To newcomers, Monster Hunter makes an appalling first impression. Its systems are complex and abstruse, its tutorialisation is not even close to adequate, and the combat will feel slow and clunky as your moves lack any form of aim assist, often move you out of position, and the camera lock-on works in an idiosyncratic way to track the monster while your character's movement works completely independent of it, making the feature borderline useless. If your weapon is drawn, should you want to perform any action that does not involve its use, like eating consumables, you must endure the sheathe animation, the consume animation and the unsheathe animation as you re-enter the fray. Monster attacks will frequently send you flying and your attacks will regularly be interrupted by stun, tremor, sleep and shock effects. Getting used to all of these user hostile quirks makes for a rough first few hours, and I would likely have put the game down were it not for the fact I bought it to play with a couple of friends.

Then I found the insect glaive. Airborne monsters were no longer such an issue because I could launch myself into the air with them. I could mount almost any monster at will and launch a flurry of blows which would stun it for a good few seconds of uninterrupted ass-whooping. I could vault out of the way of incoming attacks. Then I discovered there was a whole new set of moves which opened up if I sent out and recalled my kinsect to collect extracts from various parts of the monster, making this weapon I already liked approximately ten times better. I could also leave the kinsect out to auto-attack the monster, leaving dust clouds behind which would induce extra status effects on the monster if I hit them while it was nearby. This thing was magnificent. Why would anyone possibly want to use anything else? I had found my weapon and it had it all. Only it didn't. There are many things the insect glaive is not at all good at and there are many reasons to use any one of the game's 14 weapons, which are all equally viable and feel completely different to use. You will find people trash talking certain weapons in forums, but the truth of the matter is that the right weapon for any given fight is the one that resonates with you.

The sheer depth and malleability of Monster Hunter's weapon system is its crowning achievement. The game only gets good once you find your weapon, but this process is much more difficult than it should be. The worst weakness of MHW's uniformly abysmal tutorialisation is its failure to clearly explain the nuance of each weapon and guide the player through its application. It lays out a small handful of combos in a guidebook and calls it a day. To play well you need to know which combos end with a cool down period, which moves transition into other combos, which moves offer animation cancelling and which don't - there are some weapons which even rely on animation cancelling to perform some of their core functions, and the game explains none of this. It is borderline mandatory that a new player watch some helpful weapon tutorials on YouTube to learn the most basic information which should have already been conveyed in-game. I would not blame anyone for giving up on a game which gives up on the player before they've even started, but they would be missing out on an unrefined gem in MHW.

The core gameplay loop revolves around (would you believe it) hunting monsters. You don't do this in any conventionally narrative-based format which would see you progressing through a series of new levels, taking out chaff and fighting the boss before moving onto something new. In MHW all of your fights take place within 5 environments. They are essentially arenas, though describing them as such is to undersell their size and the intricacy of their ecosystems. Other monsters may stumble upon/into your fight and engage in a battle of supremacy not with you, but with the other monster. Insects may stun you (or the monster), plants may poison you (or the monster), frogs might explode upon you (or the monster). It allows for emergent gameplay in which no mission plays exactly like another. You are also given tools to control this chaos - balls of excrement can be stashed in your pouch and thrown at intruding monsters until they leave (yes, really), and environmental hazards can be triggered from afar to your advantage. Each mission will have you tasked with hunting anywhere from 1 to 3 large monsters. You will whack a monster around within an area of the map before it gets tired and moves somewhere else, giving you some breathing time to sharpen your weapon and heal up. New players can expect a monster to take anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to defeat, though these times will come down considerably with experience.

Your motivation for hunting? The sweet loot drops. Every monster has its own weapon and armour tree and drops crafting materials for it. Monster Hunter's armour system is unusual insofar as a piece of armour's defence rating is only of secondary concern - what you're concerned about is the skills it imparts. The user hostile quirks I mentioned earlier? Almost all of them can be negated through skills. What five-piece armour combination (head through feet) best fits together to allow you to play the game as you like? There are dozens upon dozens of skills, but only a few can fit into a single build, so if you take stun immunity, maybe you don't have room to enhance your damage or avoid reacting to monster roars with other skills. It's a jigsaw puzzle of priorities with no correct answers. Though like almost everything in MHW almost none of the skills are straightforward in how they are applied, so again, watch a YouTube tutorial to get your bearings.

New players need not be concerned about toxicity in the online community. Elitism seems to be confined to a few members of a few forums. Most players are only too glad to help other hunters out. Though this comes with a caveat - if you launch an SOS flare to invite other players into your game, it is assumed that you are struggling and therefore there is no burden of expectation placed upon you. If you respond to an SOS flare, it is assumed that you have some experience with the mission and can complete it consistently without dying. Most missions fail after three deaths, and these deaths are shared by the entire team, so while it won't lead to abuse, SOS responders should do their best to avoid contributing to that statistic. My advice is: if you want to be helpful to others, practice solo.

MHW does its best to trick you into thinking it's a predominantly online experience, but solo play is perfectly viable, fun and teaches you a lot about the monster's move set. In place of other players is your pet cat (palico) who you can outfit with various gadgets to help you out during the fight. Some see him laying shock traps down to temporarily paralyze the monster, another gives him a hoard of healing items which he will apply to you as needed, another deals damage through molotov cocktails and volcanoes, and others have yet more functions. He also innately distracts and attacks the monster to give you breathing room from time to time.

Should you ever find yourself getting tired of MHW, challenge yourself by learning to use another weapon. The difference in play styles is so great, it's no exaggeration to say it feels like you're playing a completely new game. There is also plenty of endgame loot to grind for, which opens up further possibilities I haven't even mentioned. After all my hours in the game, I am still learning and discovering new things. You owe it to yourself to give MHW a chance.

