Callate said:
Sounds like it has much the same problems I had with the original. It's all very well to have the shiny mace and the ring that heals you when you kill someone (okay, a chance that you might find the shiny mace and the ring that heals you when you kill someone), but it gets annoyingly heavy-handed when it decides there's going to be a certain amount of arbitrary "fuck you over" elements. "Yes, I'm starting you with an enormously detrimental curse. If you're lucky enough to stumble into encounters that grant you a huge amount of gold (noting that I dropped four random encounters into the deck that all give you significant pains and no rewards, so you're not likely to want to do a lot of extra searching), you can pay to have it removed- as long as you don't have to buy ANYTHING ELSE. Like, say, food."
"...And then when you die, I'm going to make you listen to my same clever witticism about how it was a matter of my cleverness and your lack of skill, rather than a completely arbitrary screwing-over. OVER AND OVER AGAIN."
Much as I admired some aspects of the thing, by the time I finally clobbered the Dealer, I felt more relief that I could stop playing than jubilation at victory.
In that sense, Hand of Fate 2 is much more forgiving. The levels are smaller, and, suprisingly, far less random as a whole. There's tons of ways to game the system (in a good way), with far, far more 100% good cards that help you a lot.
Exploration is also encouraged a lot more, since only stepping on cards you've not travelled through consumes food, which means you're not penalised for trying to complete a whole level.
Also, and this is as someone who completed Hand of Fate 1 unlocking all cards, most of the unlocks are straightforward and free of bullcrap. There's nothing in the game like the absolute idiocy that was unlocking the full Dragon Relics line; there's no card you have to purposefully fail to get the token, etc etc.
Even the most annoying unlock card (the Questing Mace, which as 10 iterations, each one requiring you to kill X of Y) you can do, without fail, in like an hour.
Overall HoF2 is a marked, complete improvement over HoF 1, and I heartily recommend it to anyone that ever enjoyed the first one. It's much better designed and built.
erttheking said:
Was not expecting him to cover this game and I'm rather glad he liked it.
Five bucks says the encounters he got disheartened by were either Strength or Justice. In an otherwise quite good game, those two can get fucked.
I found Strength to be hard.....until I realised I could take the Healing Draught, drink all it's uses on the first campfire, and be much better off. Strength with the Jousting Armor though, holee crappoli.
Justice is just a math game, really, but I do agree it's an incredibly annoying one. I got gold on my second try though.