Monster Hunter Rise review: small but powerful

More than a decade ago, in a life before The Verge, Monster hunter on PSP it was my favorite game. I spent a few hours a day facing solo missions as my train meandered through the interior of Japan, then compared looting with friends late at night as we got together to face the monsters we couldn’t beat alone.

2018 Monster Hunter World I could not hope to replicate that experience. World sought to reimagine the series as a primarily online adventure that took advantage of powerful hardware – and it was a huge success, bringing Monster hunter to a much larger Western audience than ever before. World it was a great game, and Capcom clearly changed Monster hunter in the right direction. But for me, something was missing.

This and where Monster Hunter Rise goes into. It is an exclusive Nintendo Switch game based on Worldadvances – but now you can take it on the go.

Monster Hunter Rise it is not an entirely new idea. The last time, a great new Monster hunter game first came to a home console – 2009 Monster Hunter 3 for the Wii – was coming out of the huge success of a previous PSP release. Monster Hunter 3 brought many advances to the series, but a direct transfer to the less powerful PSP would not have been practical for technical reasons, so Capcom adapted many of its elements and content into a new PSP game called Monster Hunter Portable 3rd. It ended up being the best-selling game in the series, at least until World it came, and it was the version that consumed me the most on those train journeys.

This is basically what Capcom did with Monster Hunter Rise. It is not a switch port. World – is better. Almost everything you did World a big leap forward for the series is here, and Ride up the formula further evolves while operating within a scope that makes more sense for the Switch. The result is a brand new game that feels right at home on your portable hardware, instead of having been compromised to fit.

Monster Hunter Rise it may be the most technically impressive Switch game I’ve ever seen; it is certainly the most impressive that is not made by Nintendo. Running on Capcom’s RE Engine, the character and monster models look very similar to those of World – especially on the small Switch screen. Capcom did an excellent job of preserving Worldessence and style of less powerful hardware.

The biggest concessions are the environments. The stages look older Monster hunter games than they did in World, with less elaborate designs and less graphic flourishes like dense foliage. Unlike the older games, however, the subsections are not divided by loading screens, which helps Ride up play in a similar way to Worldit is a more free flowing style.

In fact, Ride up goes even further in this regard. Navigating the environments is faster than ever thanks to two new elements: a pet dog called Palamute, which joins you in battle and allows you to mount on your back, and a tool called Wirebug that can be used to close walls and jumping monsters, occasionally even controlling them in large-scale clashes with other beasts. What Ride upThe stages have no complexity, they increase verticality and, although your targets are marked on the map from the beginning, you will often find out how to reach them at your level.

Ride up it looks even more suitable for handheld games than previous games, as you’ll never find yourself wandering aimlessly in search of a monster. Other changes save seconds that will add up to hundreds of hours – now you have exhausted the supply of resources from a mining outcrop or a pile of bones with a single touch of a button, for example.

Otherwise, Ride up is a typical Monster hunter games. It is a very complex action RPG where you choose one of several classes of weapons to hunt increasingly dangerous beasts, harvesting them to obtain materials that you can use to create new weapons and armor to face even more dangerous beasts. The game is certainly an acquired taste, and I’m not sure if the constant flood of pop-ups explaining obscure mechanics will be as useful to newcomers as Capcom seems to think they will be.

What will help, however, is that Monster Hunter Rise it’s just not very difficult compared to other games in the series, even World. I discovered the “village” missions that progress through the story and take you to the end of the exceptionally easy game – it’s like the real tutorial. I have experience with the series, but I’m not an incredible player, but I dispatched most of the new monsters much faster than usual on the first try. Village missions are never the real meat of any Monster hunter game, so I think it’s good for them to serve as a fun campaign that anyone can explode.

There are also a number of more challenging “core” missions available from the start, and these should dispel the notion that Ride up is not focusing on existing fans. But it is difficult to revise any Monster hunter game before its launch because I had very little time to test it online, let alone to see how the player base leads to its most challenging content. Ride upThe company’s longevity will largely depend on the design of the final game and how Capcom handles future updates, none of which can be known at this time.

At least for now, Ride up it looks like a more solid package in terms of content than World was at launch before its main Iceborne expansion. There is certainly no shortage of monsters, and the variety is broader than World offered, with several old favorites and some new creative designs.

Monster Hunter Rise is the most accessible game in the series to date, and may well be the best. I’m not willing to call that yet, because a lot will depend on what the post-launch support will be like. But Capcom already has the bones of a classic here. Almost everything that was great about World it’s also true about Ride up, unless you want to run it at 4K / 60fps. If you want to (and me too), there will be a PC version next year.

Looks like Monster hunter is closing the circle with Ride up. The series started on the PS2, to be sure, but it only became a cult phenomenon when it switched to notebooks, and that’s where it now returns to later World took him to an even larger global audience. You don’t have to travel far to find out how Monster hunter benefits from a portable format.

One of the joys of the Switch is that it allows you to fit the time of the game when, otherwise, you would not be able to, even if it is a situation as basic as the occupation of your room. Monster hunter always had that impulse of just one more search for fans of the series, and with its new airy design and portable format, Ride up he should see many more converts to the cause.

Monster Hunter Rise is available for the Nintendo Switch today.