Monster Hunter: World Review - IGN (2024)

Monsters themselves come with a wealth of strengths and weaknesses and many, many materials to harvest, all of which can be used to create tens of possible items. You also have an adorable cat companion called a Palico which can be outfitted with its own gear, all offering different bonuses for your character. And when it all seems like you’ve got it sussed, along comes High-Rank, Monster Hunter’s “post-game” content, which changes some monsters, adds new ones, and essentially doubles the amount of gear to lust after.

The deeper you look, the deeper it all seems to get - and that sheer level of complexity has historically been what stops Monster Hunter from offering mainstream appeal. But let’s get something out of the way: there’s been an assumption among the waiting audience over the past few months that - despite the protestations of Capcom itself - World would simplify the series’ more obscure ideas to help court a western audience. After just the first few hours, it becomes abundantly clear those concerns are unfounded.

Monster Hunter has always been opaque, its menus pebble-dashed with byzantine statistics, and its combat purposefully designed to be methodical and challenging in a way that feels strange next to modern action games’ fluidity. Practically none of that has changed. This remains a game where learning is as important as doing, from potion recipes to intricate combos.

But as far as opportunities for new experiences go, World just never seems to stop providing them – and I love that feeling. 50 hours in, it’s still regularly throwing crafting possibilities, monsters, even entirely new systems at me and expecting me to put time into learning how they can benefit my character.

Perhaps the most fundamental change is in how you find the monsters in the first place. In previous games, tracking big game was a matter of wandering between zones, hoping to spot your prey and chuck a paintball at it to illuminate it on your map. The new bioluminescent Scoutflies are an excellent replacement for that sometimes-tedious task, at once more useful and more grounded in the fiction. At first, your flitting, neon swarm leads you to trackable markings left by monsters in real time - footprints, scratches, globs of mucus - and, once you’ve gathered enough evidence they’ll catch the scent of the target monster itself, leading you straight to it with a marker on your map.

The major work, however, has clearly come in Monster Hunter’s move from handheld to console (and PC, in August) where the graphical spectacle can finally match the design. World’s hunting grounds have shifted from particulate zones connected by loading screens into huge, seamless maps. Hunts feel far less self-contained and interrupted, and give Capcom’s undersung artists a much larger canvas to work with. The results range from beautiful to breathtaking.

Without the restraints of realism, Capcom has made one of the most stunning locations I’ve come across - not just in the Monster Hunter series but in gaming as a whole. It’s clear how the experience of making the older games’ bite-sized zones has fed into the art and level design teams’ new work - there’s a gorgeous vista or change of scenery around every corner.

Their work stretches everywhere. There’s real joy in seeing weapons I’d played with on 3DS turned into 4K beauties - the absurd Metal Bagpipes hunting horn I’ve tooted so often has been turned from a jut of jagged pixels into the offensive instrument it should be, its rivets shining in the sun, it’s puffbag (not the technical term, probably) showing signs of wear. The New World setting - our hunters have travelled across the sea tracking a giant Elder Dragon’s migration - also allows for a glut of new monsters and often-insane armour that can be made out of them. Freakish, skinless mega-dogs, tar-covered wyverns that make armour out of other monsters’ bones, and a chameleon-bird that pukes poison - there’s a lot to be discovered. Plus, the sunsets in each area’s day-night cycle are ridiculously beautiful.

Honestly, the direct benefit of knowing how monsters interact is limited - at most, they’ll kick off a ‘Turf War’ canned animation, doing some of the damage in a hunt for you - but the effect of it is something else entirely. I’ve spent half-hour Expedition missions just watching these animals move around, learning where they prefer to hunt or nest, watching their fight-or-flight reflexes kick in, simply because I enjoyed getting to know them.

But for a real hunt, multiplayer is the way forward. Monster Hunter has always been best played in a group, upping the challenge to allow for titanic battles while players swap tips and secrets. World makes a much-needed change, combining the series’ traditionally separate single and multiplayer campaigns into a single string of quests. It’s a step in the right direction, but also creates its strangest problem: to play a story quest, all players must have watched any cutscenes it include (and their absurdly poor lip-syncing) first.

Debate will likely rage between Monster Hunter purists as to whether this is the best game in the series. As with any hardcore audience, attempts to streamline - particularly in how individual armour skills now disincentivise building full sets over hours of grinding - may be looked at with derision. A lack of ultra-tough G-Rank challenges might also leave some wishing for even more. Like sports games, the definitive verdict will likely be impossible until we’re hundreds, rather than tens of hours in.