Hunter: The Reckoning- Redeemer
Rating:  -
I'll be honest; I wasn't so enthralled with Hunter: The Reckoning that I immediately had to rush out and buy "Redeemer". However, I do like seeing if things improve in a series and Hunter: The Reckoning was a good enough game to at least pique my interest into wanting to see what they did this time. If you're a die hard follower of this series then I think you'll find this an enjoyable game, but if you only casually enter this particular universe you'll be slightly disappointed.
You'd think that the follow-up would be bigger, badder, and more intense. Unfortunately we don't exactly get that. You do get some cool new things that definitely made playing this game a little better. The most obvious is a new player character in addition to the four Hunters from the first game, some of you might remember saving the scared little girl in the original game. Naturally she's all dolled up in a super short skirt, corset styled top and thigh highs. This is what anyone would expect a girl to be wearing to go hunt demons and werewolves. I was a little disappointed with her character because she was kind of slow in comparison to the other characters my friends were playing. Not to mention her ranged weapon, albeit really strong, takes a long time to fire and reload. So don't expect her to achieve nearly as many kills or levels if you're playing with friends that have much faster characters. Sure, she's more powerful, but in this game it seems speed is one of the most useful aspects for a character. Since I'm on the topic of characters, one other cool concept added to the game is that you can unlock other playable characters. Namely these are the monsters you face in the game. However, strangely, if you choose to play as these characters you can't complete certain missions. That's kind of annoying and leaves you wondering why make them available as player characters at all if you can't complete the game with them? It's really a cool idea, but I don't think it was executed nearly as well as it could have been.
One thing that caught my attention in the first game was the story and length of game play. Granted the story was a bit cheesy at times, but that's fine, I don't mind cheesy story lines so long as the game play is fun with my friends and me. I expected similar things from "Redeemer", but the game was way shorter than the first. It seriously felt like it took us half the time to beat this game than the first one. Secondly the storyline this time around felt a lot more stupid. Basically you meet up with this other hunter named Lucien to protect his factory in Ashcroft from the werewolves that are attacking him. There's some crazy conspiracy and not everything is as it seems. The plot twist was overly predictable and it wasn't even that interesting. You run into a familiar face from the original game and rather than generate intrigue he generates disappointment as it feels like a waste of time to include him. Ah well, I wouldn't say I'm completely done with this series forever if they ever put out another game. However, my expectations will certainly be lower and I found myself glad that this game was a lot shorter, because it just wasn't nearly as fun.
A major improvement on this title is the graphics though. Things are a lot more crisp and clearer. Granted it's nothing to really get excited about, but it's an improvement from the first game. The combat engine is essentially the same, except some of the increased abilities. Another gripe with the game is you still have no control over leveling up your characters. Simply use a certain kind of weapon category or ability a bunch and you automatically level up, it's not based on any kind of experience points. Overall it was a decent game to play with my friends. Unfortunately we had better things to play and ended up playing this simply because we hadn't. There are definitely better things out there and if you're looking for a game with a lot more control in this regard pick up "X-Men: Legends."
Overall Rating: 2.5/5
Rating:  -
I just recently got the original xbox after I traded in my PS2. I have played all the Hunter games and this one is the best by far. The first Hunter the Reckoning was way too hard and the Wayward one for PS2 wasn't too bad for one player but it got really hard with the 2 player. With Redeemer the thing I liked about it was the fact that you could put it on easy, medium or hard instead of just one setting. You can also level your characters up as well. You can even unlock new characters like a zombie and foot soldiers plus some of the bosses you fight in the game. The graphics are way better as well. If you want to play a hunter game get this one it is worth it and you can find used at a cheap price as well.
Rating:  -
I would love to play this game as I have really enjoyed all the other Hunter games that are out. BUT, I have an older X-box so I can't play it! The game won't even start up! I tried several copies but to no avail... it just won't work. So take heed to this warning: If you purchased your X-box shortly after they came out, don't bother getting this game. Or at least rent it first to see if it will even play.
Rating:  -
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.
Rating: -
Since the release of "Hunter: The Reckoning," the games in the series have become steadily more accessible in terms of play balance. "Wayward," released for the Playstation 2 just months before "Redeemer," offered a considerable improvement to the hack-slash-shoot formula of its predecessor - but also failed to offer anything that felt genuinely new to veterans of the series. It felt like a glorified expansion pack to the previous game, simply put. "Redeemer," on the other hand, comes off as a true sequel, and further refines the series' signature gameplay. Gone is the oppressive difficulty of the original entry, and gone is much of the sameness of "Wayward."
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
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