Monster Hunter: World was a massive achievement. It is, in my opinion, a serious contender for the best game of the past generation. I have mentioned in my review what made the game earn a new degree of fame and popularity, but let me recap: it became accessible for a bigger audience; it removed the complicated aspects early on and had a massive story-chapter dedicated simply as a tutorial; it offered an intricate combat that had something new to teach you every time you started the game; its combat was thrilling, movement and weapons had weight and power; the intensity of the foes helped to create a truly immersive experience; it was an assertive experience that gifted players that were prepared instead of punishing those who were not.
Monster Hunter: World, however, has met its end. Its lifecycle ended last december after Capcom released the final patch. Now the focus of the developer lies in the next iteration, releasing exclusively for the Nintendo Switch and which had a demo available early this month. Monster Hunter: Rise comes as a promise to focus on more intricate maps with vertical design while also maintaining the elements loved by fans of the franchise. After playing the demo, however, I was not impressed.
It feels too familiar
Perhaps the first thing to notice of Monster Hunter: Rise is the fact that it looks like Monster Hunter: World. However, considering the hardware limitations of the Nintendo Switch, it feels a lesser clone of it, with subpar graphics and textures, performance dips, weird visual glitches, and a much less vibrant and dense map. It feels empty because of that.
Please, note that being on the Switch doesn’t mean the game needs to look ugly, and being ugly doesn’t mean it’s bad. We have The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is a stunning visual feast, while Fire Emblem: Three Houses has some damn ugly textures and background and yet is one of the greatest games of its genre. Monster Hunter: Rise, however, does not try to use the Switch, it tries to be a high-end game like Monster Hunter: World but playing on a lesser hardware, like a downgraded port of sorts. If that was the intention, simply bringing Monster Hunter: World to the Switch would be enough, and the compromises would be understandable.
It feels lifeless
The hardware limitation not only makes Monster Hunter: Rise look like the potato version of Monster Hunter: World in terms of graphic quality, the world itself also suffers from it. The map in the demo, whose concept is to be vertical and such, is bare when compared to the Ancient Forest in Monster Hunter: World. There we already had a vertical map around a massive tree, with multiple levels, shortcuts, bursting wildlife, dense vegetation, and incredible atmosphere. It was the introductory map of that game, whose concept was to be “open”, and it is miles ahead in terms of verticality when compared to Monster Hunter: Rise‘s initial map.
Monster Hunter: Rise‘s map also feels empty, plain, and lifeless. You see some endemic life here and there, but the areas where you fight are all open surfaces with little roughness. There is some water here and there, some areas are wider than others, but overall it is as if you are playing a PSP game of Monster Hunter, with those flat maps that felt superficial. As someone who was never truly taken by previous Monster Hunter’s titles, seeing the game going back to this old era is severely disappointing.
The hardware limitation also means there is little in terms of vegetation, tessellation, and, most importantly for me, ambient sound and effects. After playing a few hunts, I felt as if something was missing. One of the reasons the game feels lifeless is because its sound effects are subpar, artificial, and sometimes simply missing. After playing hundreds of hours of Monster Hunter: World, going to Monster Hunter: Rise feels as if every sense of immersion was taken away from the game.
It lacks impact in its combat too
Well, Monster Hunter: Rise offers all the weapons we know and combat is largely the same as in Monster Hunter: World, yet once again the compromise to be a poor cousin in a weaker hardware has its toll. The weapons in Monster Hunter: World had weight to their swings, the monster’s attacks were fearsome, even the bow felt powerful with every shot. That happened because the game combined feedback to every action happening on screen. There were sound-effects, your character would yell or moan, the monster would roar, sparkling effects would dominate the screen, and the characters would react to every hit with impact and intensity proportional to the massive weapons and foes.
