Hunter: The Reckoning- Redeemer

by Vivendi Universal

Product Features

• Choose from five playable Hunter characters, each with their own unique weapons, edges and supernatural abilities
• Fight and kill your way through 20 expansive areas as you immerse yourself in the amazing Redeemer storyline
• Fight to defend the innocent town, using over 40 different weapons against the supernatural vermin infesting it
• Cooperative play lets up to four players fight against monsters, on the same screen
• Bonus downloadable content through Xbox Live

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00008KTNE
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches ; 4 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: October 21, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,581 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Back and better than ever, Hunter: The Reckoning returns to the Xbox with even more frenetic multi-player action than ever. Based on the gothic fantasy world of White Wolf's pen and paper RPG system, players act as human monster-hunters combining melee, ranged, and spell-driven combat. In Hunter: The Reckoning Redeemer, the hunt continues as a new Hunter joins the original team of four in their fight to save the citizens of Ashcroft from a twisted plot to take over the innocent town. Players battle against hordes of supernatural enemies in single- or multi-player mode--they do whatever it takes to get the job done.

Product Description

Hunter The Reckoning: Redeemer takes you back to the adventure and fighting action of Hunter: The Reckoning -- with a new member a new mission!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best in the series. . ., January 29, 2004

By 

-- "--" (Gondor, IN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hunter: The Reckoning- Redeemer (Video Game)

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

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A straight up shoot-em-up for four, October 18, 2005

By 

Michael J. Tresca "Talien" (Fairfield, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Hunter: The Reckoning- Redeemer (Video Game)

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.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars way too short, November 24, 2003

By 

Zachary A. Phelps "xxerdocxx" (Laurence Harbor, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hunter: The Reckoning- Redeemer (Video Game)

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.