Review of Hunter: The Reckoning - Redeemer for the Xbox

Some games are epic, requiring hours of play and many late, bleary nights inching farther and farther along the world-spanning storyline. Then there is the Weekend game, the kind rented at Blockbuster on Friday after work and returned Monday morning after a satisfying weekend of gaming. Hunter: The Reckoning-Redeemer breaks this mold and creates a new genre: the Saturday game. This is the game that can be rented early on Saturday and returned late on Saturday, totally completed. Personally speaking, I hadn't realized I'd beaten the final boss until the cutscene finished and the credits started rolling. It left me gesticulating with the controller like an angry monkey while muttering, "That's it?"

Hunter: The Reckoning-Redeemer follows a posse of Hunters-in a world where Vampires and Werewolves sup on human flesh, they're our only hope, yadda yadda-as they chase down a Hunter Gone Bad with the Bad Genre Movie Supername of Xavier Lucien. In addition to the others from previous games, there's a Redeemer with giant breasts in tight clothes that somehow circle strafes just fine in a mini-skirt. Playing as her is entirely optional, which makes naming the game for her a little curious. The storyline is the usual pseudo-mystical stuff with a slice of the conspiracy/evil corporation stuff that White Wolf does when it's not suing the creators of Underworld. Always remember: when making Evil Plans, always leave unencrypted, un-password protected discs with all your evil plans on them on easily killed henchmen and never require a login or password for your computer systems. And never get personally involved until the last big boss fight at the end. Once again, we have an Evil Overlord who failed to read the Evil Overlord rules.

It's not a bad game. It's not groundbreaking, but it's a middle of the pack console game showing some heavy influence from, of all things, the last few Gauntlet games. Each Hunter has his or her own unique skills and abilities. Some run fast, some smash things better, some circle-strafe in mini-skirts, and so on. While one player can have a satisfactory run through the game, it's really better with more people. The different classes are designed to work together, so that one closes for melees while the other picks off from range, for example. Four people are probably optimal. Beer and pizzas only add to the experience. Actually, if you're looking to blast through a game with your buddies in a night, it'd be fairly easy to do so. Characters level in melee, ranged, and Conviction (superpowers!) and those levels carry over, so if you want to try out a Judge while a compadre plays the Redeemer you've been working on, it's easy enough.

Enemy design is pretty alright. They come in the small and easily killed and big and just about impossible to kill flavors with different skins and models. They're suitably weird/gawffic looking, not really horrific or scary to a veteran of ten thousand evil monster games. The human enemies are just cannon fodder. One curious gameplay feature is that stopping to kill the bad guys tends to be entirely optional. Like Gauntlet, wipe out one group and more spawn, though this doesn't have the Gauntlet-style spawners to take out. It's a bit of a shift to move from the classic Kill Everything That Moves mindset to the Run Around And Shoot Whatever's Handy ethos required if any progress is to be made. Bosses are the usual big demony-scary looking things, with the exception of...and I'm not making this up...the demonic Santa and his giant Evil Teddy Bear. In another interesting note, when playing with two characters, I found it was possible to "pin" a boss against the side of the boss-fight-area by rushing him with one character while the other went as far back as the game would allow and fired away from distance. Fortunately for humanity's stalwart defenders, in addition to tolerating being held in place, the bosses still haven't figured out circle-strafing.

The biggest flaw is the lack of camera control. The Redeemer in the title does, in fact, have boobies, so the camera seems to be designed to peer intently down her cleavage at all times, even when she's not in the game. The bizarre camera angles sometimes make it impossible to tell where to go or what's coming up and sometimes the camera wanders through walls and such, making it even more impossible to see. There's nothing like charging blindly up a street packed with monsters because the camera is in some weird position. Fortunately, the city street portions where this is a huge problem aren't a huge part of the game. And the city consists of about three blocks, so it's not like wandering, say, Vice City.

In other weirdness, there is music, but it comes and goes. It seems to wander in, notice a fight in progress, hum a few bars, then wander out again. It's nice music, on the 8 or 10 occasions when it kicks in before wandering back out. Sometimes it's possible to walk right up to an enemy and fire away with a machine gun and have a big nothing happen. There are all kinds of "so, now what do I do?" moments that require some exploration and wandering around. In other words, bring a few friends and beer, and you'll be fine, but don't expect tons of deep, meaningful gameplay.