Hunter: The Reckoning- Redeemer

That's not to say that "Redeemer" doesn't become repetitive. It does. When a game relies so heavily on hacking, slashing, shooting, and little else, this can tend to occur. Even so, the formula maintains its shallow but addictive quality - particularly if you have a friend to run through the game alongside you (or a few, for the matter of that). There are many noticeable improvements to the core game that include ranged attack power ups (such as incendiary or poisonous bullets), level-ups that actually make an impact on your chosen character (your weapons become noticeably more potent, and your basic ranged weapon can hold more ammunition), NPCs that add a little something extra to the game's environments, and more health and "edge" enhancers that pop up in place of slain enemies. "Hunter: The Reckoning" was murderously difficult, and both "Wayward" and "Redeemer" have addressed this issue respectably.

Graphically, "Redeemer" takes the series much further. The environments are slick-looking and full of eye candy (like reflective surfaces), and the characters onscreen animate believably. Even when there are many enemies onscreen at a given time, there is very little slowdown. The sound effects get the job done without making a particular impression, and, unfortunately, the music is still sporadic, but the in-engine cutscenes are very well done and excellently voiced. Overall, "Redeemer" offers a winning presentation that trumps each of its forebears.

The story that runs behind the scenes here isn't anything too impressive, but the involvement of monsters that aren't entirely evil does add a wrinkle to the proceedings. The new character class (the Redeemer) plays a large role in the scheme of things, and is a fine addition to the other four. She is, perhaps, one of the most well-rounded characters in the game.

All in all, if you're a fan of the series, then there's no reason why you should be without "Redeemer." It takes everything that makes the series so strangely compelling and polishes it to a radiant shine. It lacks the insane difficulty of the original and the overwhelming sameness of "Wayward" and offers up a game that is quite enjoyable.

Final Score: B


way too short   November 24, 2003
Zachary A. Phelps (Laurence Harbor, New Jersey United States)
6 out of 8 found this review helpful

It was fun while it lasted, but two biggest problems were 1) very short game and 2) too easy. Combine these two factors, and you get a big surprise when two days after buying the game you find yourself fighting the last enemy. After killing him, I thought "that can't be it...?", but then the credits started rolling and I realized I spent fifty bucks on twenty dollars worth of game. Also, the game play, as I mentioned, is too easy. The game is basically all hack-and-slash, which can be a good thing (as in Diablo for PC, or Gauntlet), but I found the game too forgiving (it seemed like I had countless lives to burn), so there is no strategy involved...just keep hacking and slashing, and burning off another of an endless supply of lives. The replay value is supposed to be that you get to play the game again as different monsters (the enemies you fight the first time through), but the game even warns you that you may not be able to finish the game with some of them (doesn't warn you which ones), not to mention they are all slow and weak characters. So you are basically unlocking the chance to replay the same game, only lamer.


Definite replay value   December 25, 2003
Robert Riter (Los Angeles, CA United States)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful

I know the game is short - that is mentioned many times. You have to ask yourself one thing before buying it: Did you like Diablo's format? (Do the game, then do it harder with the same character?) If you did, then you'll actually enjoy this game. I will admit the amount of lives is completely ludicrous in one-player (this isn't so bad in 4-player, but it doesn't scale!), but the fact you can import/export your hunter (a major thing not mentioned) is a huge issue.

I had wished the X-Box had PC like abilities to get more levels, as that would make this game drastically more replayable. As is, unlocking all the monsters and the two spare hunters (Wayward and Carpenter, which isn't really a Hunter but appears as one) is completely worthwhile.

The most fun you can have with the monsters is saving them to the X-Box memory discs and getting togethor for some 4-way Hunter with friends either A) Packing your badass decked out Hunter and playing 'Iron Man' mode , which makes the game considerably more interesting, or B) Picking a selection of monsters and playing the game as a troupe of Fomori, BSD, and Sabbat.

