Hunted: The Demon's Forge Review

By: Michael Bee

Hunted The Demon’s Forge is a new third-person dungeon crawler that heavy on action but light on loot. I’d like to tell you what I think of it in this one paragraph, but I’m bound by contract (signed in blood mind you) to make you click the little Read More link below. So...I guess...click the link? And I will use words upon words to explain my feelings on Hunted.

Hunted was obviously built for co-op and that is, I believe, the way the developers intended it to be played. Naturally, I played it alone, in the dark, crying over a keyboard stained with cheesy fingerprints.

The two main characters, both of whom are playable, are mercenaries. Caddoc is your everyday barbarian type; grizzled, muscular and loves swinging swords and axes. E’lara is an elf, maybe the last of her kind, and she favors the bow for a long-range attack. The two mercs go off in search of an ancient artifact that Caddoc dreams about in the hope of striking it rich. Caddoc’s visions also show him images of a woman named Seraphine, who the duo quickly run into and who sets the story in motion. The next thing you know, the world is becoming overrun with demon-like creatures called Wargar and our two heroes have to save the day, which they do with a little slicy, dicey, bow shootery.

I feel the title of this game should have been Hunted: Gears of War. Because if you’ve played Gears of War, then you’ve played this game. The two are atrociously similar. So much so that they not only look alike, but are nearly identical gameplay-wise. In Gears of War, you held down the space bar to run and tapped it to take cover behind waist-high barriers that were strategically placed throughout the map. In Hunted, you hold down the space bar to run and tap it to take cover behind waist-high barriers that are strategically placed throughout the map. Everything from the graphics to the gameplay mechanics feel exactly like Gears of War. Instead, in Hunted, there’s more melee fighting...and magic. I also think I heard some of the same sound effects in Hunted that I’ve heard in Gears.

Unfortunately, since Hunted is practically a copy-paste job, it also suffers from the same problems as Gears. It is ultra repetitive and ultra linear. It’s no secret I was never a fan of Gears of War so it goes without saying I did not enjoy my romp through Hunted very much. I will admit, however, there were a few moments I did enjoy myself, but those moments were few and far between (a little like my sex life).

In Hunted, you can choose between playing as Caddoc and E’lara and there are points throughout the game where you can switch between them when you want a change of pace. The choice boils down to whether or not you want to fight from long range with a bow or get close and dirty with a melee weapon. While both characters have melee weapons and bows (Caddoc has a cross bow to be exact), they only specialize in one. I tried out the different characters early in the game to see if there was any benefit for one over the other, but I quickly found out there is none. It’s all in how you want to play it. So since I am a melee kind of dungeon crawler, I stuck with Caddoc for most of the journey.

Speaking of dungeon crawler, there is normally one thing every dungeon crawler needs; insane amounts of loot, and good loot to boot ( holy shit I should have been a rapper). This is the area where Hunted suffers the most. This isn’t scientific by any means , and I never actually measured its accuracy, but I would say the loot is 95% weapons, 80% of which are the same weapons over and over. Caddoc’s melee weapons come in three types, sword, ax and club. That’s it. Some weapons have enchantments that could freeze an enemy for example, but those enchantments only last so long and then the weapon becomes nearly useless. In fact, as ridiculous as this will sound, there is a number at the bottom, right corner of the screen that will show you how many more blows your enchanted weapon has before the enchantment is gone. It’s a lot like an ammo readout. The other 5% of the loot in the game would be crossbow, bows for E’lara, and armor. In my entire playthrough, I found exactly three armor pieces and one crossbow. E’lara practically played the whole game with a bow I picked up for her in the second chapter of the game (there are five chapters total). What kind of self-respecting dungeon crawler has such a severe lack of interesting loot?

This leads me to the next issue I have with Hunted and that’s the upgrade system. The game uses collectible gems that you find leftover by corpses or just lying around the environment for upgrades. You collect these and then spend them to improve three abilities (each of which has three tiers) and three magic spells (also with three tiers). The abilities and the spells are all uninteresting, for both characters, and the game offers so many gems to you throughout the game that you will likely have the first two tiers fully upgraded for every one of them by the time you’re in the third chapter. The final tier of these upgrades does not unlock until you reach chapter five. So you spend a large portion of the game with nothing to upgrade and finding the same weapons over and over. You end up with little motivation to continue as far as your character and loot progression is concerned.

Also providing little motivation to move forward is the environment. The game begins with promise as the characters are in a lush area that’s quite nice to look at, but then you are quickly shifted underground, where you stay for what seems like an eternity. The underground areas in the game are dark and, well, ugly. I literally became depressed by these areas and when the game finally allowed me to return to the surface, I breathed a sigh of relief because I was on the verge of just quitting.

Along the way you will find a number of puzzles to solve in the game, but they are simplistic and mind-numbingly boring. Not to mention optional. I guess the developers believed the average gamer was too stupid to figure out even basic puzzles so the only time you have to really solve any is if you want to explore a side route. And these side routes are almost never worth the time it takes to explore them. The puzzles consist of lighting various things on fire using flaming arrows, standing on switches and finding items to unlock a door. What you get for it is a little gold, which is really just a collectible in the game since it’s not used for anything, and probably a weapon that, if you’re lucky, is marginally better than the one you’re currently holding. Starting in about chapter four, I began skipping these “side quests” altogether because all they really did was kill time.

The graphics in Hunted are not altogether awful. The game uses the Unreal Engine so it looks very much like every other Unreal Engine game, mostly Gears of War. Though the game lost lots of respect from me by having so much of it take place in areas so dark the last thing you could do is appreciate the graphics. I ended up making my sidekick light her arrows time and time again just for the little light they provided. However, everything that takes place above ground fares much better in the graphics department. Outdoor areas look lush and inviting and the cities feel right.

The melee combat is serviceable and the bow shootery is ok, but that’s the main problem with Hunted; it doesn’t do anything particularly well. It’s a generic game with generic combat and generic characters collecting generic loot while battling generic enemies. It’s like Gears of War all over again, except Hunted won’t become so ridiculously, undeservedly popular. It’s the kind of game you play and immediately forget about, which made writing this review so remarkably difficult.