Hunted: The Demon’s Forge Preview

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has given us the latest hands-on preview of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, the co-op dungeon crawler headed for store shelves about five weeks from now.

As a capsule experience, it’s an entertaining one the tangibility of an FPS attached to an RPG-lite. It’s meaty and intense, and isn’t afraid of throwing apparently overwhelming odds at you yet ensuring you can overwhelm them. As a prolonged experience, the elements I’ve played simply feel relentless, however. More monsters, and more, and more, and more. Perhaps I’m too used to exploring fantasy worlds at my leisure, but the breakneck, no rest pace of this didn’t enthral me. I personally didn’t spot or feel anything that gave me a sense of accomplishment from surviving one of its hordes, and I kept on hoping something more enthralling was around the next corner. In the full game, that probably does happen outside of some faintly infuriating teleporting, turret-dropping mini bosses, I’ve yet to run into anything like a set piece.

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There’s loot, too. Of course there’s loot. Swords and shields and bows, that kind of thing. The RPG element of the game is tiny compared to the monster-bashing element, but it’s very much there and it doesn’t seem afraid of positively draping its items with stats. It isn’t anything like as thick and fast in that regard as Diablo, but in other senses it’s definitely pursuing that approach, albeit from a behind-the-shoulder perspective. To be honest, I’m surprised more publishers/developers aren’t frantically trying to realise something Diablo-esque before the main event itself arrives (most likely next year) there’s a clear appetite for That Kind Of Thing. That in itself may see Hunted pick up more attention than it perhaps otherwise would. I hope it makes more sense as a whole than as occasional dive-ins, I really do.