Written Gamerology: Hunted

Such an awesome name.

Bethesda has much on its plate with the development of the RPG Skyrim, which continues the much vaunted Elder Scrolls saga. However, while that’s being developed other games are coming out of the company such as Brink, Rage, and Hunted. Hunted is a fantasy game set around the gears of war design of the stop and pop shooter. This is a game full of good ideas and intentions. Does it rise to the occasion and show all of its potential or does it fall short of the mark like a weakly fired arrow?

The story is one all dungeon and dragons players will enjoy. Caddoc, a melee loving warrior, and his elven female archer companion Elara are off on another adventure for gold. But Caddoc’s mind keeps sending him troubling visions of a mysterious woman and a danger filled adventure, setting the stage for the upcoming game and foreshadowing events to come. The story is quite good. It keeps the player interested by spoon feeding the tale through cutscenes and dialogue between characters as the game progresses. It is also slightly long-winded at points with a bit too much story told through dead characters via the adventurer’s device known as the Deathstone. The Deathstone isn’t a terrible way to further the details of the quest and flesh out the story but it can definitely get old waiting for the audio clip to load. It may irk some to the point where they become a chore.

I cant see anything and Im not even in a dungeon yet.

The word chore is not how I’d like to describe this games design, though it hardly makes it to intuitive or spectacular. Hunted, however, falls short in its multiplayer, particularly when played on a TV that’s not widescreen. The split-screen multiplayer scrunches the screen into a box shape. The borders of the box show the different features like magic but it is completely unnecessary. On a basic television this game is nigh unplayable in multiplayer because of this. Also the menu for leveling weapons and spells are poor too, forcing one player to level up both characters even when in co-op mode. Lastly the health and mana potions can be difficult to notice no matter what TV is being used. It’s almost impossible to see on a smaller screen.

It’s almost as bad during gameplay. Gears of War was built on the idea of two sides hiding and shooting, utilizing cover to it's fullest. This game is using that same mechanic. Unfortunately, one character in this adventure has primarily melee abilities. This makes for a clunky battle system all around. It means half the time one character feels useless because either the fighter is in the way of the archer's shots or is being shot to pieces because of unrelenting arrows rushing at his face. And that damage is massive! Hunted makes the player feel cheated at almost every death, due to unnecessarily high damage and the aforementioned low visibility. Often times, monsters will run up and stab you in the back with no way of knowing they are there until you have lost half your life. I haven’t played a game until now that made my deaths feel so undeserved.

Speaking of dying, when a character goes down there is a limited amount of time before the chapter games over and gamers must restart. The checkpoint system can be daunting to say the least. Worse, sometimes neither character has a revive potion so it’s a promised party restart. Despite touting to its similarity to Gears of War, it fails to homage to Gears of War intuitive buddy revival system. Lastly, this kind of battle condition makes players rely on using the cheapest strategies to win.

Winning or not the worst part of gameplay we’ve found were the puzzles. The Walls and I spent too much time lighting torches or pushing things. Every puzzle seems to revolve around these two actions. Is that a torch? You will light it. Is that a cart? You better push it. Quite frankly this game’s puzzles are rock-stupid. Granted yes, this game has a linear design. The player or players kill from point A to point B. But I would like to see the small puzzle pieces on the wall puzzle or one with multiple keys. Portal problems these are not.

...Dumb Puzzles...

Problems or not Hunted doesn’t have a terrible presentation. It’s actually quite good. The locales look varied and distinct from sprawling over grown forest to the broken warn torn city. It’s exciting exploring the dungeons sometimes in almost complete darkness wondering what may come out of the corner. Sadly, the character’s models are only decent and the game takes some time for textures to load. Also every once in a while the animations in cutscenes are off. The music was decent but for the most part forgettable. The dialogue and sound effects, however, are top notch.

Hunted feels like another notch in Bethesda’s belt. But, thats not such a good thing. This game is primarily based on co-op gameplay and because of design its broken. Finding the fun in this game is like pulling teeth. Its painful and hard to do. Worse, it is fun and feels really good when fun rears its head. Yet that only really makes it toe-stabbingly-bad when the flaws rear their ugly head. At best this is a renter and do not play it one anything but a widescreen TV!