Hunter: The Reckoning is one of the lastest games to come out for the XBOX. As a matter of fact I couldn’t really find too many reviews for it when I bought it. The box made it sound pretty good so I thought “what the heck.” and picked it up.
The game itself is pretty engaging. The premise is pretty good and the storyline is nice as well. Characters are well developed and the differences between them can be noticed. The extra weapons in the game are pretty cool, and the edges (aka magic) are sweet as well. This stuff works pretty well at keeping the game from becoming just a hack and slash type game.
The areas where the game is lacking are not really the games fault. The first is that after a lot of playing the attack button can become really cumbersome and I found myself accidentally having it pushed in when I needed to let off of it. This is because the attack button is the trigger on the right side of the controller. This button is a analog button that has a pretty stiff spring behind it. So it can wear you out swinging the melee weapons since you cannot just hold it in, you have to release and pull again for each swing.
Another problem is the lack of a map. It is not really a huge deal because eventually you can figure your way around, but it would be nice to have an in game map. Maybe of just the areas that you have been to or something. The game itself is way to fast paced to give you time to map out the different areas and possibilities.
The other problem is the camera. It seems like so many games have this problem. No one can really find a way to make people happy with games like this. The closest solution is to let people control the camera themselves, but that sometimes causes issues as well. The camera in this game is rough. There are times that you are walking and there are enemies right in front of you, but because of the camera angle you can’t see them until they take a swing at you.
Truely though I think this game is billed as a multiplayer kinda thing. It does good in several aspects., but others leave you pissed and wanting to throw the controller out the window. First it goes all out and allows you to have all four characters in the battle at the same time. Thats great!! It is what I was really looking for in a game for the XBOX. Unfortunately the multiplayer parts only enhance the problems with the camera. Now instead of not being able to see all the enemies, you can’t see all the enemies and you are trapped in a box. See were most computer games that allow play like this are working on four seperate computers each with four monitors, this one is playing with four people on one 640×480 screen. So when it is on computers each character’s screen can be wherever it needs to be and allows for large spaces between characters, but when it is on the XBOX the screen has to stay in the middle of the party. Add that to the fact that the game augments itself depending on how many people you have in there and it can get real hairy. There are lots of times where there is a row of shotgun wielding zombies, just out of your reach and they are blasting the shit out of you, but you can’t fight back because one member of your party is lagged back fighting someone else.
Talking about the changes in the game due to multiplayer… It can get real rough. I made it through most of the story without too much problem, the first monsters where easy enough and the bosses died with just a little work. In multiplayer though the storyline is the same, the amount of creatures is vastly changed. The final bosses are also enhanced such that it takes a lot more hacking to get them down.