Hand of Fate: Hard Endings! Demiboy vs. Backlog, Game #12
In last post, I described what I appreciated about the design of Hand of Fate: its many-layered strategic metagame of probability manipulation. But even setting aside what I wrote about being annoyed by the final boss, you might have noticed one thing I barely mentioned: the combat. HoF isn't purely about drawing cards and moving around a board in turn-based fashion; those monster encounters play out as a 3D brawler.
I mean, look at this! How could I neglect to talk about smacking stinky dudes in the solar plexus with giant meat tenderizers?
Thing is, the battles in Hand of Fate are merely serviceable. They're reminiscent of combat you might see in a Batman: Arkham (Thingy) or Middle-Earth: Shadow of (Foo) game, where you're surrounded by baddies but can parry and counterattack on cue from any direction. But HoF manages only a pale imitation of those titles' visceral, satisfying brawls. Everything's weight feels off; you fly around the battlefield in much the same fashion as your playing piece is picked up and plunked down on the dungeon board. Your character swings a hammer in the same limp-wristed way he does a sword. When he hacks at a prone opponent, it looks less like he's dealing murderous death-strokes than like he's brushing dust off the baddie with a broom head. The game tries to counteract these animation deficiencies by using slow motion to give blows heft, but it feels just as artificial as that sounds.
It's not like you get to spend much time swinging your weapon, anyway. For the majority of each fight, you'll find yourself dive-rolling around the arena like an overcaffeinated acrobat. The game's difficulty ramps up by adding more opponents, giving them unblockable attacks, and barricading your movement with damaging traps. So you'll dodge-roll, dodge-roll, dodge-roll until you find a safe place to stand for a moment on the outside of the melee, poke an attack in if you can, then roll, roll, roll, until your next chance. Swinging more than once or twice at a go tends to invite punishment, so it's roll, roll, roll, poke, roll, roll, roll, poke...
I was willing to excuse these imperfections for most of the game. The combat was its weak area, but it served well enough as the system in which the consequences of your deck-building played out. Unfortunately, the climactic boss battle with the Dealer in the endgame takes the weakness of the combat and emphasizes it a dozen-fold. You're subjected to a four-wave boss rush, taking on three boss-tier enemies at a time. You can't heal between fights, and the walls of unblockable attacks are at their absolute peak--usually, you'd have some normal enemies mixed in, but here it's just bosses with their big flashy kill moves. If you fail to execute your dodge-roll rhythm perfectly, or get fatigued from the sheer constant button-mashing, you're toast.
Developer Defiant has my sympathy on this! I've written here before about how endings are difficult to get right, and that goes double for an action game. You don't want your game's ultimate challenge to be too easy, lest it feel like an anticlimax, but you still want it to be surmountable by most players capable of making it that far. That's a tough balance to hit! It's too bad HoF lands on the "too hard to win" side of it, because getting shut out of finishing a game in its final hour is vastly more frustrating even than growing bored of it midway. A bad ending can sour a book. A bad end boss can make you hate a game.
My advice to players of Hand of Fate: put the game away once you defeat the King of Scales. That level is a good challenge that can be bested with smart deck management and solid fighting skills. The Dealer, by comparison, is simply not fun.
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