Hunted: The Demon's Forge

Hunted: The Demon's Forge PC Review

If you prefer a single-player experience, however, then you'll be pleased to know that there's nothing to worry about on the AI front. Although we occasionally realised too late that our AI partner was no longer keeping up, and was instead watching us get mobbed by vicious creatures from behind cover several feet away, this didn't happen very often. For the most part, the AI is supportive and efficient, managing to tread the fine line between babysitting and genuinely helping you out.

In fact, in many ways Hunted's single-player experience is preferable to co-op play, as you can switch characters and play the same game but with a different mechanic, switching between ranged and melee attack as your mood suits. This does, however, bring us to a large problem with Hunted. In the single-player mode, you can only change character at predesignated obelisks, but the experience would have been much more engaging if you could switch at any point. This would also encourage more advanced tactics, with judicious use of the right abilities at the right time.


Despite the overly brown colour palette, Hunted also looks stunning in places, particularly when the game throws in a vibrantly-coloured location, such as the jungle environments, that stands in contrast to the brown characters. However, the dominance of the brown palette does however become a problem in combat, and can cause confusion when selecting a target, as all the monster-types share the same palette as the main character duo.


Hunted: The Demon's Forge is an enjoyable game, but we also wouldn't return to it in a hurry. It's undoubtedly derivative, borrowing heavily from other games that have arguably done the same job better, and packing in the clichés of the genre such as the obligatory static turret section. Despite this, though, it's certainly heading in the direction of something interesting. The characters leave enough of an impression and the plot is serviceable enough to drive you forward. Meanwhile, the world looks and feels significant, and there's even a decent amount of background that you can flesh out by picking up audio logs, or rather tapping into the souls of deceased bodies via applied necromancy.

Hunted is a good solid romp that will keep you entertained for the time it lasts, but we would love to see developer inXlie take this idea and run with it a little further. A fully fleshed-out medieval SWAT team game using very similar mechanics and pacing to this would go down extremely well, especially if it went further down the co-op road towards Left 4 Dead territory. Hunted: The Demon's Forge proves that a co-op combat-based RPG can work and, while it's not perfect, it's definitely worth a look.