Hunted: The Demons Forge

I went into this one expecting a competent mid-tier dungeon crawl and came out with a pretty mixed bag. The core idea behind Hunted is legitimately interesting: split combat between a melee bruiser and a cover-based archer, force the two to depend on each other through synergistic spells and co-op kill moves, and wrap the whole thing in a grim fantasy world full of Wargar orcs, undead skeletons, and minotaurs. On paper that sounds like a solid weekend co-op game. In practice, the execution stumbles badly enough to undercut the fun at regular intervals. Caddoc handles sword-and-shield melee, which reviewers and players alike consistently called the weakest part of the package. His combat boils down to blocking and counter-attacking with very little depth beyond that. E'lara, the elven archer, gets the better end of the deal: her bow mechanics are satisfying in a run-and-gun way, and the cover system works noticeably better for ranged play than it does when Caddoc gets glued to chest-high walls mid-fight. Both characters share a magic system, and the spells are designed to complement each other, including one that suspends enemies in a whirlwind so E'lara can pick them off. Those moments of actual synergy are genuinely fun. There are also epic weapons with limited co-op charges, loot drops, skill upgrades locked behind designated upgrade stations, and a Crucible mode that lets you build your own dungeon maps. The bones are solid. The problems pile up, though. The campaign is structured as one long corridor trawl through dungeons, caverns, forests, and burning towns, with wide gaps between checkpoints and levels that go on past their natural stopping point. The cover system sticks characters to objects at inconvenient moments. Cameras pull away for cinematic beats while enemies keep dealing damage. Some players report persistent stuttering on PC. The story, which follows mercenaries Caddoc and E'lara chasing kidnapped villagers across the world of Kala Moor, never rises above functional, though the voice acting for the two leads and the ambient death-echo storytelling scattered through the environment are genuine highlights. The banter between the two characters has a low-key charm that keeps the tone from getting too grimdark. The biggest issue for PC buyers in 2025 is the co-op situation. The original online servers were tied to GameSpy, which shut down in 2013. Bethesda never patched in host-based multiplayer, so online co-op is officially dead. LAN play and VPN workarounds exist, but they require some setup and two copies of the game. The PC version also never had split-screen. For a game that is essentially built around two players working together, buying this as a solo experience is a hard sell. Single-player is functional, the AI partner holds its own, but the repetition of arena-fight-corridor-arena-fight hits much harder when there is no one to talk to about it. If you have a friend with a copy and the patience to set up a LAN session or a VPN, this is a passable eight-hour dark fantasy romp with some standout co-op moments and a surprisingly likable central duo. Go in solo, or expecting modern online matchmaking, and the cracks are very visible very fast.

Alex · Scout Team

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