“Get that frickin’ spider boss thingy!”
“Okay okay okay….but it teleported away. I am pinned down by those archers, can you take them out?”
“I can try, but where is the spider boss???”
“It’s behind you!”
“Dammit dammit dammit, I’m dead, resurrect me!”
“I am out of potions!”
“Oh no!”
“I’m dead too.”
“Should we lower the difficulty? This was our 5th wipe.”
“No, it can’t be, I refuse to play on Easy.”
In Hunted: The Demon’s Forge players take on the mantle of two mercenaries, who just try to go about merrily mercenarying when one day they meet a strange woman in incredibly slutty clothes (the games’s words, not mine). This extremely out-of-place looking lady, who popped out of a portal, states that she is a small town’s mayor’s daughter and needs rescuing from some orc-like monsters, wargars. Our heroes then find a strange artifact that lets them experience death echoes, and the boy hero also gets a creepy vision, and they witness wargars doing incredibly powerful drugs that turn them into indestructible killing machines. Putting it all together they decide that this must be a simple straightforward kidnapping contract, nothing to worry about, and decide to try to find the mayor’s daughter. What could do wrong?
The two main characters are Caddoc and E’lara. Caddoc is a hulking human warrior, who likes to plan and stay cool. E’lara is an elf archer, who is rather rash and impulsive. This might be a defensive mechanism for her because apparently she is the last of the elves, so I assume she has this inner death wish because of the trauma.
The game is a third-person hack and slash type of adventure/RPG, both characters have ranged and melee attacks, but the human warrior gets the big hunky swords and the elf ranger gets the cool sleek bows. So one of them is a melee warrior and the other is in archer, not much room for customizing the fighting styles.
The RPG elements of the game are very light. The skill tree is tiny, you can upgrade six skills, but only four of them can be linked to buttons. There are specific places in the game where you can level up and also switch characters with your gaming partner. There is no inventory, you can pick up and immediately equip character-specific weapons from weapon racks, have three types of potions, aaand that’s about it.
The Good
Let’s start with the best part, the story. Your goals are always clear, you have to get from A to B, there is constant progress in each chapter, you get to feel good about yourself. Occasionally, there are small puzzly side-quests, but otherwise, the game is very straightforward and fast-paced. And…the twists are actually good. I am not kidding.
The story is not good in the sense of having any literary value, but the game does not take itself seriously, and it is very easy to enjoy in the same way you enjoy watching dumb action movies together.
The two characters’ banter has the potential of being annoying, but surprisingly it is not. It is full of weird meta-jokes that somehow don’t take you out of the game.
Not to spoil anything, but there are very organically interwoven decisions in the game, and you don’t even realize they are choices. It is actually done very well, we were genuinely surprised.
Some of the fights are quite epic. The bosses and monsters are unique. You will be able to distinguish all the different orcs, sorry, I mean wargars, their abilities and weaknesses. During the fight you’ll naturally work together, the elf will be picking off archers from the towers, and the warrior will be rushing into the middle of the fight smashing through the melee fighters. There are scenes where one of you will handle a huge ballista, and the other will have to hunt down stragglers. I can’t really come up with a better adjective, the fights are often pretty epic.
Another great feature of the game is that it is an actual two-player co-op game. Where the playable characters are very different and not just carbon copies of each other! And it is specifically designed for two people! How rare is that?
The maps are fairly varied, although the game did not age very well. You’ll have forest areas, towns, mines, tunnels, weird fortresses, but you are very much just fighting your way through elaborate corridors, one enclosed area to the next enclosed area.
The Bad
First thing’s first, the difficulty of the game is off. We both played our fair share of games, both of us have beaten Dark Souls, one of us has beaten Bloodborne, and we still had to change the difficulty of this game to casual. We are not casuals, how dare this game suggest we are casuals… but the gamer mode was too frustrating. I don’t really need a soulslike experience from Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, and to be honest, the combat was still plenty entertaining and interesting on casual difficulty.
