Hand of Fate 2

The pitch

Hand of Fate 2 puts you across a table from the Dealer, a recurring narrator-antagonist who lays out a board of face-down cards representing rooms, encounters and events. You build your own deck of equipment, food and encounter cards ahead of each run, shuffle it into the Dealer's, and navigate the resulting board turn by turn -- some cards trigger a story choice, others trigger a fight, and the run ends when you clear the objective or run out of health and food. When a combat card flips, the game drops out of its tabletop framing entirely and into a real-time, third-person action sequence, weapons and all, before returning you to the board.

It's a direct sequel to 2015's Hand of Fate, built by the same small Australian studio, Defiant Development, and it launched as a full release on 7 November 2017 with no Early Access period. Two paid DLC packs followed over the next year, expanding the card pool and scenario roster.

Where the reviews agree: this is a real sequel

Read through Hand of Fate 2's reviews and there's an unusually strong consensus that this is what a sequel is supposed to be. Reviewers who played the original consistently describe more content, a proper campaign structure the first game lacked, additional games of chance beyond the core card mechanic, and generally sharper production values. "Hand of Fate 2 is a real sequel, with massive improvements, but no drastic changes to the core gameplay," reads a launch-week review, and that specific framing -- more of what worked, refined rather than reinvented -- repeats constantly across years of subsequent reviews. The Dealer, voiced with a dry, theatrical menace that carries much of the game's personality, gets singled out often as the connective tissue holding the whole experience together.

Where the reviews agree: the combat is the weak link

What's unusual is how consistently the same reviewers who praise the sequel's improvements single out one specific thing as unchanged, or even worse: the real-time combat. "Combat's still a little wonky but serviceable" is about as generous as the negative-leaning assessments get; less generous ones call it "tedious," "one-dimensional," and "not designed properly," with specific complaints about camera positioning, hit timing and a lack of meaningful depth once the novelty wears off. Crucially, this isn't only a negative-review talking point -- multiple reviewers giving the game an enthusiastic recommendation explicitly carve out the combat as an exception, describing it as the price of admission for the tabletop half rather than a strength in its own right. One long-time fan puts it directly: "the combat is a bit wonky, but the atmosphere, the cards, [and everything else]" are what keep them coming back.

A second, more structural complaint sits alongside it: several reviewers describe gear upgrade requirements as grind-based rather than skill-based, requiring a specific number of repeated actions -- use a weapon type 25 or 50 times, for instance -- rather than rewarding general competent play. That complaint compounds the combat fatigue for players who don't naturally enjoy the fighting on its own terms, since progression partly depends on doing more of the thing several reviewers already find the weakest part of the game.

A real, documented split among the original's fans

Underneath the broad consensus, there's a genuine minority disagreement worth naming: some returning fans of the first Hand of Fate feel the sequel, despite its added scope, actually lost some of what made the original's tighter, more focused loop work. A handful of reviewers explicitly prefer the first game's shorter, more replayable roguelike structure to the second's fuller campaign, describing the sequel as "objectively worse" in specific respects even while acknowledging its expanded content. This is a minority position in the review corpus -- most returning fans do call it an improvement -- but it's consistent enough across different years to be worth noting rather than dismissing as a handful of outliers.

What the achievement data adds

Global achievement completion follows a familiar shape: early story milestones sit very high -- 89% for the game's first achievement, 81% for the second -- and mid-campaign story beats sit in the 50-60% range, reasonable numbers for a game with a genuine multi-hour campaign structure. From there, a long tail of scenario-specific and challenge-run achievements sits under 1%, which is typical for a game with this much optional replayable content rather than a sign of players abandoning the core campaign early.

The studio's story matters here too

It's worth stating plainly, for a review written nine years after release: Defiant Development, the small Australian studio behind both Hand of Fate games, ceased development of new titles in July 2019, citing an inability to sustain its experimental, self-funded approach, and moved into what it called "caretaker mode" to keep its existing games running rather than developing anything further. One of the most emotionally direct reviews in this game's corpus was posted the day that news broke, opening with "I write this positive review with a heavy heart after reading of your impending closure today." There has been no further content or major patch support for Hand of Fate 2 since, which is worth knowing going in -- the game you'd buy today is, functionally, the same game its long-time fans have been playing, unchanged, for years.

Value

At NZ$36.99, currently 50% off at NZ$18.49 at the time of checking, Hand of Fate 2 is a reasonable purchase for a genuinely distinctive, replayable RPG hybrid with dozens of hours of content across its base campaign and two expansions. For players who click with the card-and-dice structure and can accept the combat as functional rather than exceptional, it holds up well nine years on; Defiant's closure means there's no ongoing support to factor in, for better (a finished, complete package) or worse (nothing left to fix what reviewers have flagged since launch).

Verdict

Hand of Fate 2 is a genuinely inventive hybrid that mostly succeeds at being more of what made its predecessor interesting -- a real campaign, a stronger Dealer-led narrative frame, more variety in its card pool -- while carrying forward the one thing reviewers have never stopped flagging: combat that functions but rarely impresses. That split holds remarkably steady across nine years of reviews from players who otherwise disagree about almost everything else regarding the sequel. For anyone drawn to its tabletop half specifically, it remains a distinctive, worthwhile pickup, especially discounted, from a small studio whose closure in 2019 makes this and its predecessor the complete extent of what Defiant Development left behind.