Weekly “What’re You Playing” Community Thread #5

Coming from the perspective of somebody that has been playing a lot of monster hunter over the past few years, particularly loving Worldborne and being not so pleased with Risebreak.

I was quite sceptical when I first saw it both because Monster Hunter clones have all been rather terrible including toukiden by the same developer as well as omega force's other games really aren't all that, musou games were fun but are rather boring now. The early footage I saw wasn't super inspiring either but I played the EA play demo and I must say I've been having a lot of fun. It certainly delivers more on the aspect of exploration than Rise did and the mobility in exploration I would say feels more meaningful because you are more limited.

Combat is rather fast paced, particularly when compared to mainline MH titles but because it's not a MH title I find myself being more forgiving about it. The in combat building aspect did look stupid at first and while I'm not entirely sold on it I do find that it integrates into the combat well enough though some are certainly easier to use than others. Weapon movesets are fairly limited and much less complex than later MH titles but I think the fights themselves are engaging enough for that not to mater too much, I found with the nodachi that you are heavily rewarded when you aggressively use basic buildings like the spring and torch often leading to stunlocking monsters for quite some time. Overall I'd say the game is on the easier side and your abundant iframes would corroborate that but when I'm occasionally put on the defence and having to react to some of the more complex moves it can be rather challenging for a time.

I like that it's "high rank" actually impacts monster movesets unlike MH. There isn't a massive roster by any means tough most have variants which adds some content, they aren't super different but I didn't find it as offensive as Purple Ludroth.

But the game does have issues, technical ones being obvious but haven't hampered my experience on PC despite the rather frequent frame drops. Aside from that the contextual nature of many actions in the game can be very frustrating when they mismatch with what you had in mind or when your character turns around mid building because you are locked on or if you're trying to build too close to something else and suddenly your 3x2 build did not come out as planned or when you get hit and sent right into a torch which leads you to do an attack straight into the monster, there are a lot of examples. The game is also a bit on the floaty side and sometimes rather literally as you get pushed around, especially against edges of the map. The climbing feature on monsters is really bad, not only very awkward to engage but once you're on it's very difficulty to actually get anywhere intentionally as the monster keeps on attacking sometimes even leading to get transported to a completely different part of the monster or even worse if against a wall or tree you can be latched on to it instead, truly just not well done. Cutscenes aren't all that convincingly acted out and I find faces in particular just kind of stay the same, not a huge issue as the story isn't why I picked it up but it's a clear weak point, it's an ok vehicle for game progression though and compared to a lot of anime adjacent games I'd still rate it favourably for not being too obnoxious.

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