Hunted: The Demon’s Forge

4 Overall Score
Gameplay: 3/10
Graphics: 4/10
Sound: 7/10

Good voice acting | Inappropriately revealing female armor | Lucy Lawless

Literally everything else

Game Info

GAME NAME: Hunted: The Demon’s Forge

DEVELOPER(S): inXile

PUBLISHER(S): Bethesda Softworks

PLATFORM(S): PS3, PC, XBox 360

GENRE(S): Action

RELEASE DATE(S): 5/31/11

“SPEARS OF WAR!” the masses cried when they heard of a melee combat-based third person cover-based action game.  inXile claimed to have worked on this one with co-op in the forefront of their thoughts, and while the concepts of working together are there (two characters, QTEs), the game falls so far short of it’s “co-op perfected” tagline on the back of the box that you should demand your money back.

So you’re Caddoc or E’lara, demons are invading, and it’s time to A) kill them and B) earn some bucks. The two mercenaries have an easy, slightly competitive friendship that is, frankly, a lot of fun to watch. Caddoc, the bald human mercenary, is a careful tactician in character (even though in combat he uses rage powers, so there’s that) played off of E’lara’s bloodthirstiness and greed. It’s an interesting role reversal. They sound good and play off each other pretty well. Lucy Lawless voices a scantily-clad magical princess, which is always a bonus.  At least the sound direction got something right.

As E’lara, the elf girl who primarily uses the bow, the game plays out like every cover shooter ever.  Arrows can usually one-shot normal bad guys, and the tougher ones take a few more hits, but not too many.  As Caddoc, however, it’s a much more difficult game.  Contrary to most hack and slash-style games, getting hit by an opponent in Hunted does serious damage and sets the player up for getting hit by a combo.  So almost all combat devolves into “block, attack a few times, block.”  This would be fine (albeit boring) if it worked well, but in Hunted, shields have hit points – and in the early stages, they have hit points in the single digits.  You can literally only take one or two attacks before your shield breaks and you’re scrambling for another one.  The enemies move very quickly as well, the color scheme of the game muddles everything up so shields look like rocks, and – oh yeah – teleporting enemies.

You know what’s not fun at all in any game?  Teleporting enemies.  Especially games that require the player to run up and hit a teleporting enemy with a sword.  Playing as Caddoc is a frustrating, boring adventure in waiting for your co-op partner to kill the bad guys while you look for a shield.  Caddoc’s melee-focus also means that the waist-high walls to duck behind peppered throughout the stages are useless, becoming nothing more then obstacles which you must hit 3 buttons to vault over to hope there’s a shield on the other side.

I can understand “drab” in games. It’s worn, war-torn, and generally unpleasant. But combining drab with dark just hurts. And not dark like “dim the mood lights we’re fighting in a dungeon.” Dark like “I’m maxing out the gamma on my tv to see what I’m doing,” which is something I actually had to do to get past the second stage.  Muddled textures and enemies that melt into the backgrounds add to the confusion, to where at one point I was running into a wall for 15 seconds, wondering how long this dark tunnel was.  A bright spot of all this is the armor design, though.  The bad guys’ armor is alien, spiky, and sadistic – it looks pretty mean.  Caddoc eventually looks pretty decent as a gladiator-cum-barbarian, and E’lara’s inappropriately revealing armor is actually mentioned a few times in game as being such.  Good times.

Playing co-op in this game is an absolute headache and chore. Playing split-screen creates a giant bar on either side of your TV, reducing the usable area by 1/3. Although this preserves aspect ratio, it shrinks the action to miniscule sizes.  Whoever decided to do this should not be allowed to design video games ever again.  On any TV smaller than 60″, the action is nearly impossible to see.  And good luck reading the text, too.  It’s the only game I can think of that is actually worse playing with a friend.

Online is even worse, at least on the PS3. It uses Gamespy technology for its networking. This rage-inducing protocol makes voicechat absolutely unusable. Stuttering, echoes, clipped off words, poor pickup… And that’s if it works, which is only half the time. The rest of the time, nothing. Dead silence.  Voicechat isn’t even listed on the back of the box, I had to go to the developer’s forums to figure out how to use it.  If I had any developmental involvment with this game, I’d be ashamed of myself.  To think that a $20 downloadable title can have stellar voicechat while a full-priced game just outsources it to Gamespy (who also butchered Borderlands’ voicechat) is insane.

I was embarrassed with this game. If the voicechat was functional, if the game didn’t require me to make adjustments to my TV’s settings, it may have been better. What an absolute waste.  This could’ve been an interesting new IP, but instead we are given something that is more functional as a coaster than as a videogame.

 

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Author: James View all posts by
Dangerously fat. Twitter: @hypersaline