Monster Hunter: Rise is, once again, lacking in almost every element here. I was firing my arrow at the enemy, but I never really understood if I was hitting or not if it weren’t for the damage numbers with different colors. As I dashed away and my stamina depleted, nothing happened to show me that. The yells and growls coming from the game felt as if something else was happening entirely. The sound cues for dashing around, pulling the bowstring, and much more were simply either inexistent or too timid.
I changed to Lance and the same happened. I wasn’t feeling as if I was that hulking impregnable titan while behind my shield, it had no weight, the sounds never helped me understand the power of my pokes or the hits I was blocking. Once again I changed weapons, tried the longsword and… there it was again. The combat lost most of its impact.
There was another massive hurdle that I was yet to surpass too: controls. Although the commands are similar to Monster Hunter: World, they felt less responsive, as if I was playing an ice-level where you move a boulder and it slides all the all to the next rock and stops before you can issue the next command. For this part I decided to hook up with my veteran hunter in Monster Hunter: World and… gods, the difference was immediate. It’s like playing your favorite game on a low-end PC with barebones VGA and finally watching it in full glory with RTX and a home theater set up.
It’s formula worries me too
Monster Hunter: World also felt attractive to me because it was a seamless experience. You would log in your hunter, walk around the homebase, upgrade stuff, and interact with the Handler or a board to decide what you were gonna do. You could follow the story alone, perhaps call an SOS, or maybe just answer an SOS for the same story mission you were on. I loved that, the seamless transition from single-player to multiplayer was the major reason why I enjoyed that game for hundreds of hours.
Monster Hunter: Rise seems to completely obliterate that immersion though, stepping back to the PSP’s model of dividing single player and multiplayer and keeping things around menus and predetermined hunts. I cannot exactly say how it will play in the full game, but this division is already a major block for me in the demo. I want to experience a gradual game, one that teaches me, tells me a story, and allows me to move around single-player and multiplayer as I see fit. The way it is, it seems I will be stuck playing the single-player experience for the story, perhaps with some content locked behind these fights, and will have to move to another menu and play online as if looking for a lobby of a FPS. That’s bad game design, that’s old game design, that’s anything but good.
Even the good aspects of it worries me
Well, there are some positive changes to the game when compared to Monster Hunter: World, and those are the new mechanics. The major mechanic seems like the addition of a second companion to your solo adventure, the Palamute, which is a dog companion for dog-people to enjoy the game as well.
It works. You can ride them freely to traverse the map, which is helpful, and the dog also helps you in combat along with your trustworthy Palico. This means that playing solo could be seeing a much-needed injection of variety when you and your cat and dog fight against the monsters. If solo fights in Monster Hunter: World felt like a chore of repetition, this time it may be different, although the demo doesn’t really allow us to see how these two companions will affect you with specific builds and equipment.
However… you can also bring along one of your companions to multiplayer fights, and while this seems interesting at first, it doesn’t seem to work well in practice. What happens is that you get four hunters along with four companions to fight a monster that is already shooting beams, bubbles, fiery breaths, and so on. The result is a visual mess, making the fight a chaotic affair where you rarely know what is really happening. It becomes less strategic and more hands-on old-plain reaction to dodge. This chaos may also be the reason why combat has lost most of its impact, as there is so much happening on screen that developers had to throw away some sounds and cues in order to give a bare minimum of sense of control and also perform decently on the lesser hardware.
Anyway, these are my thoughts after playing a few hunts in the demo. Capcom has since addressed that many of the performance issues will be fixed in the final version, which may solve some of the problems I’ve listed, especially the controls, but most things will remain the same. That worries me.
It worries me because it will be a Monster Hunter game, it will ride the booming of Monster Hunter: World and it is being released on a platform that is severely lacking in terms of big releases. This means it will likely sell A LOT, which will not exactly represent the major downgrade that this game seems to be when in comparison to Monster Hunter: World.
Let’s see the final product though. Until then, everything I’m saying here could change. I hope Monster Hunter: Rise is a decent game, as I’m itching for some Monster Hunter action in the near future.