Hunter: The Reckoning

Kill zombies, go get a few friends, then kill zombies again. How does the GameCube reanimation of Hunter: The Reckoning stack up next to the Xbox version?

Hunter: The Reckoning may have spawned from a pen-and-paper RPG, but the video game offshoot couldn?t live further from the role-player?s realm?think of it more as Gauntlet: The Evil Dead Edition, or Zombietron 2084. The game?s endless top-down horde-shooting and limb-hacking is an absolute blast with four people (the five characters complement each other well), but the friendless may find Hunting and Reckoning to be a lonely, repetitious profession.

The incidental music does a good job generating a latter-day-John-Carpenter atmosphere, and the sound of a chainsaw tearing through moaning zombies is quite satisfying indeed. The Xbox version of Hunter looked great, with a beautifully smooth frame rate and ultra-sharp characters. The GameCube version, by contrast, looks haggard, dull, and not nearly as smooth. Several segments are prone to slowdown, even with the sparsely decorated levels and surprising amount of ?zombie draw-in.? The GameCube controller isn?t really all that conducive to melee attacks, either?using the right shoulder button to strike is awkward, and there is no way to reassign the button in your control options.

So when you hunt, hunt in packs?and when you reckon, if you?re given the choice, reckon on the Xbox. Zombies and GameCube-owning hermits don?t quite mix.

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