I’ve just drifted my dog into battle, his hindlegs tilting out in a glorious arc at the press of a button for that precious extra boost of speed, before dismounting with the flick of a wirebug that sends a silken line up into the sky, allowing me to grapple onto it and swing towards my prey. In mid-air I pull out a sword fashioned from the remains of a bony Besarios and drive it straight down into the skull of another. Bring this big bastard down and I can fashion a hat out of his hide to complete my Besarios outfit and grant myself an attack boost, so that I might be able to go out and do it again only with more flair, and more efficiency.
Monster Hunter Rise review
- Developer: Capcom
- Publisher: Capcom
- Availability: Out March 26th on Switch, early 2022 on PC
Good gosh do I love Monster Hunter.
The core loop remains unchanged but Capcom’s series has evolved an awful lot since its inception way back in 2004, and after a long run on Nintendo’s console that peaked with the exceptional Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate it was only after 2018’s multi-platform Monster Hunter World that the series found a proper foothold in the west. Here was Monster Hunter at its most accessible – and, with expansion Iceborne, at its most brutal – and for the first time it no longer felt like a niche pursuit. Monster Hunter had finally gone mainstream.
Forgive me for making crass assumptions, but I’d presumed the series’ return to Nintendo, and to more modest hardware – Monster Hunter Rise is a Switch timed exclusive, with the PC version not arriving until early 2022 – might mean a more modest outing for the series. I could not have been more wrong. This is as lavish and opulent a thing as Monster Hunter’s ever seen, Capcom’s inhouse RE Engine excelling in its debut for the series while its soundtrack is fully orchestrated and accompanied by full vocals (every single monster gets its own unique introductory song complete with shamisen and hyoshigi in keeping with Rise’s traditional Japanese theming). It’s as if all that money made through Monster Hunter World’s success somehow made it into Rise’ production.
This is as significant a step forward for Monster Hunter as World was before it, with a generous suite of new features making hunting more palatable, more action packed and much, much more pleasurable. Before running through them all, though, there’s one underlying change worth noting that’s seismic in nature, and that informs everything that’s new this time out. Traditionally in this series, you’re the whipping boy – for the first few dozen hours at least – as you get knocked this way and that by all number of beautiful beasts. In Monster Hunter Rise, however, you are OP AF, and I am 100 per cent for it.