Hand of Fate 2 - Outlands and Outsiders

An outstanding DLC - if you like what Hand of Fate is about, you'll love this. The story is by far one of the most touching chapters in the adventurer's life, and the map itself has several ways of solving it, depending on one's favored playstyle (best of all, it's very low on gambits, so you can trust in your combat skills to carry you a long way). There's also a lot of goblins, to help pry the tokens from the related gear that requires killing the violent gits. All in all, well worth the ~6EUR, and I genuinely hope Defiant maintains this ratio of price to quality, as I wouldn't mind buying as long as they make it.

First, just so you know, I have not yet used the equipment gained from the encounter, nor did I yet persue the companion quests for our new friend, thus I don't know how he improves at the end of them. Those won't be featured in this review. This DLC gives you access to a new mission and a new companion. You get access to the mission after the hierophant mission and the companion after getting him in the Borrow Burrow encounter. First the companion. He is a young goblin you pick up on your journey who decides to accompany you. In combat he doesn't fight but he is a slippery guy, able to dodge attacks very well. When you activate him in combat he draws the agro of EVERY OPPONENT ON THE FIELD. This is wonderful for getting attackers off your back long enough to pick off specific units (screw you phallanx), or use your artifact, or build your combo meter. Outside of combat, he doesn't do anything with the gambits. Instead, when you interact with him in camp, you can make him recharge one of your bombs (only the bombs) in exchange for him being inactive for 3 turns. This, in my opinion, makes him INVALUABLE for you if you like using bombs, or even if you are scared to waste bombs. He does little enough otherwise that I don't feel to bad about making him inactive so I can see myself using bombs a lot more now that I have him as a safety net. He won't recharge healing objects or damaging objects not labled as a bomb (sorry damaclese), but this is still great. Now the mission, mapmaker. First, I am not entirely sure where this is suppose to fit chronologically since it seems like it is suppose to take place in the far future. Story asside, this mission has the gimmic where it always follows a certain pattern. It is always a 7 by 4 rectangle, there are towers at both sides of one collum and trees at both sides of one row. A priest statue is always revealed to you when you enter each of its 3 layers. [spoiler] You can pay the statue for riddles that dictate the rules of the map, revealing the aspects of the map that will always be the same no matter what layer you are on or how many encounters you do. The riddles even carry over between runs so you never have to rebuy them. If you buy all the riddles in one run, it will cost 156 gold. In order to get the gold token for the encounter you need to releace the ghost pirate's crew, which is also done at the priest statue. Each of the five members cost 20 gold each, again, pretty doable. [/spoiler] The final boss in the encounter is admitadly a bit of a pushover, at least for me. The map itself is more dangerous in my opinion. This encounter is servicible, and its predictablility makes it easy to get the gold token and easy to run into encounters if you are trying to collect tokens without the hassle of a difficult mission or uncertain card rng. All in all, I think 7$ is fine for this dlc. There is a good amount to enjoy, and as you likely already know, every card made available to you enriches the main game and endless mode, including new equipment, new encounters and in this case a new companion.

I am very happy with this DLC and definitely it worth buying. You will have one story and plenty of additional cards including new Hero. I would like to draw your attention on the STORY. It differs a lot from the ones we have in the main campaign: -first of all it's analitical (which for me is very important) - you have a large map and just going blindly will not end up well. You need have some strategy or at least decrease the amount of guessing of where to go as If you step on the bad card (there are many of them there) it will hurt a lot. And If you step several times in a row you will end up dead. Clues which you may buy for gold will help you with that. These are small hints which can help you to get yourselves comfortable on the map: like 3 steps from this card you may find this one or do not go left from the chest as it will hurt or else....personally me wrote everything on the paper and when I gather them all it helped a lot. -At the same time If you like randomness and gambits - please go ahead and may not buy any clues and just search and search everything. I completed it from the very first time and was a bit lucky on gambits as well as with goblins pursuit card which gave me enormous amount of gold thus I fastly got all the clues however this story mich be medium hard generally for the players.

The new challenge and cards are pretty meh, but more character variety is nice to have.

DLC Provides 3 new pieces of equipment 5 New encounter cards 1 New companion 1 Disappointly simple challenge 1 "New" race in endless Mode I have to say that though this DLC isn't bad it isn't good either. The lack of content for price is disappointingly bleak. Equipment wise you get a new sword, a sheild and an artifact. None of which are platinum or brimstone.The sword comes with a single quest task which yields a slightly better version of the same sword. As to encounters there are 4 basic ones and 1 platinum though this is alright it would have been nice if these cards unlocked other cards we could explore The companion is by far the best part of this DLC but with everything else falling short you might prefer to wait for a sale. The challenge was boring? Well maybe not boring but kind of simple to overcome. Lastly you get a "New" race in endless. Which most players will note fairly quickly are just reskined skeletons that have a habit of bugging out when they respawn. Resulting in the ai freezing in position or turning invisible. So if you're really desprite for content then have at it but otherwise just wait till it goes on sale because the amount/quality of content presented is really not worth the asking price. Update- So there has been a few updates and the "New" race appears to be fixed. Though still reskined skeletons, they now instead of bugging out when you kill them one of two things will occur, they will respawn or a magic zone will appear. This zone will come in one of two types either it'll be a damage over time zone or one the snares the player when they enter Update 2- DLC is now at the right asking price.

Just one little single map in campaign added(hard as hell too). I expected at least 10 new maps. One of the worst dlc's I ever played. Desreption of the dlc is false. They added shards that can be combined into tokens(on the already existing cards - yes, you do the same cards again) and they added new enemies with goblins and with one major boss(goblin prince) and a goblin companion. This is worth, if the price is 1$. Just don't waste your time and money on this ''dlc''.

Goblin king of the darkstorm galaxy, ride on the wings of doom!

Nicely done.

Good!