First Looks// Hunted: The Demon's Forge

There was a time when the term 'role-playing game' conjured up images of hunting for dragons, rolling sixes and dabbling with necromancy. Not so much these days, with the Western RPG slowly evolving throughout the decades leading to today's Fallouts and Mass Effects. So when developer InXile presented Hunted: The Demon's Forge for the first time to SPOnG, it almost felt like a fresh direction for the genre.

I say almost, because naturally the game adopts an art style that has you checking for cobwebs. The mission statement for this adventure really is “make a traditional Western RPG with the technology of today.” And the results impress so far, implementing a similar camera and gameplay mechanic to Gears of War but with all the attributes of an RPG, coupled with all the Lord of the Rings-style imagery you could ask for.

The game begins at a dilapidated town called Dyfed, a location that is overrun by nasty Orc-like creatures called Wargars. The two protagonists – a female archer called Elara and a sword-wielding melee artist called Caddoc – are led to this ruin of a location after speaking with a spirit named Seraphine.

Not an awful lot is known about the characters or the storyline when you start off – the plot and lore of the Hunted world is built as you progress through each consecutive dungeon and landscape. You do get to learn the personalities of those you control, however. Elara is rather bloodthirsty, enjoying every Wargar kill to the max, while Caddoc is more thoughtful and calculating despite his brawn. The two share plenty of sexual tension, but treat each other more like brother and sister.

Which is just as well really, because Elara and Caddoc will need each other's help to work through each map. This is where Hunted tries to stand out from the rest of the dungeon crawling crowd, by offering a co-operative mode as standard. With either an online friend or an AI-controlled partner, you have to use the abilities of each character to overcome waves of enemies.

Elara is equipped with a rather tasty bow, for example, and the high vantage points in each room allow her to sit in the background and take aim while Caddoc gets into the thick of the action. Some enemies will be too fast for Caddoc to tackle, and that's when a sharpshooting sniper is needed to pick off the targets. On the other hand, certain Wargars come equipped with heavy armour that renders Elara's arrows useless – get the man with the plan involved and things are soon taken care of.

It's not always about getting aggressive though. At many points you'll need to sneak around or take cover against enemy fire. That's where the similarities with Gears of War comes into play here, as you get the opportunity to hide behind conveniently-placed stone bricks so you can rush out when the time is right. There's something quite 1980s about seeing a huge muscle-clad swordsman leap over a wall to a heavy metal soundtrack, for some reason.

Defeating enemies will earn you crystals, which you can trade for magic and special abilities. All of these power-ups are designed with a co-operative use in mind. For instance, equipping the Levitation magic spell will allow Caddoc to slam his sword in the ground and send enemies floating upwards for a short while – leaving them susceptible to Elara's arrows. Caddoc also rocks a fireball move which works like a meteor-bomb. That looks pretty awesome.

One of the ways that Hunted attempts to do team play better than its peers is in what InXile call “co-op from a distance.” There are various types of vials that contain status-ailing effects, including your standard health potion and strength-raising elixir.

If you want to help a friend out, you simply select the appropriate item and throw it to them, eliminating the need to run from your archery spot to revive a fallen teammate. When you consider that the developer intends to keep co-op players as far away from each other as possible in some action scenes, this feature sounds like quite the welcome one.

Along with the status of your partner, you'll also need to keep an eye on your equipment too. Weapons degrade over time as you use them, and while the same can be said for the shields too, they actually come with a secondary use. On top of defence, you can slam them into your enemies and break their weapons too. You get a chance to catch them unguarded as they try to find another weapon on the field.

But while InXile was keen to tell me that Hunted: The Demon's Forge is meant to be a dungeon crawler that channels all the good bits from 80s and 90s role-playing, you won't just be exploring dingy corridors and underground lairs. There will be many instances where Elara and Caddoc must venture outside to deal with colossal creatures and face epic battles.

The dungeons don't seem to be so claustrophobic in size, either. I'm told there will be multiple routes and loads of secret passages that can be opened by completing various puzzles. A simple example was shown that reminded me a lot of TV kids' show Knightmare, where a huge rock face cryptically exclaimed “Fill me with the flame of your courage.”

Light an arrow as Elara and shoot it in his extinguished eye socket and it will open a passage for you and skip a considerable part of the dungeon. It's this sort of thing that, along with the atmosphere and traditional art approach, brings back the feeling of dungeon crawling the most, and if InXile can create many of these puzzles at varying levels of difficulty we may be onto a winner here.

Hunted: The Demon's Forge is out later this year for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.