The Therapist Gamer

The Monster Hunter series has long been the gold standard for, well, monster hunting games.  The main premise is that you (and friends) track down a monster and engage in an epic boss fight, and then use it's body parts for armor and weapons.  By creating better armor and weapons, you can take on stronger and stronger monsters.  It's pretty much the same behavioral reinforcement model as free mobile phone games, but it's actually backed up with fun gameplay.

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The Monster Hunter games had been on portable devices for about a decade before Monster Hunter: World was released, so this game serves as a massive technical/graphical update to the series.  It was advertised as being in a giant open world (unlike previous entries with smaller areas with many loading screens per battle arena), but really it's just the old model but with much, much bigger arenas.  There are five (or so) giant areas to play in, but they are not connected in one seamless world.  Unlike previous games, however, you can freely explore an area without time constraints and various monsters will arrive in and leave the area.

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Monster Hunter: World does provide a story and it makes sense in that universe, but it isn't really much more than an excuse to go out and slaughter armies of monsters.  I was totally fine with this because the story isn't really pushed in your face that much and, frankly, I bought the game just to fight boss characters and create new equipment from their remains.  I got what I payed for.

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There are dozens of different kinds of monsters and they are all actually pretty unique (with a few exceptions).  The main idea of avoiding attacks and striking at the right moment remains, but the monsters all behave differently and require little adjustments with how you approach them.  For example, one enemy will run away when it's getting beat up too bad, and you need to find ways to draw it back; another enemy has quickly growing horns all over it's body and they grow stronger each time they take damage - this creates an incentive for you to repeatedly attack the same part of it's body lest it become unmanageably tough.  One small aspects of the fights that that I really appreciated is that the more you damage a monster, the more it looks damaged; they don't have energy bars - you can simply tell how close they are to death by the way they look and how they behave (if you like, you can capture monsters instead of kill them).  There are always multiple monsters in each locale, so you'll often be fighting one monster when another will swoop in and attack it too! 

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There are lots of different weapon classes to choose from, and you can build upgrades of each type.  There are giant swords, bows, guns, knives, and all sorts of other random weapons.  My personal favorite was the "insect glaive," which is kind of like a pike that you can stick into the ground to pole-vault onto the monsters.  The fighting itself is a bit too simplistic for my taste.  I think the developers figured that if a person got bored with one weapon that there are plenty of other weapons to try out, ergo there are actually a lot of different moves that each player has available.  In reality, I suspect that most people try out a few weapons before settling on one to focus on upgrading.  And using one weapon simply doesn't have enough variety in its move set.  I personally think the game would probably feel much more accessible if the designers settled on maybe five different weapon types, and then made deep move sets with each of the five weapons.  That way people wouldn't be overwhelmed with the huge variety of weapons, all of the available moves could still be utilized, and each player would feel like they had a much wider range of combat options with their weapon.

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Your armor is broken into five main categories, each being upgradeable.  Part of the fun of Monster Hunter is walking around and seeing other players' gear, and wondering wear they got their cool looking armor.  Some armor is almost like a badge of honor, showing others (and yourself) that you have conquered difficult monsters over and over.  Before long you'll get armor that has special bonuses if you wear them in sets.  For example, if you have three sets of armor from the same monster, then you can gain some trait consistent with that monster; perhaps more stamina, resistance to heat, immunity to poison, or the ability to harvest more food from collection points.  There are no experience points in the game, only better stats and abilities obtained from better equipment.

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One of the weaknesses of Monster Hunter: World is that, in general, it's pretty convoluted.  Over the years there have just been so many features added to the series and pretty much all of them are in this one game.  It can be overwhelming to a person who's never played a game like this before.  It's hard to explain, but there are just so many options of things to do that it's hard to work out what is actually important.  While you're learning the basics of how to kill monsters and use their carcass for upgrades, you also learn how to use a BBQ spit, how to throw a bug net, how to automate mixing honey with herbs to make super potions, how to ask a chef to make you a meal before battle, how to make hats for your pet cat . . . the list of things seems endless.  I don't think this is a flaw, per se, because all of these things add to the overall gameplay experience, but the average newcomer will likely experience a period of time where they feel like they are supposed to know more than they actually do.

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I also think the controls are pretty convoluted and could have been done better.  After quite a while of playing I got used to it, but the controls simply confused me for hours.  I'd be in the heat of battle, low on health, and in need of a potion.  I'd select it on the item list but just couldn't use it.  I'd similarly have times when I couldn't run away and couldn't attack.  It perplexed me that I'd push one button to take out my weapon and a different button to put it away.  What I figured out is that the game designers were trying to accommodate all of the things that you can do in the game, and thus made a sort of "two stance" control scheme - one set of controls for fighting, and another set for when you aren't.  This is why there are different buttons for very similar functions - you draw your weapon with square because it's the same button you press to attack in "attack mode," and you put your weapon away with R1 because that's the button you use to run away during "normal mode."  You can only use items in "normal mode," which is why I was struggling to use a potion - I needed to put my weapon away first.  In a way it all makes sense, but it's just weird and, I think, unnecessary.  They should have just made so that certain buttons always attack, one button always runs, and one button always uses the selected item.  Having the "two stance" control scheme seems completely unnecessary and only serves to heighten the barrier to entry, and it's just made so much worse by needing to use both during battles.

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Monster Hunter: World isn't' a flawless game, but it knows what it is and embraces it with it's own sense of style.  If you can get past it's weird and overly complicated systems, there's a lot to enjoy.