Last Week's Games: Hand of Fate, OlliOlli, Pokemon Leaf Green, Assassin's Creed 2, Painting Chaos Cultists

It’s been quite an eventful week for me in terms of playing games! I had a couple of highlights, not the least of them finally getting to the end of Hand of Fate after owning the game for nearly two years. You can read my full review here, but I’d like to re-iterate how much it adds to the game that there’s no real plot to speak of, no Jacobean tragedy of characters to keep track of and no need to restart the game in order to remember what in the world was going on. It’s just you and The Dealer, and even though none of it gets explained by the end of the game, I feel it would have ruined it the game if it had tried to resolve it. It is a hugely fun experience, worth more than the sum of its parts, and one that I would more than recommend giving a go.

My new game for this week was OlliOlli; a 2D skating game. I’m finding this one very difficult to get to grips with because the system for tricks and landings is completely different from what I’ve come to expect from the 5/6^th generation Tony Hawk-style games. With those games, the face buttons combined with the directions handled the vast majority of the tricks, and landing was as simple as pointing the skateboard the right way when you hit the floor. With OlliOlli, the tricks are done almost entirely off the left thumb stick, and the A button (on the Steam controller) handles the landing. It’s taking some getting used to, but then, so did Tony Hawk, so I might come back and give it another go if I’ve got a few minutes.

I carried on with Pokémon Leaf Green for a while, getting to the other side of Moon Mountain and into Cerulean City. I haven’t done anything there yet because I didn’t play the game for very long this week, but I’ll keep going at it whenever it’s convenient.

I also carried on with Assassin’s Creed 2, arriving at the point where you have the option to spend some money to rebuild the town. It does require a certain suspension of disbelief to accept that roughly two years have passed between arriving at the villa and the game’s plot progressing, and I’m not sure to what end you are re-building the town. Some of the buildings have obvious benefits, but for the rest of them, I’m not sure what the purpose is unless there comes a point later in the game where you have to spend a lot of money! I’m having a pretty decent time with it, but while it does seem to take control of its own plot more than the previous game, it appears to be less open than Assassin’s Creed as well for that reason.

Finally I spend some time in Warlords ‘n’ Wizards in Netherton painting Chaos Cultists. I enjoyed painting them a lot more once I’d got the block colours done on the clothes, because at that point they started to look quite good. I probably put a little more effort in to them than was necessary for rank-and-file models that will die if my opponent so much as breathes on them too hard, but hey, it’s not like I’m in a hurry to complete the army!

I had a look at some of the options for building my Word Bearers army, and found that with the addition of 20 cultists and a Dark Apostle, I could build a Battalion formation in a 500 point army. This would give me six command points to spend on Stratagems, and I found a couple of interesting ones that relate to the army I’m trying to build. I could, potentially, remove a unit of cultists from the board and bring it back at full strength on any of the board edges I like; this is a bit of a gamble but it might pay off in objective-based games. Also the Stratagem that relates to the Word Bearers take some of the risk away from summoning Daemons, I will see how this effects the composition of the army as it grows.

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!

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.

My Unfinished Games of 2016

Well we’ve come to the end of another year and once again I’ve bought more games than I’ve got a hope of playing through. I’ve not beaten anywhere near as many games as I was expecting, although I would attribute a change in my personal circumstances and an almost compulsive need to keep myself busy to at least some of that.

Of course, there are games out there that I have played and, for whatever reason, I haven’t beaten them. Maybe they’re too long, maybe they’re too hard, maybe they’re not supposed to be ‘beaten’ in the usual sense. Maybe in some cases they weren’t very good. As I write this I’m still trying to get through a couple of games in time for the New Year but I’m not going to force it, since that sucks a lot of the fun out of playing video games for me. Nonetheless, there are a few games that I’ve had a lot of fun with, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to tell you about some of them:

Mordheim: City of the Damned

A battle in full swing...
 

I love this game. Mordheim was always my favourite of Games Workshop’s intellectual properties, and when I heard a video game was in production I really hoped it would be good (as Games Workshop have taken a somewhat cavalier approach to licensing their property for video game development, this isn’t a guarantee!) What we got was a game that grew on me as I was going along, to the point where I can look at my Steam screens and see that I’ve sunk 140 hours into the game. Not since XCOM: Enemy Unknown have I played a game so obsessively, and it certainly filled a strategy game-shaped hole left when XCOM 2 failed to engage me in the same way.

