This game could've been so good. The concept seems great. It was described to me as a "card-based rogue-like dungeon crawler with action RPG combat and CYOA-style mechanics." Sounds right up my alley! Unfortunately, the awful balancing, terrible combat and total reliance on luck-based difficulty just make HoF2 alternatingly frustrating and boring.
The combat itself is strictly SimonThis game could've been so good. The concept seems great. It was described to me as a "card-based rogue-like dungeon crawler with action RPG combat and CYOA-style mechanics." Sounds right up my alley! Unfortunately, the awful balancing, terrible combat and total reliance on luck-based difficulty just make HoF2 alternatingly frustrating and boring.
The combat itself is strictly Simon Says where you mash attack until a prompt appears, and then press the button the game tells you to. It's incredibly stale almost immediately and feels like a half-assed attempt at ripping off the Batman games. I thought that there would be some kind of exploration or something in these little battles but nope, you are in a circle and you fight enemies. That is literally it. After playing for a while, you begin to dread seeing combat cards more than any other, just because they halt the ACTUAL game completely for upwards of a minute at a time. Every enemy takes at least 5-6 hits to kill no matter what weapon you are using, some taking more like 9 or 10. And don't even get me started on bosses with armor that you have to bash against for 45 seconds or more just so you can actually start damaging them. It's a horrible slog from the very first fight and the more you play the worse it gets. The only time you will ever lose is because you get sick of it and just start mashing in frustration.
So then since there is no actual difficulty in the combat, how does HoF2 challenge the player? Well, it doesn't. This game's idea of difficulty amounts to giving you 4 cards that fail you and 1 card that doesn't, and then making you pick at random. Or maybe giving you 3 dice and telling you to roll a 15. Or maybe just littering the map with an absurd number of trap cards, because the devs want to... punish exploration? Yeah, I don't get it either. There is zero strategy and the vast majority of the time that you lose, it will not be your fault. I grew up playing D&D and game books like Forest of Doom, so I'm no stranger to RNG-based systems, but HoF2 consistently feels unfair in a way that those other games never did. Being forced to grind the same mission 4-5 times in a row just so you can actually complete it and get your stupid gold token is the exact opposite of fun, and only serves to make the game grow staler even faster than it would without this crap.
Basically, if you are playing for the tabletop aspect, I can't recommend this game. It's too grindy, unfair and repetitive to be fun, and the experience is constantly being interrupted by the subpar combat. But I can't recommend it to fans of action RPGs either. I honestly don't know who this game is supposed to be for, or why anyone would play it. It's probably the most disappointing game I played in 2017.… Expand
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