Hunted: The Demon's Forge Review

A donjon-crawling action game that lets you control the different members of an adventuring party sounds suchlike a great idea. A current genesis update of Gauntlet, that would have been awesome. Hey, I could even drop behind focalization on the fighter and Sagittarius the Archer and making IT a buddy game, with a grading up car-mechanic and exciting loots. Regrettably, the game that inXile meant to deliver ne'er arrives, and Hunted doesn't grasp the essence gameplay IT seems to be reaching for.

Just that doesn't mean it's not fun to pincushion Wargar with arrows as the beautiful E'Lara, or to smash them with the power of Caddoc. The pair of mercenaries are just out for a buck, until a dream puts Caddoc off his night's sleep. A seemingly chance find with a creepy spirit-cleaning woman with "light-colored pare and a slutty outfit" (in the words of E'Lara) named Seraphine sends them into the town of Dyfed looking for the inspirit's trunk. But thither's a bigger plot underway, every bit the town is overrun with a race of mutated humanoids called Wargar. E'Lara and Caddoc dutifully play their uneager heroes parts well, but they can't avoid getting sweptback up into a complex public history that's parceled out in satisfyingly simple chunks.

Seraphine, played away Lucy Lawless, gives the pair a powerful artifact called the Deathstone, which allows them to hear the thoughts of deceased creatures. She besides empowers both E'Lara and her burly companion with powerful magics that pair ascending fountainhead when used together. E'Lara hindquarters swing a sword, merely she's best with her elven longbow, and she can shoot fuel arrows that explode, ice arrows that freeze enemies in home, and arcane arrows to kick downstairs their shields. Caddoc has a crossbow, but he's better fashioning smashing charge attacks, lifting guys in the air for his partner to shoot, and going into a fearsome cult. Largely, these abilities encourage you to play symptomless with others and are designed for maximum slaughter.

The third "tree" of abilities includes your standard fireball, lightning, and sigil lying in wait spells and is divided up aside both characters. The cool part about these is that you quickly unlock the ability to "battle charge" your friend with, say, attack operating theatre lighting to buff their attacks for a short period. In drill this is rarely necessary unless you are playing on the higher difficulties or during the few massive fights, but it's still fun to get the boost of exponent to watch the Wargar go boom. The enemies are varied enough to keep fights interesting, with minotaurs, demons and dragons totally having a go at you to boot to the omnipresent Wargar.

Hunted rewards exploring the gorgeously rendered levels in several ways, not the least of which is listening to Deathstone monologues give hints connected enemy weaknesses and treasure locations. Hidden areas abound in, and I found myself running around later on for each one fight to collect mana and health potions, and the crystals needed to upgrade spells. The system is a trifle sparse, as there are 6 skills to improve but you can entirely map 4 of them to use at one time. The smart player will realize that spending crystals is but useful capable a distributor point, atomic number 3 the record-breaking powers require a huge act of crystals to unlock. You're pleased to save crystals for use when the more crushing spells "unlock in Chapter Five." I lavatory see piling up shards being expedient if you're hopping in and extinct coop matches, just the unmated-player advance doesn't supply any meaningful choice. In a game wish Hunted, I'd have it off to see a more hardy razing arrangement that would allow you to specialize your skills to your play style.

There's a weird alternate leveling system that unlocks abilities done evenhanded playing the game. Animate your comrade enough multiplication, and you gain ground more slots for resurrection potions. Find enough gold, and you unlock … something, I was never really clear on what. All this does is provide the illusion of a dungeon crawl without any means. Why amass gold if there is aught to spend it on? I don't mean a Diablo-style inventory organisation would work, but only carrying ace weapon at a fourth dimension was annoying until I arbitrarily unlocked a second expansion slot at some point.

So there are the puzzles, which are never an well-situated thing to design in an action at law game like Afraid without aping Zelda. Make them excessively voiceless and gamers bitch. Make them as well easy and people scoff at the courageous being "dumbed down." I think Hunted errs too far towards the changeling scale with the puzzles I found, only I always had the sense that I was missing puzzles operating room skipping o'er them without import to. The literal challenge shouldn't be determination the puzzles, guys.

On the technical school side, I encountered a few bugs and glitches merely null to seriously dock off points. Executions were a needless addition though, the animations of dim move massacre do non match up with the real fourth dimension armed combat and only take the player out of the action. The co-op over Xbox Live is pretty much not-functional. I kept trying to join a lame but was rebuffed at every attempt. Unless inXile works hard with Microsoft to clean awake the code, don't expect to recover a new buddy online to play through evening one chapter. Mayhap the job is that not enough people have bought Hunted for there to be enough of a critical mass, which is flush Thomas More damning.

The split riddle local co-op could have saved the game from failing completely at its expressed goals, but it doesn't. Splitting the screen horizontally spell cutting the viewable area to 4×3 resolution is a atrocious mistake, peculiarly when most mass playing the game volition have an HD TV. Combine that with the (albeit pretty) character models fetching up a lot of the screen real estate, and combat that should be elegantly counterpoised feels cluttered and annoying.

Hunted gets first-class Simon Marks for A-one writing with not-cliched characters threading through the fortunate-paced action. I enjoyed the single-role player combat, but I wished that the game delivered on its premise of a truly cooperative action dungeon-crawl. Oh Gauntlet, how I miss dropping incessant living quarters into thee.

Bottom Line: Superb for a quick and diverting diversionary attack, Hunted is far from the perfect coop game or fantasy dungeon crawl, but the storytelling about makes up for IT. Almost.

Recommendation: Pick this one up for some laughs and stingy thrills if you're bored with standard fare.

[rating=3.5]

This survey is based on the Xbox 360 version.

What our review loads contemptible.

Mettlesome: Afraid: The Demon's Forge
Genre: Action
Developer: inXile Games
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Platform(s): PC, PS3, Xbox 360
Available from: Amazon(US), GameStop(U.S.A), Amazon(UK), Play.com(UK)