Last Week's Games: Hand of Fate and Far Cry 2

Fun fact: I originally opened this blog with some scathing, sarcastic remarks about how I have nothing better to do on Christmas Day than write blogs about video games, (I normally put these blogs out on Mondays,) before appending that I’d actually written the vast majority of it the day before. The joke was on me in the end, as it turned out I actually had got better things to do on Christmas Day than write blogs about video games, and ended up posting it two days late. Well done me. 

So, what have I been playing this week?

One of the best and most compelling characters I've seen...

I had a go with Hand of Fate, in anticipation of getting the second one at some point, most likely when it goes on a Steam sale. It’s a game that I was originally put on to by TotalBiscuit a few years ago. The idea is that you’re sitting across from ‘The Dealer,’ a mysterious Games Master-like figure who is using cards to take you through your adventure. It’s definitely inspired by a few different kinds of what I now call “Hobby Games;” there’s a board game, a deck-building card game and a role-playing game in there somewhere. The Dealer lays the cards out in a pattern, and you move your piece on to each card, which is then flipped to reveal the encounter. Sometimes it will be a quest, sometimes it will be a shop, sometimes it will be an opportunity to get some new gear or another bonus, with a random chance mini-game. Other times it will be a combat encounter, whereupon the game transports you into a combat arena and becomes a fighting game that borrows heavily from the ‘Arkham’ combat system. There are 3-5 ‘levels’ to each adventure, and each one culminates in a boss fight. If you win, you progress into the next adventure, and if you lose, you can try again as many times as you like.

It’s an intriguing prospect, however the game increases your engagement by adding rogue-like elements to it. You can beat the first few levels without trying, but the game becomes a lot harder later on. However, you don’t start with all of the cards in the game; you gain other cards as you go along. Some cards have tokens attached to them; each token has a set of new cards in there that you can add to the deck if you beat the encounter on the card. You get to keep all the cards you win, even if you lose the adventure, so there is a sense of progression in the game even if you don’t do too well.

The combat has been criticised for being too ‘clunky,’ but I don’t notice; my laptop doesn’t run especially high frame rates. I really enjoy the game – and I like being able to dip in to it every now and again and still feel like I’m making progress.

I'm enjoying it at the moment, but will it
carry me to the end?

I’ve also had a surprising amount of fun with Far Cry 2, a game I haven’t played since No Game New Year. It’s a first-person shooter set in sub-Saharan Africa, and the emphasis is on exploration and story progression. I struggled with it for the longest time; the game appeared to expect me to meticulously plan everything out and attack targets after spending ages planning and scouting, and when that invariably didn’t go very well, I lost a lot of the fun out of the game and gave up after not very long. It got much better once I threw all that out of the window and approached the missions from the angle of getting an assault rifle and killing everything that moves. I find I’m making a lot more progress and enjoying the game a lot more. I might even make it all the way through the game this time! Now that I’ve increased the pace of the game, and therefore decreased the time it takes me to get through the missions, I can play the game for roughly an hour and feel like I’ve made progress. It’s is a long game, but I’ll stick with it for a bit longer and hopefully have a lot more fun in between, whatever happens.