Hunted: The Demon’s Forge Review

Is this the definition of insanity?

by: Allegionary

©2011 Alex Hilton

“In life you’re either the hunter or the hunted”

So says one of the protagonists, and sure enough that’s what this game is all about- hunting. But not the kind where you just hunt puny animals like rabbits but the big dangerous kind where you take on terrible monsters intent on ripping you to shreds.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is developed by inXile Entertainment and published by Bethesda Softworks. It is a dark fantasy action game that has been called the medieval Gears of War.

But does it live up to this claim? Or does it degenerate into a certain E3 trailer’s definition of insanity?

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge’s story is not one to draw you into playing this game for hours straight as it mainly has you hunting a group of people. However you don’t want to kill them, but rescue them.

• Hunted: Demon’s Forge Official Trailer

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You follow strong-man Caddoc and his female ‘slutty outfitted’ elf (his words, not mine) partner, E’lara, in their search for these poor helpless people. This brings about the discovery of some very big and bad monsters.

But not only are you hunting for the innocents but you also try and find some other things on the way.

For example at the beginning of the game you are searching for an artefact that Caddoc saw in a vision. Overall the story is lacking in excitement as the constant chase of the evil monsters that took the people gets a bit dull after three hours of the same thing.

Combat, lots & lots of ‘bloody’ combat…

Another repetitive aspect of this game was the combat. Fighting wave after wave of the same types of enemies isn’t what I would call exciting and there aren’t any real boss battles to break up the sections of constant fighting.

Also you get no sense of accomplishment after these waves as the next section of the level consists of… (drumroll) fighting the same enemies! Yay…

The combat system though was pretty good as for the first hour or two I was having fun with the game’s combat. Shooting heads off monsters does have its perks but after repeating the same thing over and over again I started to find problems with it.

For example getting into cover is delayed which is annoying as the whole point of getting into cover is to avoid fire, and if it takes a year to get into cover then the enemies have a clear shot. This has ended up in my death many times.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge allows the ability to play co-op and the way that this feature is implemented in split-screen is not great. About a third of the screen is taken up by a black background which reduces the screen size of the players noticeably, even on a large HD TV.

This is especially the case when playing in another dark area with a lot of debris around, such as the burning town, where it is really hard to see where you are and where you’re meant to go.

• Hunted: Demon’s Forge screenshot slideshow

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Another bad part of the co-op is that there weren’t really very many co-op actions to do, the extent of which was pressing ‘B’ together or reviving each other when inevitably someone dies (probably because they couldn’t see much).

Hunted: Demon’s Forge, surprisingly, has a map creator mode for use in co-op (you can play it single player but it is nowhere near as fun as co-op). However the maps that you create are just a series of rooms where waves of enemies come at you, which emphasizes what this game is about, repetitive combat.

Unlike Gears Of War’s Horde mode where they take cover and flank you, these just appear and attack you.

Some decent controls help…

The camera and controls on the other hand are rather good. I like the camera angle for the ranged attack for the characters especially. The third-person over-the-shoulder approach works well with a medieval shooter, and Hunted sure feels like a shooter at times.

The controls are simple and easy to learn but sometimes spell-casting gets a bit complicated when trying to cast different spells in quick succession.

The landscape of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is not open-world breathtaking in style as most of the time it is either burning or it is set at night. The graphics are good for the style of environments that Hunted uses.

This dark and gloomy landscape in Hunted: The Demon’s Forge does set the tone of the game though and matched with the music it does make you get freaked out occasionally when a spider-like monster jumps out at you. Except in co-op where it is just too dark.

The destructibility, grittiness and the style of shooting arrows suggests that the game was trying to be a medieval Gears of War. However, Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is not as good as Gears of War because the thing that made Gears so great was that its combat system and environments were new, innovative and didn’t feel as repetitive.

At E3, Far Cry 3‘s antagonist tells us the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect things to change. If this is the case, the fact I kept going through Hunted: The Demon’s Forge‘s repetition of tasks and gameplay, hoping each new level that it would evolve, means I should be quite insane.

I didn’t quite go insane, but I did get bored. Hunted: Demon’s Forge was fun to begin with, but desperately needed more variety.

This is a lesson for modern game-makers. A good game should keep you interested either with story or variety and not rely on looks or one good concept.

“6.5/10

©2011 Alex Hilton

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• Hunted: Demon’s Forge screenshot gallery

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