Hunted: The Demon's Forge Reviews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on June 9th, 2011

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Hunted: Demon Forge is one more malignant tumor in the blasé cancer eating the videogame industry. It's derivative from the start, and the game's concept is as poorly thought out as its execution. What little entertainment it provides is interspersed between tedium and frustration. You won't be missing anything by not playing Hunted: Demon Forge, and everyone will have forgotten the game ever existed in three months. If you just have to have something to play and there are no other games you want to play except Gears of War with medieval weaponry, then by all means, grab this game. Hunted: Demon Forge can provide the oft bit of entertainment and it isn't a complete waste, especially if you're willing to lower your expectations for fun and put up with some frustration. If you want to be mindlessly distracted, then Hunted may be right for you. If you're looking for something with any depth, look elsewhere.

Hunted: The Demon's Forge is by no means a ground-breaking game. What Hunted does offer though is a fun co-op experience with an interesting storyline. Tie in a dungeon creator, and it can keep you coming back for more with a fresh new map to play on. You will find yourself playing through the story more than once to amass enough gold to unlock items in the crucible mode to create that perfect dungeon. If you are looking for a perfect game that changes the co-op experience, look elsewhere, but if you are looking for a decent game that offers a fun experience while playing online Hunted is where it's at.

The secret rooms are some of the strongest sections of the game. They make a nice breather from the relentless combat elsewhere, and while the puzzles aren't exactly Mensa material, they can be quite charming in that D&D way. Quick, do a spot check! Whoops, stepped on a trap trigger, now I can't ride the bell-ringing platform back to the talking stone head.

It's this spirit of exploration within the confines of a devious dungeon master's narrative that makes Hunted such a lot of fun, complementing the constant battling. This isn't an RPG the way we think of them, but the story and setting will definitely please old-school RPG fans - especially in co-op, which, coming in local and online varieties, is a major draw.

Hunted: The Demon's Forge does take the elements of a Gears of War and a Demon's Souls and cross-breed them into an experience that's a bit more involved than the former and a bit more accessible than the latter, and it does so more or less successfully. The story is a good piece of barbarian fiction that's fun to see through to the end, and the visuals and audio are mostly rather good all around. The game offers lots of different combat options that are simple enough to adjust to while also offering plenty of great RPG elements that add some nice depth to the experience. There's also a lengthy single player campaign to plow through, alone or with a friend online or off, as well as a level creator, New Game Plus mode and multiple difficulty levels to fool around with for those who want a good amount of reason to come back to the game. However, there's a bit of a learning curve to the experience, the enchanted weaponry the game offers doesn't always make a great argument to pick it up, and the level creator doesn't offer any sort of easy way to share maps with others. As a first (big) effort from inXile, however, Hunted is a great time that's well worth checking out, as it's an in-depth experience that's fun to play alone or with a friend, and while there are some mild hiccups, they are exactly that: mild, and surmountable.

So, certainly not an awful game, but one that's difficult to recommend nonetheless. Action fantasy aficionados might be better served elsewhere, perhaps in the form of Castelvania or Enslaved, whilst co-op fans should stick to games built with co-op in mind (see the 2-player element in Splinter Cell: Conviction or Portal 2, for examples of how to do it right). Hunted: The Demon's Forge feels like a single-player game with a split-screen mode added into the mix, as opposed to the other way around, and in that respect it simply fails in its primary goal. Despite that, though, it remains a playable and enjoyable game, even if its not especially clever or pretty.

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