With Hunted: The Demon’s Forge so close to launch we went to Bethesda’s BFG Showcase in Utah last week thinking that they possibly couldn’t show us anything new with the game that’s scheduled for early June. My, how wrong we were. Enter Hunted: The Demon’s Forge’s Crucible mode then. If you like dungeon crawlers and you like creation tools, then you’ll surely love Hunted’s Crucible.

inXile’s co-op orientated co-op then has another facet for fans to get knees deep in when June rolls around, allowing gamers to create their own custom dungeons using their easy to create system.

Starting off with a 5 x 5 grid – that’s 25 squares for the mathematically challenged – players can setup their dungeon however they want. If they want to create a 25 square spaghetti shaped dungeon that will take hours to plough through, they can. If they want a short 5 stage dungeon, then they can do that too.

What you create is entirely up to you in actual fact, but playing through the campaign – in co-op or alone – is where you’ll more than likely want to start things, seeing as the gold you earn there is used to unlock more and more options within the Crucible.

Players have the choice to not only select loadsouts for the players and what theme each section of the map will be – from themes from within the campaign, like River Town and The Wilds – but they can also setup the pick-ups, the enemy types, character modifications and how many enemies they’ll see in every wave.

The modification slots can either be setup to make things more challenging for players or conversely, to make things easier – the choice is yours. So if you want to use the Punishment of True Aim modification to take away the game’s auto-aim assist, by all means, feel free. If you want to make things easier though you can use the Never Ending Quiver – which gives you an unlimited supply of arrows – or the Replenishment Quiver – which yes, replenishes your arrows over time – and more. If you can’t be bothered will all the specifics like that, then don’t, you can use quick setups depending on how much time or how much of a challenge you want in your experience or you can even randomise each arena specifically as well.

Once you’ve setup your map, the rest of the game is simple. Name it with 6 nouns from a variety of lists, save it and then boot it up – alone or with a friend. It’s basically Hunted’s version of horde then, asking players to tackle an arena at a time.

Depending on how you set it up, you’ll take on up to 9 waves of enemies per arena stage. If you set it up with 100 enemies per wave, the game will slowly drip feed and throw enemies at you until you’ve defeated them, because enemies come out in 2s or 3s rather than all at once. So taking on 100 enemies in 1 wave will take you a very long time. Combine that with 25 arena stages and you’ve created one hell of a ridiculously time consuming dungeon. Then again, if you want to duck in and out, you can create a 5 arena dungeon with very few enemies and be in and out before you can say “Bob’s your uncle.”

Quite how much players will want to invest into this mode is entirely down to the player. While some will see it as a temporary distraction away from the main crux of the game, others will likely challenge themselves in lengthy dungeon crawler experiences, looking to unlock as much of the content as possible. The mode itself though is easy to use, quick to setup and as deep or as easy as you want it to be, which makes for a nice change of pace away from the sexually-charged campaign adventures of E’lara and Caddoc.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is scheduled for a May 31st and June 3rd release in North America and Europe respectively.