There’s plenty that I like about Mordheim. Firstly, the tutorial is kept separate from the main game. Far too many games these days introduce the mechanics as they’re going along; useful in itself but makes replaying the game far from a joy as you’re basically following a scripted sequence for anything up to the first hour. Mordheim shows you the game mechanics in the tutorial, but after that, you’re on your own. It’s up to you to learn your warband’s various strengths and weaknesses, what strategies work best with each faction, and what loots and rewards you need to be aiming for.

Developing your warband into a fighting force that can take on the game is a fulfilling experience when you know what you’re doing in terms of customisation. The skills and stats they build up along the way are always fun to apply, and even the injuries they pick up contribute to the organic story that you’re telling. Character development, when done well, can be a game’s greatest asset and this one is pretty good.

Finally, the game lets you go at your own pace. You have to collect enough Wyrdstone in a certain amount of time, and the game is over on the 4^th time you fail to do this (I’ve never had this happen to me, yet!) Other than that, it’s up to you. If a large percentage of your best fighters are injured, you can make the decision not to go on a mission while they recover – there’s no penalty other than wasted time. There are campaign missions which you have to do at some point, but if you want to raise the value of your warband so that you can beat it more easily – but risk more injuries in the process – that’s up to you.

Unfortunately the game is let down by two major flaws: Game breaking bugs and the Ironman saving system. There have been times when I’ve reached a certain point in the game – and put a significant number of hours into the relevant save file – to find that I’m unable to complete a mission because the game will not end it. Either the AI won’t take their turn, or one of your objectives doesn’t register. You have an option to abandon a mission if this happens but this comes with penalties that could potentially cripple your warband. And while the idea behind an Ironman save system – the game is constantly saving on one file so you can’t go back and load a previous save – is great for a game that relies on the consequences of the choices you make, it also means you can’t reload a save file if it is effected by a bug. Things came to a head when playing the 4^th campaign mission with the Sisters of Sigmar warband I’d spent weeks building up, and I couldn’t complete the objective without abandoning the mission. I quit out of the game and haven’t played it since. I probably will again at some point – but I have other games I could be playing for now.

Rogue Legacy

Dodge this, squire...

Since watching some TotalBiscuit videos I’ve been hearing the term ‘Rogue-like’ bandied around a lot, with Rogue Legacy being the crowning achievement in the genre. Now that I’ve played the thing, I’m starting to see why it’s so popular! The gameplay is excellent – tight controls, a charming art style and competent procedural level generation. Even better is the upgrade system, where you upgrade your skills and equipment after every run.

Because of course, that’s the whole point of Rogue-likes: You’ll never beat them all in one go but nor are you supposed to. Instead of that, you’re supposed to carry on until you die and then use what you picked up along the way to improve your chances of getting further next time. I have actually played a few games with so-called ‘Rogue-like’ elements and this one has been by far the best, for this reason: You’re always clear on how well you need to do for your next upgrade. You buy the upgrades for a certain amount of gold, and provided you know where to take your next upgrade, you always know how much you need to aim for. This might seem like a minor detail, but in actual fact it does a really good job of gauging the success of your run, rather than champing at the bit all the time.

It will be a long time, if ever, before I beat this game. And even if I do, I understand there’s quite a bit of post-game content to enjoy as well. But I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time with it so far, so it made my honorary mentions list.

Super Mario Maker

Spiny's can go upside down? What devilry is this?

Well how do you beat a game that has ongoing and almost entirely user-developed content? The answer is that you don’t; you just have some fun with it. And fun I have had! It’s good to fight your way through different levels made by other people, it’s good to have a go at some dev-designed levels that don’t appear in the Super Mario games that these are based on, and designing your own levels and seeing how they challenge people is a rewarding experience.

You make your own fun with Super Mario Maker, and when I’m building levels I try to make a gimmick for each one; a puzzle or a challenge to overcome. Whether that’s building a set of pipes in the shape of a hill, sending several Bomber Bills flying at you, or creating levels that look like a chandelier, I want to make a level that challenges low-mid level players on the right level. I may never reach the giddy heights of designing a level where you don’t have to move; just let the platforms carry you. And I may never build a super-difficult level that only the most precise platforming can overcome. But I like to build what I would consider to be challenging levels.

I come back to this game sparingly as I tend to prefer games that have an ending that I can aim for, but for a bit of creative fun every now and then, you could do far worse than this.

 

Hand of Fate

I'll beat you in the end, dealer. Oh yes.

Not going to say too much about this one as I am expecting to beat it at some point; a very difficult game but enjoyable to play and I’m looking forward to seeing how it all works out in the end. It will be one of the few PC games I’ve seen through to the end!