Which brings me to the two gripes I had - I know this game had a WoD licenese, but apparently ONLY for the Hunter book specifically, as the characters go -out of their way- to avoid actually mentioning WoD terms such as Banes, Fomori, the Wyrm, etc. The closest I could find was one enemy named a Throwback, that was most obvioulsy a Fomori (From White Wolf's book Freak Legion), but the monster itsself had NOTHING in common with the source Fomori, which is esseintly someone that took too many "pump you up muscle" pills tainted by the Wyrm (evil for those who have no idea what I'm talking about), and turn into really, really strong dumb jocks that loathe women and have a few other odd powers. The Throwbacks from Redeemer's closest bonus is they have a football tackle - other than that, they are walking massive zombies that eat more damage than a tank and have armor and spikes coming out of their skin.

Which brings to my final gripe. For a game based almost entirely around Freak Legion / The Book of the Wyrm, it's drastically too mild. Genefex is obviously a Pentex subsitedary, but Pentex is never mentioned (which I can live with given it's nature.) But the Fomori models just aren't that disgusting or creepy - they feel too much like enemies from Quake, barring an encounter with Santa Clause and his vomit-spewing Teddy Bears.. that one really did capture the mood. The concept art showed most of the monsters (once you unlocked it) as skinnier, more human, and more decayed looking.. and unfortunatly the modelers felt the need to "Pump them up."

I'm not a very big WoD fan when it comes to Vampires, Werewolves, etc.. probably because I'm not the goth target base.. and the Wyrm really appeals to a very different audience). This game really had a potetional to put in some of the most disturbing enemies of all time and it really softened them up way too much. The book on which they were based gives them powers like "Savage Genetallia" and "Stomach Pumper" which when combined with the Worms taint can allow you to projectile vomit man-eating worms. There's a lot of psychological horror involved, too, crossing with the total splatter-movie effect, at least in the books. The game, however, is strictly PG and keeps to monsters you've probably seen a million times in other games.. even the bizzare demented ones never quite reach the level of grotesqe that they should.

Last but not least, I'll mention the story.. the mood is there, with the basic Garou (Werewolf) vs Pentex story and the Hunters get thrown in the middle. The ridiculas parts are A) There are no run ins with police, B) NPCs are beyond unrealistic acting at all and this makes the storyline seem laughable. Topping that off is the Redeemer, who makes Blood Rayne's outfit look much less stupid. Given the look of the rest of the characters, every time she's jiggling in a cutscene, I wanted to sigh. Esp. since she doesn't actually redeem anything, and only stops the Hunters from being total idiots. I won't mention the Werewolf you meet later on that's too stupid to just shift to human form ever, when it would allow him to just waltz out of a bad situation. In addition to all this, it's never explained WHY the foot soldiers and the First Teams (Here known as "Security") are fighting at all; in the beginning these things seem to be on the Werewolves side, then, on Genefex's side, and eventually everyone wins up killing them. Why would Genefex's own forces be assaulting Genefex, defending Genefex, and everything inbetween? I have no idea.

...So while the basic concept of the plot, while simple, is solid and fun for those who know what's going on.. the actual story is very minimally handled. This doesn't detract from the "check your brain at the door" gameplay, however, and it doesn't do anything too ludicrous with the source material (other than Edges being drastically more powerful), don't go looking for an RPG or oppertunity to actually "play" a Hunter. This is Diablo meets Gauntlet with mini-guns... if that appeals to you, this game is just the ticket.

PS: Carpenter, the first boss you face, is the hardest in the game. I've yet to figure out how to beat him without multiple deaths. The very last boss can be easily dispatched without dying once - so other than Carpenter I highly recommend you place this with friends, and go iron man. It's quite possible and indefinitely enhances the game.


A straight up shoot-em-up for four   October 19, 2005
Michael J. Tresca (Stamford, CT USA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

My wife and I beat the Hunter: The Reckoning -Wayward on the PS2 a year ago, so we decided the next logical step was to buy Hunter: The Reckoning - Redeemer (can that title get any longer?) for the Xbox.

