99 on the steam store, I mean if you weren’t already convinced to buy the game, I’m sure the price has. The game is dirt cheap and gives you a very memorable and enjoyable experience.

TO DISCLOSE! I did recieve this copy of the game for FREE however I do maintain that these are my honest opinions.

An excellent sit-back-and-chill game. Fully controller supported. A little action, a lotta optioning. What makes this game though is the narrator, who basically serves as your opponent. His varied commentary and hints at the larger picture do an excellent job of keeping you going.

If you're looking for something that's more about seeing what comes next and less about jamming X to win (though there's a bit of that, need some action to keep you invested), this is definitely worth checking out.

If you don't have a controller don't buy this game. The targeting is finnicky enough with Analog, I can't imagine using WASD.

I'm struggling as to whether or not I should recommend this game, and I don't think I can. The game starts out really fun, and it stays fun for quite a few runs. I've almost beaten it at four hours, and I don't know if I will end up finishing it. The Endless Mode sounds like it could be pretty fun with the right deck, but after starving to death on the last tile of the game thanks to an awful combination of curses and cards, as well as all the other BS this game has thrown at me, I just couldn't play it anymore.

As I said, the game starts out really fun, and it stays fun for quite a few runs. Then you start running into the problems.

The combat is really easy for anyone that's played an Arkham game. That is, when the game actually lets you do well in combat. Combat features a fixed camera, and incredibly small arenas with (as far as I've seen) at most 10 enemies. It also doesn't let you interrupt your attacks, which causes you to not be able to dodge. Combat also has a targeting problem, so occasionally you'll hit the wrong enemy. The power attacks that some enemies do are unblockable, and uninterruptible, which will cause you to get hit when you face one of the bosses for the twentieth time. Unless I missed it, the game also doesn't explain how to do finishers on enemies. As for the difficulty, in the early levels its easy, and in the later levels it just feels unfair. Don't bother trying to increase the difficulty before you get all your food upgrades though, because if you do you'll run out of food and probably end up starving to death.

I will say I really enjoyed the different gear you could get.

The card part about it was really good. I really enjoy that aspect of the game, and how you can choose which cards you'll be finding. Some of the cards however, are incredibly annoying, and basically only worth it to unlock whatever the card unlocks. Also some of the special cards, basically stories told through a couple cards, like The White Minotaur, or the Kraken, they were cool, but you're not gauranteed to find them during a run. That's fine I guess, it was a bit annoying not finding them, because I really liked them, but that's just the type of game it is. My problem with them, is that at a certain point, you have to find them, then roll the dice on whether or not you'll actually get to move on. I was doing one of them, spent 6 turns walking between cards, and then ended up failing because I got unlucky. This was with a blessing that let me reroll my successes and failures as well.

Also the Ratmen. The Ratmen are the worst enemies in this game. They will end your combo because you killed them. Why does this happen? Because they leave a cloud of gas that will damage you over time, and you'll end up running over it at least once thanks to the usually small arenas. They also have a ranged enemy that throws 1-4 knives at you very quickly.

Maybe I'll change this review to be a recommendation later, but as of now it just gets too frustrating for me to recommend.

This may be my new defining Rougelike. The combat can be hit or miss (first all you deal with is the brainlessly easy Dusts, then it gets a bit trickier, then you finally figure out how to play around the combo system by kiting and looking for cheap shots). The main draw is the Dealer character and his endless pool of dialogue, doing the Bastion voiceover type thing all game.

Of course, it wouldn't be a rougelike without disgustingly broken builds and item combos, and you have a fair bit of control over what you'll find due to deck building. The best thing I found (and the only way I've beaten the final boss so far) works as follows:
-Whenever you would die, instead gain health equal to how much gold you have
-Gain 1 gold
-Whatever killed me probably got one-shotted by another effect
Which sounds cheap but the finale is genuinely insane.

Need to change my review a little bit since I finally beat it the game on default difficulty.
The difference between the early game and the late game is night and day. Early game is fun and exciting, the late game is nearly the opposite.
Only play this game if you are OK with random events being the reason you lose. You can be very good at combat (telegraphed enemy attacks help) and understand the cards and what to choose (when you have real choice) but still die to 25% chances of bad things happen or getting a bad curse.
The combat is basic, the concept is fantastic, and the game is technically very replayable across it's characters and game types as long as you are able to tolerate the punishing randomness. I hope Hand of Fate 2 has ironed out some of the problem that this game has with it's late game. I do like the game and will therefore recommend it but not to anyone.

Fighting seems somewhat "unfinished", otherwise awesome game

Hand of fate is a very fun card game with a really good atmosphere and some fun choices. The combat is ok and really not the best but the rest of the game is solid. The custiomizing of the diffucult is fun and the story in some of the card are really interresting to follow through the play throughs of the games. Haand of fate is worth it for 20$ and even better on sale.

EVen though the combat system is pretty weak, the presentation, voice acting and visuals are so good they make me keep coming back to collect all the cards, and finish the adventure. 8/10

Fun to play, recommend using a controller.

An excellent sit-back-and-chill game. Fully controller supported. A little action, a lotta optioning. What makes this game though is the narrator, who basically serves as your opponent. His varied commentary and hints at the larger picture do an excellent job of keeping you going.

If you're looking for something that's more about seeing what comes next and less about jamming X to win (though there's a bit of that, need some action to keep you invested), this is definitely worth checking out.