The Haunted: Hells Reach

I've fired up a lot of horde shooters in my time, and most of them earn their reputation by being competent Killing Floor clones. The Haunted: Hells Reach is not quite that, and that's both its strength and its problem. Built from a mod that won the Make Something Unreal contest, it comes to the table with a third-person perspective, a surprisingly deep melee system, and four modes that each play differently enough to matter. The mode lineup is the first thing worth understanding. Inferno runs you through four escalating waves capped by a boss fight in hell. Survival is endless-horde, high-score chasing. Then it gets more interesting: Battle is a 4v4 format pitting a human squad against a demon squad, and Demonizer works like a tag infection mode where each killed human flips sides until one survivor remains. On paper that variety is genuinely appealing for a budget-tier release. The melee system adds another layer that separates this from a straight shooter. You can roll with double-tap directional inputs, execute stunned enemies for a small health return, and use upgradeable melee chains that progress from a knife all the way up to a glaive that boomerangs back to your hand. Guns cover pistol, shotgun, and SMG slots, each with their own upgrade tier. There are also hidden special weapons - RPGs, flamethrowers - scattered across each of the eight maps, though finding them requires genuine map knowledge rather than a quick sweep. The friction points are real, though. Ammo economy at launch was genuinely broken - critics noted the drops were far too sparse, turning gunplay into a constant drought. The developers patched difficulty adjustments fairly quickly after release, which is worth knowing since a lot of the harshest review scores predate those fixes. Health recovery only comes from executing enemies or destroying health-stone pickups with a tight timer on them. The rage mechanic that kicks in near zero health is counterintuitive in the worst way: you are demonstrably stronger when you're almost dead. The game also fails to communicate its own rules well. Chronostones appear on the map with a countdown, and if you miss the prompt they spawn another minion and pile on chaos - but nobody tells you this cleanly upfront. The bigger issue in 2025 is population. The online servers are functionally empty. Solo Inferno and Survival are playable and have a certain repetitive charm, but Battle and Demonizer require live opponents to be anything other than a menu option. If you have a group of friends willing to coordinate a session, those modes still hold up as a quirky afternoon - the hit feedback is punchy, the gore is excessive in a satisfying grindhouse way, and the movement tech (rolls, slides, jump kicks) gives the game a ceiling that a lot of cheap wave shooters simply don't have. Steam user scores sit at 85% positive across nearly 470 reviews, which tells you the people who stuck with it found something worth defending against a Metacritic score of 51 that reflects a rough launch more than the patched product.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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