2 people found this review helpful
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 154.2 hrs on record (29.4 hrs at review time)
Posted: 4 Mar @ 8:39am

Great entry to the Monster Hunter series featuring a solid cast of monsters and their accompanying craftable weapons and armours. Several fantastic quality of life changes and a renewed focus on story make this one of the best Monster Hunters out there.

But.

The focus on story mode (Something the series was never really know for) falls a bit short and shows a lot of negatives. The story mode basically alternates between cutscenes of people talking and auto-walking sections with people talking. There's a lot of "tell" and not a lot of "show" when it comes to the main story and the method of delivering this story is even worse.

I've been a Monster Hunter fan for a long time now and for me the most important part has always been playing together, which this game does really well except when you're trying to progress through the story, which honestly should just be locked to single-player and clarified as such to avoid frustration. You CAN play through the story together but that mostly means doing your own thing until the next monster fight happens, where you can join up again. In the year of our lord 2025 we should really have a seamless coop integration in a game like this and it's a shame Capcom failed to hit that mark.

Speaking of multiplayer, playing with friends really shouldn't be difficult; I know the game has cross-platform multiplayer but if I want to play with Steam friends I should just be able to hit an invite button and be done. Seperate in-game friendslists and several different types of lobbies - none of which are explained well - leave a lot of room for confusion. Again, all of these should just be one-button invites. World and Rise had lobbies too and weren't anywhere near as confusing as what Capcom gave us here so we know they can do it.

All of this might sound like a negative review but these really are my main negative points in an otherwise fantastic game. I've heard people talk about performance issues and frequent crashes, I've experienced none of that besides the occasional framerate dip which I'm also willing to attribute to me streaming the whole thing on Twitch and having to run capture software that also eats into my CPU and GPU.

If you're a fan of Monster Hunter you don't need me to tell you to get this, you probably already have and are playing. If you're new to the Monster Hunter franchise this is an excellent jump-in point, especially if you have friends to play with but if money and hardware are a factor, Monster Hunter Rise is still my go-to recommendation.

Solid 9/10 from me.
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