In the Good section I mentioned how some fights are epic, well, some are not. Sometimes the combat gets very repetitive, just endless hordes of the same five types of enemies, big dude with a sword, small dude with a crossbow, annoying one with a shield that is impossible to smash, and two more random variants.
While some scenes can be epic, the fighting itself is not very satisfying. The impact is not programmed well, the sword just slashes through the enemy model causing the health bar to decrease. Can’t really put my finger on it, I assume more professional games do tricks like freezing the movement for a split second, adding a tiny vibration or subtle visual cues, and that’s all missing from here. It’s simply two 3D objects colliding without any impact on each other’s physics and triggering the health decrease function.
As I mentioned in the beginning, there isn’t much character customization in the game. You do get a ton of XP though, sorry, I mean crystals, for some reason, but once you max out the four skills you will use, you quickly lose interest in collecting them. I think we ended the game with an excess of a couple of dozen crystals just lying around in our… inventory? Minds? Mercenary secret stash?
You can also loot gold that is not used for anything, which is something I have never ever seen in a fantasy game before. You can gather it, be puzzled by it, google it, realize it is something that can be used in crucible mode, realize that that is not part of the main campaign, and then feel slightly disappointed and puzzled by this game design decision.
The potion system is also weird. You can have health, mana, and resurrection potions. Now, the interesting bit is that there are way more resurrection potions lying around, so it is usually worth killing yourself and letting your partner resurrect you over drinking your own health potions. It does make the fights more co-operative though.
The game uses this little trick where the two characters have to open doors together to mask loading times and also close off previous areas. I get it, it is better than a loading screen, but they overdid it a bit, the game is interrupted by these weird door structures every 5 minutes. The game even comments on it, but that is just cheap lampshading.
Unfortunately, the game is also somewhat buggy. You can get stuck, randomly die, etc. It is not game-breaking, but also not minor.
I know this game is from 2011, but I think even then the female fashion choices of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge were considered weird. I mean, Caddoc, the warrior is not in full body armor either, but he does wear pants and some protective gear and spiky pauldrons, and on the other hand, E’lara, the elf lady is in… a leather harness. Or a leather bikini, one that resembles the Princess Leia slave-bikini very closely, but E’lara is not actually a damsel captured by a giant slugmonster in this story, she wears this outfit for combat. By choice. The heroes even comment on it, during one of the banters E’lara says her “armor” is not slutty, it is strategically placed, and I call bullshit on that.
Lastly, the servers are not running anymore, you can only play this game in co-op mode on the LAN. You have been warned.
The Co-Op
The co-op is actually pretty good, the characters complement each other nicely during combat, and since the game is not super-easy you’ll have to work together and pay attention to each other. Also if one of you dies the other can throw them a resurrection potion to get back on their feet.
The boss fights are tight, even on casual, playing through them together is really fun.
Since resources are kinda scarce you’ll have to divide them amongst yourselves. Whoever wrecks the weapon rack (haha) gets the loot, and you’ll want to make sure everyone has resurrection and health potions distributed evenly. This is good because it makes you talk to each other, but it can also be a source of conflict when playing with less considerate people.
The game has some puzzles you need to solve together, they are not difficult, but it adds to the co-op experience.
The Recommendation
Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is a real hidden gem, a very rare two-player full co-op campaign in a fantasy setting with asymmetric characters.
I know the list of bad things is fairly long, but overall it is still a good game, mainly because of the story and co-op experience.
Once again, as of 2019 you can only play this game together locally.
Lower the difficulty to casual, grab your controllers, lay back, and cruise through the twists and turns of the story, epic and not-so epic fights, bosses, and mediocre cut scenes. It is a great little guilty pleasure.
Info
| Release Year | 2011 |
| Genre | Hack and Slash, RPG |
| Difficulty | Medium |
| Number of Players | 1 to 2 |
| Length | 10 hours (on Casual mode) |
Rating
| Overall | Good |
| Story | Great |
| Co-Operation | Good |