But don't let that fool you. The Hunter series of video games have little in common with role playing games beyond their roots. Hunter: The Reckoning, which came out last year, was a fairly straightforward beat-em up dungeon crawl, minus the dungeon. Redeemer is very similar. After a few set up movies in which you're introduced to the team of Hunters, it's up to you to pick the best one of the group and start clearing the monsters out of Ashcroft.

The four original characters are back: Deuce, an axe-wielding biker, Father Cortez, a priest, Samantha, the Defender and Kassandra, the party girl turned smiter of evil. The new hunter in the bunch is Kaylie, the Redeemer. If you played the first game you'll remember her as the scared little girl you escorted through a graveyard infested with flesh-eating zombies. Since her family was killed she's grown into the role of teenage video game nymph and rounds out the group as the one most interested in redeeming fallen souls. There are also two more unlockable characters for later.

Redeemer is as simple a game as you need it to be. Your character can move in one direction and fire in another, using the two control sticks. He also has default melee and ranged weapons. Deuce, for example, defaults to a huge axe for hand-to-hand bashing and a shotgun for long range. There are several tasty ranged weapons to pick up along the way, like rocket launchers and machine guns. There's only one attack button, but different combinations of presses, like rapid as compared to holding it down, can make for different moves and combos. All this is done as you navigate screens sometimes literally filled with enemies coming from all directions. The overall feel is reminiscent of Gauntlet but with an obviously more modern, edgier theme.

Edges, which are the form of magic found in Hunter, are different for each character. Some make you hit harder, regain health or just mow down all the heathen in your path. As you progress, your character will improve in categories like strength, accuracy and Edge. You'll only advance in the skills you use repeatedly, and that advancement is represented on the screen. So if you've been using mostly your melee weapon, that skill will level up when the bar is full. During the game, you can also use special glyphs, glowing symbols on the floor, to replenish health and edge power.

Fighting legions of evil is fun, but the first thing you have to do before playing Redeemer is to exercise that index finger because you're going to be doing a lot of attacking. The waves and waves of bad guys seem without limit, and even though the game features pretty good visuals and a solid effort in the music department, it boils down to a very repetitive killing spree with no requirement for strategy. Just line 'em up and knock 'em down, and keep doing it until the area is clear. Also, each character can do combo attacks with the control sticks and attack button. But using them is not only confusing, because you'll end up moving your character in illogical directions trying to pull off a move, it's also utterly unnecessary. There's no reward for using the combos and it's much easier to just use the standard attack.

The characters on screen and the environments have both been improved dramatically over what we saw in last year's Hunter game. The colors are brighter, there's more detail, and all this is done without losing the gritty, dark appearance of the original. The other shining points are the menu screens, which are gorgeous, for what it's worth. The options are clear and the screens navigable, but the fire burst transitions and the artwork itself is top-notch.

Throughout the game your ears are treated to the sounds of licensed music that is just hard enough to fit itself in nicely with the mood of the game. And that mood is perfectly personified by Deuce, whose character never misses an opportunity to throw in a swear word just in case you forgot how tough he is. Whiney guitar riffs and heavy, canon-like drums color the whole game. A whimsical journey through Candyland, Redeemer is not.

Beat 'em ups and dungeon crawls are best when playing with friends, and Redeemer supports up to four players simultaneously taking on the horrors of the Hunter universe. You can turn friendly fire on, which means your friends can hurt you; you can turn it on but without the pesky nuisance of real damage, just the reactions to getting hit (which slow your player down but cause no damage); or you can set it to ignore friendly fire completely. Your choice in the matter will greatly affect the difficulty of the game, because while the camera is much improved from the original, it's still difficult to keep all the players on the screen without being in each other's way. It's also tempting to run off on your own, but unless everyone works together you'll end up pulling the screen in different directions at the same time and going absolutely nowhere. Redeemer is much more fun with friends than when playing alone, but it could be better by simply adding the ability to separate into split screen. Anything is better than staying in one place because you can't get into lock-step behind one player.

Ultimately, I can't shake the feeling that when I first popped Redeemer into the tray and fired it up I was incredibly disappointed to find almost the exact same game I played more than a year ago. It looks very good, much better than the first, and killing waves of the undead and mutated is nice, but there's a reason I didn't play through the first Hunter multiple times. If you've never played the first one, Redeemer is an entertaining, but repetitive, beat-em up action game with lots of style. But if you've played Hunter already, you'll be wishing the time between games had been used to make Redeemer a little deeper and more interesting than this repetitive slash-fest.