Quest hunter review series#
Without the restraints of realism, Capcom has made one of the most stunning locations I’ve come across - not just in the Monster Hunter series but in gaming as a whole. The screen is absolutely saturated with detail - landmass, particle effects and creatures all interacting - ending up feeling pleasingly overstuffed, as if the frustration of working with handhelds has led to a flood of ideas that couldn’t have been possible previously. It’s a fantastical barrier reef grown on land, replete with seahorse-like hummingbirds, floating jellyfish, and a giant bat with an inflatable neck, and my hunter’s been seriously injured several times because I got distracted by how pretty it all is.
But it’s once you reach the Coral Highlands that it becomes clear how beneficial this shift in hardware has been. “The opening areas - Ancient Forest and Wildspire Waste - turn familiar woodland and desert locations into intricate webs of overlapping biomes, each filled with creatures large and small going about their business. It’s still stupendously generous with content and, better, matches that with consistently making your time feel well-spent instead of wasting it on empty-feeling grinding. Above and beyond anything else you can say about World, there is a lot of it. This isn’t an admission of guilt, it’s a demonstration of what kind of game we’re dealing with. Find an experienced friend to guide you or sit down for a few video tutorials, because Monster Hunter: World is one of the most consistently exciting, satisfying, and gratifyingly absurd games I’ve played since, well, the last Monster Hunter game.Ī disclaimer: though I’ve completed the story quest, I’m absolutely nowhere near “finished.” Side quests are clogging up my menus, I haven’t touched the majority of the weapons, and even the end of the campaign opens up a second, much more difficult half. “But no matter how much I or any other fan tries to convince you, there’s a chance that a game that requires this much management alongside its maiming simply won’t be for you. This remains a game where learning is as important as doing, from potion recipes to intricate combos. Monster Hunter has always been opaque, its menus pebble-dashed with byzantine statistics, and its combat purposefully designed to be methodical and challenging in a way that feels strange next to modern action games’ fluidity. After just the first few hours, it becomes abundantly clear those concerns are unfounded.
But let’s get something out of the way: there’s been an assumption among the waiting audience over the past few months that - despite the protestations of Capcom itself - World would simplify the series’ more obscure ideas to help court a western audience. The deeper you look, the deeper it all seems to get - and that sheer level of complexity has historically been what stops Monster Hunter from offering mainstream appeal.
And when it all seems like you’ve got it sussed, along comes High-Rank, Monster Hunter’s “post-game” content, which changes some monsters, adds new ones, and essentially doubles the amount of gear to lust after. You also have an adorable cat companion called a Palico which can be outfitted with its own gear, all offering different bonuses for your character. Monsters themselves come with a wealth of strengths and weaknesses and many, many materials to harvest, all of which can be used to create tens of possible items. “Each of 14 weapon types makes combat feel like an entirely different game, from the grace and familiarity of a sword and shield, to the explosive pummel of an ammo-switching Bowgun, to the downright oddity of the Hunting Horn, a massive hammer that plays stat-buffing tunes.
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