Hunted: The Demon’s Forge sure is a video game from 2011. Dubbed “Spears of War” by some, it’s a great idea on paper: a cooperative 3rd person cover-based hack and slash dungeon crawler. But in execution it falls flat in pretty much every genre it pulls from.
Coming from Brian Fargo’s inXile Entertainment, you might expect a quirky story and well-written characters. But that is definitely not the case here. The two protagonists are both annoying archetypes, and the story holds few memorable moments. This would all be fine if the game worked well mechanically, but as I alluded to earlier, that’s not the case.
Hunted is a mishmash of disparate parts that aren’t great individually and never form a cohesive whole. The RPG elements are undercooked and unsatisfying. The cover-based ranged combat never feels right. Co-op feels arbitrary. The puzzles are tedious. And so on.
I enjoyed myself the most during melee combat. It’s simple but satisfying, and if the game would have stuck with this focus rather than attempt to be a jack of all trades, the experience may have turned out better.
It’s a shame that Hunted is such a mess because its lineage (it’s loosely based on Fargo’s 1981 adventure “The Demon’s Forge) is fascinating. Hunted is not irredeemable; with the right mindset and a co-op partner it could be a fun time. But as a genre-bending, overpromising game from a talented studio, it’s hard not to be disappointed.
Played and captured on a PlayStation Triple
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