Hunted: The Demon's Forge Review

Campaign co-operative play was once the preserve of the dedicated PC gamer, but these days it's become a standard gameplay feature and it's not hard to see why.

My experience playing Gears of War, for example, was infinitely superior once I had someone there to witness me punting a Locust corpse around a room while shouting that we do not negotiate with terrorists, and I know that Left 4 Dead was more memorable whenever someone had to fight their way across a level to save my life than it would have been if I'd just used a health pack.

The presence of a friend means that co-op is fun by default, and it would be nice to see more games embracing the concept from the outset rather than tacking it on.

Cue Hunted: The Demon's Forge. Developed by a team of RPG veterans at inXile Entertainment - the sort of RPG veterans whose reliance on pencils and paper for Dungeons & Dragons sessions was a quiet but competitive form of deforestation - it's the modern cover-based third-person shooter retrofitted as an eighties dungeon-crawler.

Two players take on the complementary roles of human powerhouse Caddoc and elven archer E'lara, and must work together to loot exciting swords and slay exotic demons as they explore the dark recesses of a traditional fantasy world.

Caddoc, whose accent wants to be English but whose dialogue sometimes isn't sure whether to be Scottish or Californian, and his haughty companion are mercenaries who begin the game wandering around swamps aimlessly. But they quickly find themselves drawn into a dark conspiracy - involving the orc-like wargar, minotaurs and demons - by a seductive spirit called Seraphine.

E'lara's bow is the solution to many of the game's puzzles.

Their quest takes them through the war-torn streets of corrupted and impoverished Dyfed, into the depths of the dungeons that run far beneath it, across wild plains and port towns and far beyond.

Caddoc is a brawler with a shield at his back and a sword, axe or cudgel in his right hand. In combat he is a tank, working his way into the midst of the pesky wargar, where a flurry of light and heavy attacks decimate their health bars.

E'lara specialises in ranged bow attacks, the idea being that she can assist Caddoc from afar with covering fire and also degrade the influence of the enemy's ranged forces, in order that Caddoc can operate outside cover without becoming a sitting duck.

As you progress you gather crystals that both characters can spend on magical abilities, and these follow form - so E'lara gets things like explosive and freezing arrows while Caddoc can greatly enhance his strength and perform area-of-effect attacks that lift enemies up and dump them to the ground.

On top of that, either player can temporarily become more or less invincible if they happen upon 'sleg' - a combat drug that also underpins a lot of the story.

She's mainly good for ranged combat, but E'lara's no fool with a blade.

Initially combat can be hard going, but within a few chapters you're both pretty badass, and if you like blowing up demons cheaply and bathing in their gory entrails then Hunted is very much the game for you.

The setup's reasonable enough, then, and there are some nice ideas along the way. These mostly occur when the game is confident enough to divert its attention from the story and let you follow a path away from the otherwise linear, corridor-based progression.

The riddles and puzzles you encounter here wouldn't exactly floor Dr Kawashima (or even Dr Nick), but the developers know how to arrange recessed switches, haunted crypts, false walls, eternal flames and giant spiders so that the 756-attack-point War Scepter at the end of the fight feels like an epic relic recovered rather than just another percentage point on the invisible completion meter.

And of course co-op means that when the going gets tough, the tough can get organised. Providing you aren't plagued by connection issues, you will be able to work together in combat to conserve health and mana, prioritise tougher enemies and make use of the environment.

If you're anything like us, you'll also amuse yourselves with unofficial pastimes like "deathstone lottery" - the game of guessing whether the next ghost whose collectible voice recording you uncover will be Scouse, Irish, Brummie or whatever. (Winner gets first refusal at the next character-swap gemstone.)

In these days of launch patches it's hard to say whether connection problems will be an issue by the time you play Hunted, but we fared reasonably well pre-release over Xbox Live.

My first party of two averaged one and a half chapters - around 90 minutes of content - before one of us dropped out. The lobby system isn't very transparent but seems to work OK and in-game lag isn't an issue. (The game's also fully playable in split-screen.)

We do recommend you find someone to play with, too, although perhaps not for the gameplay reasons you imagine. While the computer AI does a decent job of filling in for another human if you do have to play the game on your own, it's much less fun to play when nobody else is around to frown moralistically at E'lara's ridiculous outfit, or comment that it's nice to hear the soundtrack from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time getting another run-out.

You tend to need that because, left to their own devices, Caddoc and E'lara aren't exactly the most compelling people to keep you company. Their relationship is business rather than pleasure, but for people who seem to have voluntarily spent years together there's a surprising lack of chemistry and humour in their banter.

E'lara's snooty refrains and double-entendres clash uneasily with Caddoc's awkward pseudo-paternal everyman patter, and most of the dialogue is just flat. "We sent that demon back to hell," says E'lara. "Right where he came from," says Caddoc.

Boss fights at the end of each chapter are uninspired. Then again, when are boss fights anything but?

The greater shame though is that the relationship also has to be somewhat forced on the battlefield. On paper, E'lara's skills should complement Caddoc's brute force and create interesting opportunities - but while you can get more out of the game by co-operating, it is far from required.

On anything but the hardest difficulty setting either character can charge into battle from chapter two onward without too much concern for planning or coordination, and for most of the game the lightning spell and occasional button-mashing sees you through, whether the latter is Caddoc's hacking and slashing or E'lara's aim-and-explode archery.

There are times when co-op is mandatory - E'lara has to fire flaming arrows to activate puzzle-specific items, for example - but the majority of prompts to bring both characters together seem to have little to do with gameplay.

"Why are all these doors so damn heavy?" Caddoc moans at one point as you are both obligated to stand next to one another to progress to the next area. The answer is more that the programming requires you to cross that threshold together rather than anything to do with the core co-op conceit.

The fearsome wargar have been rounding up human slaves, but to what end?

A solid eight hours of action takes you through to the end of the story, after which you can extend the life of the game through Adventure+ mode (toggling various tweaks) or by creating your own arena-mode extensions with the Crucible Map Creator.

Crucible is like Horde mode in Gears of War 2, except you can choose the manner of your destruction, specifying the sequence of rooms you face and the make-up of the enemies to be spammed upon you. After the story mode's six chapters, I feel I've had my fill, but if you want more of the core combat then this is a flexible and welcome extension.

Hunted isn't exactly Left 4 Dead for the fantasy genre, then. It's seemingly, and in the end rightly, insecure about its co-op credentials so it never fully embraces them, and the result is a fairly standard fantasy third-person action-adventure that can happily be played with a friend but for which you needn't rely on one.

Given the excellent concept that gave life to it in the first place, that's a rather disappointing conclusion. But those who can overlook Hunted's design shortfalls and occasionally tepid fantasy backdrop will extract a good few hours of fun slashing and exploring before something better comes along.