Hunted: The Demon's Forge Previews

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Written by Brother None on February 28th, 2011

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It's on the other side of it, at the top of a breathtakingly beautiful gorge wreathed in waterfalls and thick foliage, that the scene is set. A portal opens and out steps a woman with pupil-less eyes, skin the colour of poisoned milk and an outfit that leaves one thing to the imagination: how she got into it. Introducing herself as Seraphim (and voiced by Lucy Lawless), the lady requests that Caddoc picks up a small, dark stone on the pedestal next to her, referring to it as a "Death Stone".

Understandably, Caddoc has some doubts about the whole situation. Professional mentalcake E'lara does not, however, and snatches the thing up, thereby attracting the ire of some kind of terrible demon, empurpling the entire valley and sparking the sky into a broiling tub of lightning. It's from here that the game's action would appear to stem from, with cities abruptly finding themselves besieged by whole armies of nasty creatures.

Or perhaps the whole death stone thing turns out to just be a side-plot. It's that kind of game.

Described as a cover-based hack-and-slash or third-person shooter--depending on who you're playing as--Hunted is an action adventure that encourages cooperative exploration with lots of combat included. The story follows a pair of mercenaries: the more serious, mace-wielding Caddoc; and the sassy, silver-haired elf, E'lara. The tutorial felt familiar, especially because it was essentially the demo we've seen from last year. Although, it did give us a chance to play as either Caddoc or E'lara to see which one we preferred. Depending on your play style, Caddoc is your traditional brute that can get up close and melee. He's got a shield and a big club or axe, so you're pretty much set as long as you keep mashing those buttons. E'lara requires a bit more finesse to play as because her melee weapons are not as strong as Caddoc's weapons so she relies heavily on her bow. As E'lara, it will feel more like a third-person shooter, with limited ammo and everything. There are pick-ups and weapons along the way, but knowing that you can't just randomly fire one arrow after another will force you to come up with some kind of tactic.

Restarting at the last checkpoint meant going all the way back to the start of the level. An issue that might crop up with Hunted then is that people don't ever bother with exploration because one mistake will mean a long trudge back over previously played areas, something nobody ever likes to do. Unless they're mad.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like this will be something that changes between now and release, but there's always hope. It would be a shame for the game to be spoiled by something as easily fixed as bad checkpointing.

It's at this point the game decided to introduce the two main characters: Caddoc, the mail warrior who is best up close, and E'lara, the female ranger who is best at a distance. The two characters, right from the beginning, show a sort of brother and sister kind of relationship, complete with competition and sarcastic banter that's lively and believable, and it added a bit of life to the game that the E3 demo had lacked. The first fifteen minutes or so of the tutorial walked me through the basic combat options. You're given melee and ranged attacks, which can be enabled using the face buttons or the triggers, respectively, depending on how you want to approach a battle. Melee combat offers light and heavy attacks as well as the option to block incoming damage at the cost of deterioration of your shield, while ranged combat works like Gears of War, complete with aiming and firing being assigned to the triggers and being able to take cover behind debris of various sorts. After some mucking around, shooting and smacking around enemies, the game got around to introducing the pale skinned woman from the intro as Seraphim (or something thereabouts), a magically inclined young woman who asks Caddoc to pick up an artifact called a Deathstone, which Caddoc is not especially interested in doing, as, well, it's a Deathstone, and it's next to a dead body, you see. His associate is not so cautious, however, and the end result quickly degenerates into being chased down by demons and the undead, allowing me some more experience with the healing mechanics of the game. Unlike a typical third person shooter, Hunted allows you to pick up healing potions that you can carry to restore health instead of allowing the player to duck behind cover to regenerate. Once you run out of potions and health, you're taken down unless the other player has a revival potion, which they can then use to resuscitate you. While the healing mechanics might not be immediately popular, the revival mechanic should be. Unlike similar games, so long as your ally is in line of sight, you can toss the potion at them with the press of a button and bring them back to life, meaning that they can be a good distance away and you can bring them back without having to traverse half the battlefield to do so, which is fantastic.

It became immediately clear this game was built for co-op from the ground up; while Maxx's Caddoc held the horde back from my weaker E'lara with melee attacks, I picked off enemies with my arrows from a distance. So while he was helping me from getting overrun, I was also helping him from getting overrun. There's little things here, like the ability for Caddoc to levitate enemies giving E'lara time to use an Ice Arrow ability to freeze and then shatter the cold creature. This constant balance of each character protecting the other became apparent many times through our play through. I was told that one of the goals in this design was to "train the player to play co-op."

Graphically, the game looks impressive. Certainly, the levels vary in color palette and design enough to keep the player engaged, but the narrow, self-directing nature of the environments in the early portions of the story keep the scope fairly limited. However, we're assured that, in the service of good looting, the landscape opens up for more branching exploration once the first few hours are complete. In the meantime, there are a handful of dynamic sequences like a sprint through a collapsing set of ruins that keep the momentum moving forward while the story beings to formulate.

It seems inXile is not quite prepared to give up all of Hunted's secrets just yet, though. The Crucible is described as a map generator, but nobody present will divulge further information other than to say that the gold you collect throughout the main game will be of use in this mode.

Whether that's for wagering in some form of customised battle arena or used to purchase terrain and enemy types for custom built levels, we can only guess at this point.

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