Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is an action-adventure game with light RPG mechanics. You play as two mercenaries searching for an artifact who get dragged into a series of events involving Wargar (orcs), sorcerors, and demons.

Presentation

I typically begin my reviews with gameplay, as it’s often the most noticeable element of a game, with the greatest impact on player enjoyment. For Hunted, I’m changing things up because of how quickly it left a bad impression on me. The main menu sets the tone for the whole game, which features the two protagonists standing one in front of the other. Depending on who you are playing as, they will swap places. When the male character swaps with the female character, he slaps her butt. At first, I brushed it off as something that was a bit weird but probably intended as a playful moment between characters. Yet once the game begins, you immediately see that this isn’t an isolated incident. Every notable female character has gigantic breasts and a thin waist, all wearing revealing clothing. Anytime the game does one of those in-engine scene transitions (that definitely aren’t hidden loading screens), the camera zooms in on the female character’s butt or breasts, depending on which animation it’s using. Maybe some players enjoy lusting after an attractive protagonist, but it does nothing for me, and given how common and in-your-face it is, it detracted from the game’s attempt at a semi-serious story.

As for the graphics, they certainly show their age. Lots of blurry textures, poor-looking graphical effects, and mediocre visual design when it comes to most enemies you’ll encounter. If I played it on release, I would have probably been a little more charitable, but it still looks worse than many games from its era.

Gameplay

I had high expectations coming into my playthrough, knowing it was made by the same studio as Wasteland 2, a game I enjoyed a good deal. Unfortunately, my high hopes were dashed when combat turned out to be an odd mix of Gears of War and one of the blandest melee combat systems ever designed. Each character can switch between bows/crossbows, which play like a third-person shooter, and melee weapons, which just use left and right click for attack and block. The male character specializes in melee while the female character is best with their bow. It doesn’t seem to matter who you play as, with regard to the story, so I strongly recommend playing as the archer, who is much stronger in combat and avoids the terribly boring melee system. Both characters get access to a set of spells and skills to upgrade, which are generally uninteresting and clunky to use.

Most of your time will be spent hiding behind cover and mowing down hordes of bland enemies with your bow. You will occasionally encounter a boss that can often be killed by using your damage spells over and over, provided you saved your mana when fighting standard monsters. The other type of boss you’ll face is a puzzle or gimmick boss, where you’ll fight normal enemies and then shoot a catapult or pull a lever to deal damage. Neither type of boss is particularly interesting, usually feeling like a lull in the action, rather than a fun climax.

Finally, we have quality of life issues, which turn this otherwise mediocre game into a chore. The camera feels strangely placed, like it’s too zoomed in to see what you need to see. This gets combined with the clunky movement, giving the whole combat system an awkward vibe before you even begin fighting. The game is also clearly designed around co-op. If you don’t play with a friend, you are given a brainless AI companion that gets stuck on walls while wandering after random enemies. Mercifully, triggering a scene transition will force them to teleport to you, rather than waiting for the pathfinding to eventually work. You’ll also encounter a variety of bugs, like getting stuck in a certain spot, enemies not spawning properly, cutscenes playing audio over a black screen, or a character getting locked into an animation. I wouldn’t say it’s a major problem for Hunted, given all of its much bigger issues, but it’s definitely a buggy, unpolished game.

Story

Now we come to the story. It is disappointingly on par with the rest of the game. A lot of it is quite generic, and the parts that are somewhat original aren’t great either. The protagonists are your typical reluctant heroes, following every trope in the book. They’re only in it for the money, until they decide saving the world is more important than earning gold. Along the way, they meet a cast of mostly irrelevant and unimportant characters that guide them toward the main villain.

There are a few twists of varying quality, but the most egregious has to do with “Sleg”. I won’t spoil it, but it’s so strange that I need to bring it up. For context, Sleg is a liquid that is established very early in the game as something magical that grants you power, but is highly addictive and eventually results in the user turning into a monster. Clearly, not something you want to mess with. It is then revealed later in the game that the liquid has some sort of sinister/evil origin, but it’s played like some big twist that no one saw coming. It’s a small moment overall, but it’s indicative of the problem with much of the game’s writing; every plot point has been done dozens of times before in better games. There’s such a dearth of original content that by the end, it feels like a series of clichés instead of a complete narrative.

Verdict

Hunted was a chore from the very beginning. Sadly, it’s the worst kind of bad game. Many less-than-stellar RPGs excel in one area and are absolutely abysmal everywhere else, like having an excellent story but awful gameplay, or novel mechanics paired with excessive bugs. Here, everything is so consistently bad that there isn’t a single strong highlight. There’s essentially no reason to ever play this. It brings nothing new to the table, has aged horribly, and its basic style has been pulled off better by countless other games.

1/10

• inXile Entertainment, Bethesda Softworks
• Steam
• $5