With Kimerex doing Quick Looks of games he played but never finished due to issues he had with the game, I am going a little more drastic. Too many times I have played games that after the first 3 hours, I either fell asleep from boredom or raged about some mechanic in the game that fought everything I was trying to do to actually play the damn thing. For this reason, I am doing something I like to call Warning.
In my first Warning, Hunted: Demon’s Forge is on deck. I wasn’t too excited for Hunted when I first heard of it at PAX East 2011. Being the type of gamer willing to try anything cause you never know where that hidden gem could lie, I wanted to check out Hunted. I didn’t get a chance to check the game out at PAX East 2011 but was still interested in getting my hands on it. In the coming months, there were a handful of developer diaries for Hunted that showed different aspects to the game. Watching them made me feel like Hunted would be a fun action/adventure game that I could probably get Kimerex to co-op with me in.
Finally getting a copy of the game in my hand, I sat down eager to start shooting monsters in the head with arrows. I thought to myself “Hey, this opening sequence reminds me of Game of Thrones with the music and the sweeping camera through the city is pleasing to the eyes”. About an 4 hours later, I couldn’t tell you more about the story due to the lack of depth put into it. inXile didn’t help matters when developing the characters and the quips between E’lara and Caddoc. Not enough was there to make me believe the two were traveling friends with a close bond.
Combat is dull and uninspired which is sad to me since you can see how inXile wanted the combat to flesh out into something complex yet fun to play for the 20 hours this game is suppose to be. Besides combat, there was something that bothered me while playing that wasn’t explained until I forgot about what was bothering me. From the start of Hunted, I saw little glass bottles of white liquid throughout the areas I was playing through. I tried picking them up but I would get no button prompt telling me I could. Only until I got to the part of the game that “unlocked” these glass bottles for me to actually start collecting. I know it’s minor and I am being nit-picky but you have to wonder why inXile decided to add those glass bottles early in the game if you couldn’t interact with them until a trigger point later in the game.
So this is my warning to everyone reading this, Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is not to be approached with the intention of having any kind of fun at all.
