Backlog Beatdown: Handling my Fate with Hand of Fate

I bought Hand of Fate in the summer of 2016. I remembered watching TotalBiscuit’s impression of it the previous year wishing I had a computer powerful enough to play it, then jumped at the opportunity to play it when I bought one. This was probably the reason I bought a Steam Controller as well; I knew a lot of it was an Arkham-like brawler and I didn’t fancy doing that on a laptop keyboard!

This is the best you see of either character.

Hand of Fate is a procedurally-generated Deck Builder/Brawler/Role Playing Game. You are an unnamed adventurer, across the table from The Dealer; a mysterious being of considerable power. The Dealer has a deck of cards that take you through various encounters; these purport to be memories from your adventures. These cards are laid out in a simple shape, some large and some small, some linear and some more open. You move your character onto the cards one at a time and resolve the encounters on there. Sometimes this is a decision, sometimes it’s a game of chance, and a lot of times they’re combat encounters with a variety of monsters. You have to make your way through these encounters, through various ‘levels’ of the dungeon created by the deck, manage your resources along the way and beat the boss at the end of the adventure. You’re supported along the way by equipment cards, and you can manipulate what occurs by building up the equipment and encounter deck at the start of the game. Each run takes between ten minutes and half an hour, promoting a “Just one more go!” mentality.

The combat - simple, but short and functional.

Hand of Fate appears to be a jumbled mess of ideas that shouldn’t work in a game, but it really does. The game is beautifully presented; the graphics are nothing special for the time but the theme and the atmosphere create a fantastic and slightly unnerving experience. The Dealer, in particular, is wonderful character: Primarily an antagonist with a distinct aura of menace about him, but almost friendly in nature; not above congratulating you for a victory, apologising for a harsh card, or laughing at you for a mistake. That you can only see his eyes means his countenance never gives too much away, and Anthony Skordi’s brilliant voice acting brings as much to the character as it needs to – clearly invested in what he’s doing, but no overblown dramatics. The deckbuilding is well-implemented; you can either build the decks yourself or allow the computer to do it for you. This allows for micro-managing and optimisation for those who want to, and rewards you with more cards and items if you do, but doesn’t distract from the game for those who just want to play it. Some questions have been raised about the combat system but the only major flaw for me was that I wasn’t able to control the camera, meaning that I didn’t know what was going on in some situations. Everything else is fine; it’s basic, but you’re rarely in combat for more than a few minutes at a time so it doesn’t outstay its welcome. If anything, it adds to the general effect of not quite being in control of the situation!

If you play pen-and-paper RPGs and have ever wondered
what "True Neutral" looks like, I think The Dealer is it!

Finally, one of the game’s greatest strengths is in its plot. On the surface, there doesn’t appear to be one. You don’t know who the adventurer is, or who the Dealer’s true identity, or the purpose of the game. Without wishing to spoil, the ending, while spectacular, doesn’t address any of this. But this is fine; it allows you to fill in the gaps for yourself, and you can never be so invested in a plot that isn’t there that you feel the need to restart every time you come back to the game after a time, which is usually the reason I rarely see RPGs through to the end. And I’ll happily come back for more later; some additional difficulty levels were patched in post-launch, there’s downloadable content which implies different classes, and a sequel was released not long ago.

Hand of Fate is a game that delivers exactly what I needed when I needed it. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time, and I’m looking forward to returning to it soon!

Backlog Beatdown: Double Dragon. No single dragon nonsense.

Double Dragon Trilogy was a game I bought months ago from GOG having had an email from them promoting the game. I remembered enjoying it when I played it on my mate Adam’s NES years ago, bought it on a whim and it’s taken me until now to give it a go. I dug my old controller out, booted up the game, remembered how hard it was and hoped that this time I’d be able to beat it. You should be aware that these notes refer to this updated version of the game.

The premise of the game is that you’re one of a pair of twins, Billy and Jimmy Lee, and you’re on a quest to fight through a street gang called the Black Warriors to save Billy’s girlfriend, Marian. The game is one of the earlier efforts of what later became known as the Brawler genre, with your character able to move around the floor section of the screen, kicking, punching and special-moving your way through the levels and the enemies. The game was originally released in 1987 and the genre was very popular in the arcades at the time, but is it still any good today?

That’s a loaded question if you’re asking me, because I will always compare a game like this to the standards of Streets of Rage 2, which is the best game of all time and everyone should play it. But as a game released roughly five years before that, Double Dragon does OK. It’s a standard brawler with some new features (for the time) and satisfying game mechanics, let down at the end by a horribly cheap final level, (we’ll get to that.) You have a button to punch, a button to kick and one to jump as well. You can also to a jump kick, but I got through the game without doing this because Billy kept kicking backwards. I didn’t find out until later that you’re supposed to press the punch button to make him kick forwards!

Batter him...

The enemies usually go down after one or two attack combos, and there are some colourful characters and bosses to liven things up. Double Dragon was also the first game of its kind to allow the use of weapons, which added an extra layer of depth as you have to balance range, speed and timing. The whip, for example, was a fast weapon but didn’t have a lot of range, whereas the baseball bat was slower but had more reach. Both required good timing. The knife was a throwing weapon, which would one-shot kill most of the lower-level enemies and help a lot with a boss. You could also throw boulders, boxes and barrels.

Aside from being able to select the difficulty (I went with easy; games like this often require you to know them inside out to be able to handle the harder difficulties,) the Trilogy version comes with two modes – Arcade and Story. It took me a couple of goes to work out the difference: In Arcade mode you play through the game, you have three lives and can continue when you’ve lost them all. In Story mode, you can select any of the game’s four levels once unlocked, starting the game with four lives and no continues. I beat the game on Arcade mode. I did try the story mode but found it very difficult, and here’s why:

Remember that horribly cheap final level a couple of paragraphs ago? This purports to be the gang’s hideout in some kind of temple. The first half of the level is trapped with sliding blocks and spear statues that drain a lot of your energy, and with the blocks in particular there seems to be nothing you can do about it. They appear in a random pattern as soon as you get close to them, and will kill you after two hits. There’s no skill involved with this, just luck, and you’ll lose a lot of your lives navigating it. Then there is the game’s final boss, Willy, whose weapon is a gun that will one-shot kill you the moment it hits you and will never be dropped. It is possible to beat him, but without the option to continue the game once you’ve lost your lives, it presents a far greater challenge than is fun.

Once you’ve beaten the game, Billy rescues his girlfriend and the credits roll. Apparently if you play in multiplayer mode you then have to fight Jimmy for her affections, but as I played this game on my laptop, I doubt I’ll ever see this! All in all, it’s not a bad little game, I had some fun with it, despite the last level. Give it a go – but don’t spend any substantial amount of money on it!