Preview by: Neilie Johnson

We first laid eyes on The Grinder at last year's E3 when it was destined to be a first person shooter exclusive to the Wii. Oh, what a difference a year makes—at this year's GDC, developer High Voltage brought a completely different incarnation of the game. The overall concept remains the same; it's still an action game with light RPG elements, made in the style of Hunter: The Reckoning. However, since last June, The Grinder has morphed into a third person, top-down shooter for PS3 and Xbox 360.

The plot of The Grinder is as yet a little fuzzy but what we do know is that it takes place in a somewhat steam punk-ish western setting and features four main characters: Hector, a Mexican bounty hunter, Doc, a stoic Native American, AJ, a busty blonde and Miko, a sexy Japanese assassin dressed like a schoolgirl. Each member of this motley bunch is a professional monster hunter and all four are hired by a hucksterish mayor to protect his dusty western town from supernatural attack. The game adopts a From Dusk Till Dawn approach, mixing a western setting with things like vampires, skeletons, werewolves and golems. I was fortunate enough to play the GDC demo of The Grinder and get a real sense of its four-player drop-in co-op.

I chose Hector, and joined the group as it entered the monster-infested town. The demo started with a cutscene showing the four monster hunters walking up a desert road, with Doc foreshadowing the carnage to come by saying, “I sense a great darkness here...”

The game's top-down view showed the town to be on a metal grating built into a cliffside with huge gears turning underneath it. Upon entering, the voice of the somewhat sleazy mayor came over a loudspeaker, telling us where to go and then followed us throughout the level, making wisecracks about our performance and warning us of impending danger. To accommodate all four players on one screen, the camera is set back quite a ways so to better differentiate one character from another, each had a different colored ring at its feet. We were immediately beset by creatures that looked like naked Nosferatu—called “Draculas” by the townspeople. These nasty things were able to surround us by teleporting, causing us to turn continually as we fought.

All four monster hunters were able to perform melee attacks with handy boards and each had its own signature weapon. They could also use other guns of course, (some which they could dual-wield) like pistols, rocket launchers, shotguns and “dark science” weapons and made good use of (the seemingly ever-present but always useful) exploding barrels. Different weapons were more effective against different enemies and we could even pick up special monster-specific ammo, like wood bullets for the Draculas. Weapons leveled up as we played and were powered up via pickups scattered throughout the level (pickups—XP, health, dark energy—were gained by finding varicolored, glowing rock piles and bashing them with a melee weapon). Individual characters did pretty good damage on their own, but High Voltage told us that in the future, players will be granted damage bonuses for working together.

Once we'd dealt with the Draculas, we were swarmed by Corpse Bombers, walking skeletons that came lurching out of mine shafts in the mountain, ran at us and exploded. Combat was crazy-chaotic with four of us on screen, all blasting away, all being mobbed by skeletons which were not only explosive, but sneakily teleported to get behind us. Once the exploding corpses were dealt with, we had to face down mass murderer “Jason”-like (as in, Friday the 13th) enemies called Slashers who attacked by throwing axes. Those guys were even tougher and really forced us to spin like dervishes to avoid the risk of getting an axe square in the back. As we progressed, we were prevented from entering certain sections of the levels by sparking electrical fences which held us inside until we defeated a certain number of enemies.