Reviews// Hunted the Demon's Forge

I feel sorry for inXile. They remade The Bard’s Tale, followed it up with a series of iDevice puzzle games and now they’ve finally released a game worthy of praise, it’s probably going to be dismissed out of hand as a Gears of War clone.

But... mutant monsters, underground caverns, lakes of glowing goo - they’re not really helping themselves. In its early stages Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is a fantasy version of Gears in all but name. Waist-high walls and cover mechanics, roadie running and gory execution moves, giant spiders like Locust Corpsers and tag-teaming your co-op partner back to life - it even has that distinctive Unreal 3 engine feel about it, where all the shadows are wrong and the characters look like they eat Steroidabix for breakfast.

And yes, at times it is a bit of a Gears clone. But it has much more to add to the genre than crossbows and doing away with potato-faced space marines.

Hunted is a cover-oriented third person shooter that takes its cues from the same blood-spattered school of fantasy as Dragon Age.

Our unlikely heroes are Caddoc and E’lara, a delightfully mercenary duo who spend much of the game trading insults. He’s a world weary arachnophobia with a weak spot for gold; she’s an elven arsonist with a tramp stamp. They’re the heart of the game in the same way The Prince and Elika were the heart of the 2008 Prince of Persia reboot.

They spend a lot of time commenting on whatever’s happening around them; much of their banter strains at the fourth wall, letting the audience know the developers are well aware of the game’s clichés. "We do seem to go through shields, don’t we?" says E’lara when picking up the umpteenth buckler of the game. Later, when Caddoc remarks on her somewhat skimpy costume she replies that "It’s not slutty. It’s strategically placed."

Hunted is surprisingly well-written. E’lara and Caddoc take the lion’s share of good lines, bantering back and forth across the battlefield, offering each other advice and comparing kill counts at the end of every skirmish. Though the plot starts as a rather by-the-numbers story about an invading tribe of orcs - sorry, Worgar - it twists in unexpected directions over the course of the game. There’s a world with real depth here, the lore of which is presented in a slideshow that unlocks as you talk to the various dead bodies scattered across the levels.

At the start of the game you find a magic ‘death stone’ through which you communicate with the spirits of the dead. These conversations advance the plot, give clues as to where rare treasure can be found, help fill out the world’s lore or are simply the deceased soul’s tales of how they met their unfortunate end. For the most part they function like the diary reels in Bioshock, but occasionally inXile throws in something a little different, such as viewing the memories of one of your defeated enemies, or talking to the corpse of a soldier killed centuries before. They also throw in some interesting ethical dilemmas regarding the practise of talking to the dead.

There’s an ethical streak running through Hunted, and some extremely clever plot branching based on the decisions you make. For years gamers have complained about the cut-and-dried decision-making in BioWare games. In Hunted, the choices you make effect the course of the game. These choices are never explicit - there’s no radial menu asking whether you want to be a paragon of virtue or sock a character in the jaw - and neither are they as subtle as the plot branching in Deus Ex, but they do require you to pay attention to what’s going on.

Hunted’s an unusually smart game in that respect. It shows a love for the genre missing in most other fantasy games. Rather than concentrate on booting and looting there are some great puzzles and optional side-quests that can remove you from the main plot for an hour at a time. You’ll find ancient stone heads like the talking walls from Knightmare, that deliver riddles in rhyming couplets. Many of these riddles can be solved simply through fetching certain objects or having the characters stand on certain buttons, but there are other puzzles that require a little more thought, and are more involved than you might initially think.

Then there are the underground sections that offer a more authentic dungeon-delving experience by dropping you into caves that are utterly pitch black. You won’t fix this by turning up the gamma correction in the options menu; for these short sequences you’ll have to drop your weapons and pick up a torch. This, coupled with the constant decline of the path and the characters wondering aloud if they’re getting closer to Hell, makes the game feel like a true descent into the unknown. It perfectly captures the feeling of heading into in the bowels of the earth, raiding crypts in search of treasure.