Hunted: The Demon's Forge

"We wondered why no one had done anything new in the dungeon crawling genre since its glory days and games like Wizardry or Might and Magic," inXile's Matthew Findley told the gathering of game journalists that had turned up for the unveiling and get a peek at Hunted: The Demon's Forge. "With Hunted, we're going to make [the genre] relevant again.

The game that inXile presents to us doesn't have much in common with those pretty dusty titles. Not only is it in third person, but it has been built from the ground up with co-op in mind - no split-screen though, only over the Internet.

You either get to play the elven ranger Ilara or the human warrior Thaddick, and as usual the characters have their own respective strengths and weaknesses. Ilara is better equipped for ranged combat, while Thaddick is the typical melee fighter. The two are supposed to complement each other, with the latter beating things up in close combat while the former tries to keep the monsters in check from afar. There's also a magic system, which is split into different trees, and the developers showed an example where Thaddick used telekinetics to levitate an orc while Ilara filled the defenseless enemy with arrows. Some of these magics have different uses depending on if you use them on your enemies or yourselves - a firestorm can either be used to wreck havoc or set Thaddick's sword on fire.

The developers have decided to remove as much of the number crunching as possible, at least make it all invisible. You don't even get to see how experience points you gain when killing monsters, which creates a greater focus on the actual fighting and the two characters. The game is also supposed to be a lot about solving puzzles and exploring new areas, and the two protagonists talk and bicker with each other all the time.

While the game looks good and the long time in development did manage to give a pretty good first impression, there were things lacking from the presentation - how varied will the game be? How much fun will it be to shoot arrows hours on end? How does the controls actually feel? Will I feel all warm inside when Thaddick cuts an orc in two? There are still a lot of questions that an actual hands-on with the game could answer better. And I really want to know if that orc towards the end of the demo, tall as a skyscraper, is a boss or just a part of the backdrop.