Hunter The Reckoning

Hunter the Reckoning is a game I remember with great joy back in the early 2000’s.  The cover, the setting and the gameplay were all things that interested me at the time.  The fact that the game allowed up to four players was also a big draw for me.  While I was never able to get a group of friends together to play a four player game, I would play it from time to time but never got really far into the game.  Fast forward twenty years and I got my brother to go through the whole game with me.  After completing it, my rose colored glass view of this game is slightly cracked.

Hunter The Reckoning is part of the World Of Darkness tabletop game series.  The tabletop series takes place in modern times where humans fight supernatural monsters. In Hunter The Reckoning the video game, the game starts out with the four playable characters becoming aware of the evil supernatural that is all around them while being witness to an execution.  They  are given powers to fight them and end up escaping the prison where they were at.  A year after the events of the opening movie, the town where the four playable characters got their powers becomes overrun with supernatural creatures and they return to put a stop to the evil.

When you start the game you can pick between the four characters from the beginning movie.  Each character (named Avenger, Defender, Martyr and Judge) has a melee attack, a ranged attack that has unlimited ammo and a power (called Edges in this game).  They all have their pros and cons, Avenger is better at melee while Martyr is faster, ect.  These differences between the characters are noticeable in the game and while they don’t make a huge difference overall, it is something to consider.  However, the Edges are the more important factor when picking your character, especially if you are playing solo.  For example, while I prefer the way Martyr plays, Defender’s healing Edge is too good to not have on your team.

The gameplay is pretty straight forward and consists of moving through the stages killing pretty much anything that appears in front or around you.  While most of the enemies you fight are different forms of zombies, you also encounter gargoyles, demon hounds and other supernatural creatures. Switching between your melee, ranged and Edge abilities is pretty seamless and is needed often depending on your situation.   Enemies can drop health and energy orbs (what is needed to use your Edge powers) and admittedly they drop these quite frequently.  Enemies also give you experience that improves your base abilities.

The game is very linear in its progression.  While a lot of the stages let you do some exploring, the path forward is usually pretty clear.  Most of the time you have to look around for a certain enemy that drops a key that unlocks the end of the level or you have a boss battle.  You also have a goal of finding any innocents that are either hiding or being attacked on each level.  Rescuing innocents gives you bonus lives and you need at least fifty to get the good ending.  You also will find special weapons such as shotguns, chainsaws and rocket launchers that are scattered around the levels.  While these weapons have a limit to how much ammo they can hold, you will find them pretty regularly.

Those special weapons will come in handy since this game has weird difficulty spikes as you're playing.  On one hand, you will be progressing through a stage with no problems and when you enter a new section you will get bombarded with enemies with no way to escape.  The boss battles in this game were a challenge with the bosses having abilities that will kill you in two hits in some cases.  This is part of the reason I mentioned earlier that the Defender character was so useful since she has a healing ability that affects the whole group.  There also are healing and energy spots on the map that will replenish these resources, but they have limited uses.

While the difficulty spikes are annoying, my biggest problem with the game is the repetitiveness of it.  While I enjoyed the first few stages, very quickly the game became a boring grind of either running around shooting enemies or whacking them with your melee attack.  While the stages do vary, the general theme of run around, kill enemies, collect items and find the key to open the exit doesn’t change from the start to the end of the game.  There are one or two stages where that isn’t the case, but overall the game felt like it was dragging on and on with its bland gameplay.  The overall story, while alright, is not memorable or impactful and just adds to how average this game is.

Graphically, the game is alright for an early 2000’s console game.  The player models are decently detailed and the enemies are also well done.  The game has an overall dark theme to it which does fit into the games setting.  The stages have some detail to them but get repetitive after seeing the same themes over and over again.  The sound effects were good and the music wasn’t too bad either.  Overall, I liked the presentation of the game although I have to admit while it does hold up twenty years later, it does show its age.

Overall, I enjoyed the seven hours it took to beat this game with my brother.  Even though the game gets repetitive and has some random difficulty spikes to it, it doesn’t do anything bad.  While I never got a chance to do a four player game, I’d imagine it would have been fun.  That is the big caveat with this game, it's ok solo but better with more people.