Hunted: The Demon’s Forge Previews

We have a couple more previews from websites that were able to take a look at InXile’s upcoming co-op action RPG romp Hunted: The Demon’s Forge. Joystiq.

Hunted has another promising novelty going for it, too — “Crucible.” This is the game’s dungeon creator mode, in which players are presented with a large, empty grid on which to build a number of adjoining “arenas.” The twist is that each arena is fully customizable, from the amount of enemies to the amount of gravity. Likewise, the enemies and players themselves can be tweaked by all manner of options.

Crucible acts as a sandbox in which to spend the gold you’ve looted and the secrets you’ve unlocked in the single-player campaign. It can be silly — there’s a “zero gravity” unlockable — or downright hellish — 100 waves of an enemy spawn in just one arena. Gear of War’s “Horde” mode might be the inspiration, but Crucible isn’t just another lazy knockoff. By allowing the players to create their own vastly customizable dungeon crawls, inXile has turned the creative power over to the players, who will undoubtedly create inconceivably difficult and hilarious arenas. (Check out more of Crucible’s features in the video above.)

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is still fighting an uphill battle to distinguish itself from the countless generic cover-based shooters on the market, but it looks to bring some good and genuinely fun ideas to the worn-out genre. My main issue with the current build is another easy one to fix — the checkpoints. In a few instances, my partner and I had to replay some pretty long and intense battles because we had died during a later one. This, coupled with the canned animation we had to watch all over, made the second time through a real drag. Hopefully, inXile is still taking note.

CVG asks “is it worth paying attention to?”

Still, despite our sound tactics we fell foul of a number of glitches. Hunted’s far from impressive right now but thankfully there’s still time for the coding kinks to be bashed out.

More encouraging is the ‘map generator’ mode that exists outside the ’20-hour’ main story quest. Not only should it boost longevity; it could be a key feature to help further distinguish Hunted from its main competitors Lord of the Rings: War in the North and Dungeon Siege III.