Monster Hunter World review

Wrath of the wild.

Two legs bad, four legs good

Speaking of journeys, your nominal motivation in the game is to pursue a giant Elder Dragon called Zorah Magdaros as it smashes its way through the exotic continent upon whose shores you've alighted. This is perhaps the line beyond which the game's love of its depth and obscurity is genuinely misplaced. Whereas the NPCs and quest-givers in Destiny - to continue that comparison - eventually grew into lovable personalities, Monster Hunter World doesn't offer much to latch onto. It doesn't help that two of your most frequent companions - the Planner and Field Team Leader - apparently don't even qualify for actual names. The Palicoes who dance around to prepare your meals are more memorable than any characters we encountered on our quest.

More could have been done with this side of the game, then, but at least the developers built the story around the pursuit of a giant monster, because the game's bestiary are definitely the stars. From Tobi-Kadachis and Paolumus to Anjanaths and Rathalos, the monsters will be the names you talk about with your fellow hunters, whether you're seeking guidance on how best to deal with them or just sharing war stories.

Squaring up to monsters is rarely just a case of laying into them indiscriminately - anything worth an introductory cutscene is capable of squashing you, leaving your Palico to haul you back to base camp on a gurney, and you can only "faint" like this three times before you fail the mission. You can stock up on healing potions and other status-buffing elixirs to carry you through a tough fight, but they may not be enough. Sometimes the only answer is to take your time, really study your foe's attacks and movements to understand where the chinks lie in its armor, and then measure your aggression to take advantage.

Life finds a way

It also helps to roll deep, and while the game's multiplayer systems are often as complex as everything else, it's worth spending a bit of time learning how to squad up. It's not so much that it makes the game easier - it's more that it feels like a very different game, where you can try different strategies together and tackle more challenging beasts in new ways.

That vaunted shift to PS4 and Xbox One (with a PC version still to follow) has finally filled in the technological gaps that Monster Hunter players always had to plug with their imaginations, too. From Ancient Forest to the Coral Highlands and every monster in between, this is a game with breathtaking art design and visual imagination, and the seamless environments mean the chases that punctuate labored encounters with the truly big beasts no longer mean extra load times. We feel slightly ashamed that it took high-end visuals to show us the light with Monster Hunter, but there is something special about falling in love with our first one in 4K.

And it's definitely love. At this stage, we're playing the game away from our controllers as much as we are when we're in front of the TV. Our phone browser has slowed to a crawl under the combined weight of a dozen wiki tabs, and our home screen is never clear of WhatsApp and Facebook notifications as friends swap tips and coordinate hunts. It's become that kind of game, and if you also stumbled into 2018 slightly bereft, wondering where your next big gaming obsession was going to come from, Capcom really has delivered the answer.

The Monster Hunter World life can take a while to get you, but once it does you’ll wonder what you ever did without it.

Editor-at-Large

Tom is probably best known for the 15 years - FIFTEEN YEARS! - he spent at Eurogamer, one of Europe's biggest independent gaming sites. Now he roams the earth, but will always have a home here at AllGamers. You can try and raise him from his deep, abyssal slumber through tom.bramwell@allgamers.com or he's also on Twitter.

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