To newcomers, Monster Hunter makes an appalling first impression. Its systems are complex and abstruse, its tutorialisation is not even close to adequate, and the combat will feel slow and clunky as your moves lack any form of aim assist, often move you out of position, and the camera lock-on works in an idiosyncratic way to track the monster while your character's movement works completely independent of it, making the feature borderline useless. If your weapon is drawn, should you want to perform any action that does not involve its use, like eating consumables, you must endure the sheathe animation, the consume animation and the unsheathe animation as you re-enter the fray. Monster attacks will frequently send you flying and your attacks will regularly be interrupted by stun, tremor, sleep and shock effects. Getting used to all of these user hostile quirks makes for a rough first few hours, and I would likely have put the game down were it not for the fact I bought it to play with a couple of friends. Then I found the insect glaive. Airborne monsters were no longer such an issue because I could launch myself into the air with them. I could mount almost any monster at will and launch a flurry of blows which would stun it for a good few seconds of uninterrupted ass-whooping. I could vault out of the way of incoming attacks. Then I discovered there was a whole new set of moves which opened up if I sent out and recalled my kinsect to collect extracts from various parts of the monster, making this weapon I already liked approximately ten times better. I could also leave the kinsect out to auto-attack the monster, leaving dust clouds behind which would induce extra status effects on the monster if I hit them while it was nearby. This thing was magnificent. Why would anyone possibly want to use anything else? I had found my weapon and it had it all. Only it didn't. There are many things the insect glaive is not at all good at and there are many reasons to use any one of the game's 14 weapons, which are all equally viable and feel completely different to use. You will find people trash talking certain weapons in forums, but the truth of the matter is that the right weapon for any given fight is the one that resonates with you. The sheer depth and malleability of Monster Hunter's weapon system is its crowning achievement. The game only gets good once you find [i]your[/i] weapon, but this process is much more difficult than it should be. The worst weakness of MHW's uniformly abysmal tutorialisation is its failure to clearly explain the nuance of each weapon and guide the player through its application. It lays out a small handful of combos in a guidebook and calls it a day. To play well you need to know which combos end with a cool down period, which moves transition into other combos, which moves offer animation cancelling and which don't - there are some weapons which even rely on animation cancelling to perform some of their core functions, and the game explains none of this. It is borderline mandatory that a new player watch some helpful weapon tutorials on YouTube to learn the most basic information which should have already been conveyed in-game. I would not blame anyone for giving up on a game which gives up on the player before they've even started, but they would be missing out on an unrefined gem in MHW. The core gameplay loop revolves around (would you believe it) hunting monsters. You don't do this in any conventionally narrative-based format which would see you progressing through a series of new levels, taking out chaff and fighting the boss before moving onto something new. In MHW all of your fights take place within 5 environments. They are essentially arenas, though describing them as such is to undersell their size and the intricacy of their ecosystems. Other monsters may stumble upon/into your fight and engage in a battle of supremacy not with you, but with the other monster. Insects may stun you (or the monster), plants may poison you (or the monster), frogs might explode upon you (or the monster). It allows for emergent gameplay in which no mission plays exactly like another. You are also given tools to control this chaos - balls of excrement can be stashed in your pouch and thrown at intruding monsters until they leave (yes, really), and environmental hazards can be triggered from afar to your advantage. Each mission will have you tasked with hunting anywhere from 1 to 3 large monsters. You will whack a monster around within an area of the map before it gets tired and moves somewhere else, giving you some breathing time to sharpen your weapon and heal up. New players can expect a monster to take anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to defeat, though these times will come down considerably with experience. Your motivation for hunting? The sweet loot drops. Every monster has its own weapon and armour tree and drops crafting materials for it. Monster Hunter's armour system is unusual insofar as a piece of armour's defence rating is only of secondary concern - what you're concerned about is the skills it imparts. The user hostile quirks I mentioned earlier? Almost all of them can be negated through skills. What five-piece armour combination (head through feet) best fits together to allow you to play the game as you like? There are dozens upon dozens of skills, but only a few can fit into a single build, so if you take stun immunity, maybe you don't have room to enhance your damage or avoid reacting to monster roars with other skills. It's a jigsaw puzzle of priorities with no correct answers. Though like almost everything in MHW almost none of the skills are straightforward in how they are applied, so again, watch a YouTube tutorial to get your bearings. New players need not be concerned about toxicity in the online community. Elitism seems to be confined to a few members of a few forums. Most players are only too glad to help other hunters out. Though this comes with a caveat - if you launch an SOS flare to invite other players into your game, it is assumed that you are struggling and therefore there is no burden of expectation placed upon you. If you respond to an SOS flare, it is assumed that you have some experience with the mission and can complete it consistently without dying. Most missions fail after three deaths, and these deaths are shared by the entire team, so while it won't lead to abuse, SOS responders should do their best to avoid contributing to that statistic. My advice is: if you want to be helpful to others, practice solo. MHW does its best to trick you into thinking it's a predominantly online experience, but solo play is perfectly viable, fun and teaches you a lot about the monster's move set. In place of other players is your pet cat (palico) who you can outfit with various gadgets to help you out during the fight. Some see him laying shock traps down to temporarily paralyze the monster, another gives him a hoard of healing items which he will apply to you as needed, another deals damage through molotov cocktails and volcanoes, and others have yet more functions. He also innately distracts and attacks the monster to give you breathing room from time to time. Should you ever find yourself getting tired of MHW, challenge yourself by learning to use another weapon. The difference in play styles is so great, it's no exaggeration to say it feels like you're playing a completely new game. There is also plenty of endgame loot to grind for, which opens up further possibilities I haven't even mentioned. After all my hours in the game, I am still learning and discovering new things. You owe it to yourself to give MHW a chance.