Hand of Fate: Hordes recently entered Early Access bringing some interesting story-telling, games of chance and deck-building to the bullet heaven genre. A rather wide genre now that exploded initially with Vampire Survivors, where it seems like every indie developer wants to try their hand at it.
The overall game set-up in Hand of Fate: Hordes is unlike any other in the genre. Based loosely on the previous Hand of Fate games where you face The Dealer and everything revolves around picking cards. Your cards make up various types of encounters, equipment, food for healing and much more. You pick a character and an adventure, then play through a series of levels that have different cards put into them to build quests and encounters to find during the run. It’s quite clever and it has some wonderful design to the world, the characters and the animations.
Basic combat is much the same as other survivor-likes. You run around while abilities auto-fire, as you collect little experience orbs to level up. When you do, pick from cards to power up your character.
I especially like the bomb skeleton enemy that puts down a barrel and then it looks like they cower and cover their head before it explodes – quite funny the first time I saw it. That’s what I really like about it, the design of the little things. You see it all through the game, they spent a lot of time to make it look quality.
What I’ve seen from it is that it’s a lot slower than other games in the genre, as you’ll have constant interruptions from quests, encounters and picking between items. Like all the games of chance you end up doing when activating various points during a run. You’ll find Shrines, Wells, Chests and other objects that require you to stand in a circle for a while to activate them – and then you get your game of chance. You might have to roll dice or pick from shuffled cards – to hopefully get a good reward. Or failure, where you can pay in Food to have another go.
In between runs you can camp with your food to restore some health, or go shopping with your gold to trade for upgrades like new spells, increased max life and so on.
Something I have been impressed with is the UI size. Playing it on my Steam Machine, everything is perfectly clear – they really nailed it where so many developers fail miserably at it. So they get a bonus point for that.
Hand of Fate: Hordes is a game for people who like the idea of bullet heavens but find them perhaps far too chaotic. This one is definitely slower on the action, with more events and games of chance that keep stopping you in your tracks and a very chatty narrator telling you what’s going on. It’s an interesting and more unique take on the genre with it being the most interactive survivors-like that I’ve seen so far.
The Native Linux version has been running really nicely on the SteamOS Steam Machine. No issues with bugs or performance – really smooth.
What I would like to see is a better meta upgrade system. While you could go for repeated runs across the few different adventures it has, where you can go through and unlock more cards for new encounters and new equipment – it feels like it needs something a bit extra to work towards. The meta upgrades it has aren’t the most exciting with you being able to unlock more max health, more speed, health regeneration and so on – all just a bit too safe.
During Early Access they said they do plan to add in more heroes, cards, enemies, encounters, progression systems, game modes, and narrative content. All of that sounds great and by the end it should be an easy recommendation.
I’ll reserve any score and final thoughts for when it leaves Early Access but for now I can safely say I am thoroughly enjoying trying out all the different equipment combinations, as I try to beat all the encounters and quests to unlock every single card.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.