In the games, hunting was once an activity reserved for the Cabela’s C production games. The situation began to change sometime at the arrival of Red Dead Redemption, and then there was a wave of games where hunting was one of the basic mechanics. Far Cry 3, The Witcher 3 and Horizon Zero Dawn are just some of those games. But before them there was Monster Hunter, Capcom‘s series that started in 2004. The new sequel to Monster Hunter World comes to attract new audiences around the world to the hunting games world.

With this sequel, Capcom has tried hard to make Monster Hunter accessible. Those who played their previous series games will find a bunch of modifications in MHW that have changed the whole concept for the better. A great effort was put into making gameplay focus more on the underlying idea of ​​hunting, and less on poking around the menus and the eternal preparation for the battle in which they eventually fail. On that side, in Monster Hunter World you do not feel the need to complicate the game just for the sake of complicating.

On the other hand, MHW is an unmistakably Japanese game and as such it has some “old-fashioned” principles that it holds. Looking outside, it’s a cheerful and, at moments, comic adventure where cat chefs prepare lunch for you before you go hunting and pterodactyls are used for transportation at a greater distance. The story revolves around the migration of the so-called Elder Dragon to a “new world”. The story, for the most part, is dry, “chewed down” and set more as a context rather than a guide to the very experience itself.

The point of Monster Hunter is, believe it or not, in a monster hunt. This aspect of the game is brilliant, more than before because monsters now have more space to move. Monster Hunter World does not have a huge map with thousands of square kilometers, but it has a variety of regions that are large enough to be habitats for five or six different monsters that are freely moving around the map.

The eco-system of this game is not a complex simulation, but has a certain hierarchy and just like the real nature, it contains some established behavior. Monsters eat each other, use the environment for their own benefit, have their hiding places, etc. You’re basically there to disrupt it, so no wonder that the monsters react violently to your very presence. Although you are a hunter, most of the time you are actually the prey.

There are a total of 14 different weapons available and all are available right from the start of the game. The thing here is that no weapon is better than the other because each one manages differently. The only question is which suits you better depending on your approach.

Monster Hunter World is not a simple game and there are a few things that support the need to play it the way the developers have imagined it, with no shortcuts. In the first place, multiplayer is not just a sideshow here. Even though you can play MHW solo, it is much easier when you are not the only target of a monster. It is therefore recommended that you play with three more players, or at least connect online, otherwise there is double the work waiting for you.

A half of that job is pure grinding. You cannot just keep track of the story because you need to upgrade the equipment between the main missions. And you improve it by doing banal hunting and resource-gathering tasks. If you pick five mushrooms you will get armor core to improve the statistics, and once you fill it up you will receive similar, if not the same task again. Somehow it helps to do these tasks in different regions, but on the other hand you cannot, for example, take ten secondary missions and solve them simultaneously.

Each task also has a time limit and limitation of how many times the enemy can defeat you. These are some totally unnecessary rules that have no justification in this game. Okay, some game-over risk must exist, but this should not be the time limit for the hunt.

The game is started by the MT Framework engine that was designed for the past generation of consoles and this is very noticeable. While Capcom was ambitious in the Monster Hunter World’s graphic display with the amount of detail, the whole thing looks pretty bad on the technical side. The textures are blurry, anti-aliasing is almost nonexistent, and the colors, despite the HDR support, are so faded that they do not look natural. The overall impression is not fixed by the performance that barely holds 30 frames per second.

The presentation is only improved by the excellent sound. This is especially noticeable when you play with headphones because this is the only way to hear the three-dimensional sound. The music is tense and unobtrusive, but like in most Japanese games, there is always one melody repeated for a single location.

Monster Hunter is still a weird artifact because of all these things. Sometimes it will leave a question mark hanging over your head for its archaic mechanics, but occasionally it will catch you unprepared and surprise you with an epic battle in which you start cheering on the stronger monster to defeat your target at one moment, but at the next you’re running away from both. When you get used to the hunting routine, it is possible to cross over the rough edges of Monster Hunter World, but you still have to love the craft of hunting. And it’s not for everyone, just like this game is not for everyone’s taste.