Monster Hunter World PC: Significantly Better Than Every Other Monster Hunter (But Also Worse)

People are playing Monster Hunter World.

Other MonHuns I reviewed:

• MH3U (4/10): http://www.crymore.net/2013/03/30/monster-hunter-3-ultimate-review-3ds-version/
• MH4U (D+): http://www.crymore.net/2015/03/23/monster-hunter-4-ultimate-ultimately-not-worth-it/
• MHX/Gen: Forgot to post a review (it’s like a C-), but I lost 189 hours to it. Switch upgrade now plz.

 

Quality of Life

Good gods, it’s like the devs of this game made a list of all the most annoying things about the Monster Hunter series and summarily executed them as traitors to the revolution.

I kinda went ham on the word vomit here so I’d recommend most to just skip this section and go into the complaints. …Unless you’re a series vet and wanna fangasm over all the presents they gave us. I could go for hours.

Big Wins:

 

 

Bad Combat Design

For however good this game tries to be, it’s still Monster Hunter, so you can expect some issues. Here’s the worst off the top of my head:

• Chasing monsters for five minutes around the map — sometimes multiple times per hunt — until they finally decide to fight you is not fun.
• The camera doesn’t lock onto monsters for more than a second, which makes combat really fucky.
  • I dunno if this is necessarily ingrained into the design, but it sure seems to be a series staple.
• OHKOs are still a thing. Most are pretty telegraphed, but you can still get fucked outta nowhere.
• Some weapons are more equal than others. Read: Short-range melee weapons are ass against flyers.
  • And no, I’m not gonna switch to bow for those fights; anything but hammer is for cowards.
• The final boss is miserably time-consuming and boring.

 

 

Multiplayer

Here’s the deal: I have yet to play a single round of online in this title. Hear me out though, cuz I have my reasons.

For every goddamn fight in this game, you are better off playing solo. Constant connection issues (I get “disconnected” from the servers every time I do a solo run), reports of rampant cheating (the game is PvE but they can fuck with your progression too), and save game corruption potential (both from hackers and from poor coding in the game itself)…

Normally Monster Hunter encourages you to deal with all that bullshit because the majority of the real fights are basically impossible to do by yourself, but here Capcom actually made it easier and far more convenient to just say fuck it and fight everything solo.

So, like, who wouldn’t just run every quest by themselves? I mean, other than people with friends.

 

 

Decorations

Monster Hunter’s always had RNG determining what end game builds you had access to, but it’s never been this fucking bad. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, skills are determined by your armor pieces and your charm (these contain built-in skills, and decoration slots), and your decorations (which fit into those slots and provide more skill points).

In other entries, the decorations were craftable, so you farmed charms by mining for them, hoping for a combination of good skills and open slots. Yeah, it could get boring but it was very chill and you got 20 charms to sort through after every 5-minute run. Your efforts never truly felt wasted.

Here? Here, the charms are craftable and the decorations aren’t. And rather than calmly mining your way to them, your only option is to fight through a bunch of end game monsters on steroids. Of the 1-2 decorations you get from those quest rewards, your odds of anything decent dropping are next to zero (the decent loot table is a 2% drop, and of that table only a few skills will be of relevance to what you’re looking for). Considering that’s the end game, it’s very hard to see a reason to play much more once you clear story mode.

 

 

Event Quests

MHW has a rotating series of online-accessed quests. In theory, this is good because those quests get populated with players for the week or two they’re available and enable a constant stream of content to keep players engaged. In reality, you’re gonna be force fed a bunch of tediously unenjoyable shit on a weekly basis, and anyone with a completionist streak is going to drop out as soon as they miss a quest that allows you to build unique (but useless) armor or weapons.

Looking ahead to the cool quests that the PS4 players have access to, there does happen to be some interesting content coming down the line, including monsters you need to team up against. But I have very little interest in hunting with the kind of people that will still be playing this shit in 6 months. Capcom really shoulda just made these damn things permanent and unlocked from the get-go.

Quite frankly, outside of the events months down the road, I’ve run out of content I’m interested in and this game’s only been out for 9 days. Capcom plz.

 

 

Final Score

• As a ~50-hour single-player experience: 8/10
• As a multiplayer game: 1/10
• As a trans man: Problematic