The Hunter series is noteworthy because it's based on a World of Darkness pen-and-paper role-playing game. The World of Darkness was dominated by the first game in the line, vampires. Then werewolves. Then wraiths. Then changelings. Finally, someone got fed up with playing monsters and made a game dedicated to blowing them all up. Thus we have Hunter: The Reckoning, where soccer moms and school teachers suddenly discover they have super powers and can pierce the Veil, the illusion that cloaks the monsters who live among us. Good stuff.

Now, you might expect that our heroes would all be rather mundane looking, boring people. But in a sacrifice to the laws of videogames (and thus, the laws of What Teenage Boys Like), all those Hunters were sexed up quite a bit. We have the big scary biker guy (Spencer "Deuce" Wyatt), the black ex-cop (Samantha Alexander), the wise priest guy with a wicked sword (Father Esteban Cortez) and the rich kid raver chick (Kassandra Cheyung). Wayward had something of a 70s funkadelic feel to it.

Redeemer adds a new character, and she screams, "Somebody knows their demographic!" Dressed in a tight leather bustier, pigtails, and wielding a huge sword, Kaylie Winter achieves two amazing feats: she can actually swing a sword bigger than her entire body and she never falls out of her outfit. Not for lack of trying, mind you. Also, perhaps in a nod to being a bit more politically correct, Samantha no longer has an afro.

Although the World of Darkness role-playing game supposedly doesn't have classes, it has something similar: creeds. These creeds determine the characters starting abilities and access to Edges, the powers that Hunters wield against the forces of darkness. These range from confusing enemies to healing allies to blowing bad guys up real good. It didn't take long to start thinking of Father Esteban as a cleric (oh the irony!), since he gets the healing Edge.

The developers tweaked the game significantly since Wayward. Specifically, we stopped playing Wayward because we got stuck at one of the bosses-an evil witch. With her gun-toting harpies, she mowed us down over and over. What we didn't realize was that there are actually a limited number of lives. You just have a lot of them, so it takes a lot of deaths before you run out-long enough that we figured we had unlimited restarts. When we finally reached the boss fight, we had long since saved several games with that limited number of lives. It was never spelled out explicitly in the game documentation and, for reasons I will never understand, it's not spelled out in Redeemer either.

But it doesn't matter, because on Medium difficulty we never ran out of lives.

The game play is basically the same. You shoot stuff, you hack stuff, and you take its stuff. Wayward had the hysterical side effect of putting items in garbage cans, thus turning Hunters into the worlds most powerful dumpster divers. No trash receptacle is safe! Conversely, Redeemer restricts items to corpses and even gives certain adversaries items that make sense.

The plot is difficult to follow, mostly because it draws on preconceived notions from the World of Darkness that most gamers are probably not familiar with. Werewolves, in this universe, are good guys fighting the forces of corrupt civilization. In Redeemer, werewolves that appear to be enemies are actually allies, opposed by Gentex, an evil super corporation. This might sound familiar, because it's obviously Pentex, the evil super corporation from Werewolf: The Apocalypse (now Werewolf: The Forsaken). I'm not sure why the name was changed.

Anyway, it just so happens that a Hunter runs the corporation. So the corporation can't be that bad, right? Without giving too much away, let's just say that another role-playing game, one of the last to be released before the current World of Darkness "reboot" has a lot to do with this game. That will only serve to confuse people, I'm sure.

By far the best part of Redeemer is that it's one of the rare four player games for the Xbox. The controls are customized for blasting away at opponents, including a very cool strafing maneuver. It's all about killing zombies, vampires, and other weird things.

And that's not a bad thing. Redeemer makes no pretense about what it is: a straight up shoot-em-up for four. If you can stand the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink premise and don't mind your Hunters showing a little leg, Redeemer is for you.


Very short story line.   November 19, 2003
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

Take note that the story is only about 5 1/2hrs of game play. It was very disappointing, and it falls way short of the orginial Hunter game. I can't see much replay value in this game.