Hunted: The Demon's Forge is good, clean fantasy fun

Two warriors take on an unspeakable evil - is this a classic fantasy or something to be forgotten already?

 Gamers have always been fans of good, narrative co-op gameplay. There’s something pleasing about experiencing a tight storyline with a friend or two – the popular co-op mods for games like Half Life being a perfect example. Diablo certainly offers a good co-op experience, and big MMOs like Warcraft are often built around co-operative gameplay where different players take on different roles, like healer, damage dealer and so on.

However, developers are starting to take a leaf from classic pen and paper games like Dungeons and Dragons regarding how a real co-op game should work. DnD Online messed around with world interactions that only certain classes could accomplish – like trap finding for thieves, but some upcoming games are set to take the co-op experience even further. That pretty much sums up inXile Entertainment’s Hunted: The Demon’s Forge.

Sword and board
The premise of Hunted is about as stock a fantasy story as they come – two brave warriors on a quest to banish ye olde evil. It’s the kind of thing that’s so simple that it’s easy to take a wrong turn with – hundreds of fantasy writers do that every year. But in this case, the classic story exists purely as framework for the gameplay, and that’s where Hunted really shines.

The game’s built around a two-player co-op experience – one player controls E’lara, a female archer who excels at ranged combat and the use of lighter, close-in weapons; the other takes the part of the beefy Caddoc, your typical warrior type who’s more melee specialist. You know the trope – sword and shield, bravely cutting a bloody swathe as wide as his mighty thews.

In our time with the game at GamesCom we discovered the pair to be perfectly matched, offering a lot of depth to the co-op gameplay. Good level design also means there are many points where each character’s skills come to the fore. For instance, there was one part of our quest that triggered a series of stone obelisks to start summoning undead skeletons, and the dead things will keep coming until you take over a series of ballistae to take out the obelisks.

To get the job done, Caddoc effectively needs to run interference, taking out skeletons and generally being the tough guy while E’lara works on the towers. It’s stuff that any MMO player would be familiar with from the more complex sort of boss fights, but in the more intimate settings of Hunted, with just two players, it feels a lot more epic. Similarly, inXile’s come up with some interesting ideas to keep the game fresh.

Bow and arrow
Both Caddoc and E’lara, aside from an array of skills and weapons, can use various spells. But rather than these just being a way to mess shit up, you can also channel the magic into each other, effectively buffing your partner’s damage for a while. Also, rather than a player dying outright when they get defeated, they can be restored to health during a pause in combat.

But the biggest and most important part of the co-op experience are the portions of the world that only one player or the other can interact with. There might be a section of wall that Caddoc can batter down, or a darkened portion of dungeon that E’lara can illuminate with a fire arrow. As the two explore the world, the game becomes a series of challenges and puzzles that require constant co-ordination to overcome – it’s not just a matter of spamming attack after attack with the occasional heal thrown in. Real communication is just as important, as one player finds something that can only really be made use of by their partner.

Our time with the game was of course limited, and we barely touched on the skill and loot systems of the game. However, with such a strong backbone in actual gameplay, this is already looking like a fun fantasy experience, with lots of hidden tactical depths.