Hunted: The Demon's Forge Previews
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GameSpot:
Caddoc and E'lara are both played by what sound like British thespian actors, and the delivery is often quite tongue in cheek. E'lara, who herself is dressed in a ridiculously skimpy outfit, comments on one of her enemies' 'sluttiness'. InXile's Maxx Kaufman was on hand to explain how the developer is keen to turn the relationship between the two characters on its head, with E'lara keen to run headlong into combat while the more traditional warrior character Caddoc is much more cautious.
The other part of our short demo concerned the new side quests, which are completely optional, but will allow you to explore the back story of the game and improve your characters. You'll be able to find death stones scattered around the world, and when you find them, you can press a button to reach into the spirit world. In the one we saw, a ghost told us to collect the remnants of its bones, which had been scattered in the surrounding area. In this instance, we found them relatively quickly, but Kaufman told us it will be much trickier in the finished game, so you'll have to work to level up your characters.
G4:
The section we played through looked like the ruins of a huge building, which was partially collapsed and on fire in several spots. Opponents would fire ranged weapons at us, while grunts would attempt to come in for melee attacks. Playing as Caddoc, I was happy to see E'lara take to a raised platform with cover so she could pepper the enemy with her ranged attacks. Caddoc is much better suited for getting up close and personal, with his sword/mace/axe attacks and his shield bash ability.
While Caddoc has a ranged attack as well (hit LB to switch easily between the two), E'lara is much quicker with her bow, and she has a handy freeze attack that can stop enemies cold. She's also the only one who can light arrows on fire, which comes in handy quite often, particularly when solving puzzles. With E'lara providing ranged attacks behind cover, and me bashing skeletons in the face as Caddoc, we made short work of the sword fodder grunts before a fair-sized Minotaur appeared. He's a bit harder to take down, and this is where E'lara's freezing power comes in handy.
Bit-tech:
These two characters naturally find themselves in the usual fantasy tropes ancient powers, mysterious influences, hideous monsters, etc. Lots of skelingtons and magic, basically, with the two heroes rushing to save something from something for some reason. If I'm being a bit to general here then it's because there's not really all that much to get specific about even the details feel generic and uninteresting.
The game is co-op based, though you're not narrowed down to playing either the Female Elf Archer or the Manly Barbarian exclusively, thanks to checkpoints which let you swap over and see if the grass really is greener. Unfortunately, it nearly always isn't; no matter which class you play as it seems as if you're just pressing random buttons to summon arbitrary actions; there's not nearly enough personality or feedback to root you in the moment, from what we've seen.
And Destructoid:
As we continued, we got to a waypoint where you can switch characters to mix up the gameplay. As the melee character, instead of shooting a ton of arrows, you run around and hit things with your sword. Or use your shield to bash things with a short boost attack. One thing I noticed was that the sword I had was really slow to wield, but it killed enemies proper. In the full game, you will have light and heavy weapons which will be faster but less powerful or slower but harder hitting. After more killing, we got to a cutscene that I skipped on autopilot and the demo ended.
Hunted: The Demon's Forge looked like it still needed a bit of polishing on a couple of things, such as having a lack of an indicator for where you partner was. But it's still a while until release after all. Mostly, I quite enjoyed playing it. It wasn't very deep or heavy handed, but it satisfied my need for killing a literal ton of things. I do love the Dynasty Warriors games, and this felt like a much more focused and, well, better game than those.
