Why You Should Play
- Challenging fights and skill-based combat.
- Four-player cooperative battles against massive creatures.
- Tons of items, gear, and armor to unlock and craft.
Monster Hunter: World is a vast, expansive adventure that gives many players access to an amazing and astonishing world that more recently has only been available on the Nintendo 3DS line-up. Now that the game is finally available on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, players can dive in and see what all the fuss surrounding Monster Hunter: World is all about. Boasting four-player cooperative gameplay, a ton of items and gear to unlock, and a plethora of monsters to hunt down and fight—Monster Hunter: World is everything that fans could ask for in a Monster Hunter game.
Gameplay
If you’ve never played a Monster Hunter game, then the gameplay in Monster Hunter: World probably won’t make much sense at first. There are a lot of moving parts, and learning how to deal with them is going to take time. It’s this steep learning curve, as well as the skill-based combat that draws so many fans to the series, and Monster Hunter: World offers hours upon hours of fun hunting, tracking, and facing off against massive creatures of the New World.
Your main goal in any mission is to find and track down a beast that is causing trouble in the area. This can sometimes lead to smaller battles with other monsters even as you fight to take down the monster that you are currently hunting. On top of hunting for monsters, you’ll also spend a good deal of time crafting and gathering materials to build new and better armor and other gear. There are a ton of gear variations—as well as a ton of different weapons to use—and each one offers different advantages to hunters trying to make a name for themselves.
A lot of thought went into how monsters work in Monster Hunter: World, and this really helps make the game shine. Each creature has its own territory, and when encroached upon, the monsters will fight back against each other, sometimes leading to these colossal battles between two beasts far larger than the player. It’s an astonishing site to see, and a development masterpiece in and of itself.
Perhaps the greatest thing about Monster Hunter: World, though, is the ability to easily team up with your friends and take on hunts and other quests in the world. The gameplay is fairly plug and play, and diving in is as easy as finding the invite and accepting it. Of course, this is how we’d recommend spending the majority of the game, as you’ll find that hunts are much more dynamic and fun when you have teammates to roll around with. You’ll also get to show off your gear to other players, which is great for those who go through the trouble of learning how to color their armor. The amount of work and detail that has gone into the design of each piece of gear and weapon is phenomenal, and it really shows how much the developers care about the game.
Visuals and Performance
Monster Hunter: World is by far one of the prettiest Monster Hunter games that we’ve ever seen—and we’ve put quite a bit of time into more than a few of these titles. The game’s world feels alive as you move through it, and the deep brush of the forest, the sandy dunes of the wastes, and the coral rocks of the highlands are all stunning and offer different vistas to take in as you hunt down your prey.
The animations as a whole are smooth as well, and the way that monsters move, hunters fight, and even the way that small bugs fly around feels realistic and smooth as you travel throughout the world. All of this works together to create a beautiful world that is easy to get lost in as you explore and track down creatures three times your size.
As far as performance goes, we haven’t noticed any big issues. We’ve spent the majority of our time running the game on a PlayStation 4 Pro set to the most graphically intensive options available for the game. This has led to some great visuals with no real performance issues in the 30 or so hours that we invested into the experience. We, however, have not tested the game on a regular PlayStation 4 or the Xbox One, so we cannot speak as to how it performs on that system. If the PS4 Pro performance is any indication, though, we expect that players aren’t seeing many performance issues all around.
Game of the Week
Monster Hunter: World has so much to offer players, and with over 30 hours logged into the game we’re still just scraping the surface. The game’s overall performance, excellent visuals, and outstanding gameplay help it stand out above other titles available right now, and if you have up to three friends that you can team up with, the game offers an unlimited amount of fun. Capcom is also outstandingly good at after-release support for the game, which means Monster Hunter: World players have months upon months of new content to look forward to.
Monster Hunter: World takes everything that players love about the series and brings it to the living room with improve graphics, visuals, and gameplay. The game is easy to dive into, yet hard to master, and the challenges offered within are more than enough to keep players busy for hundreds of hours. With so much to offer players, and so much to look forward to in the future, Monster Hunter: World has more than earned its place as Prima’s Game of the Week.
Monster Hunter: World is a complex machine that takes a lot of time and effort to master. Make sure you check out our Monster Hunter: World guide to get a leg up on your adventure and learn how to use the Melding Pot to get better gear. We also have an in-depth guide that will teach you all that you need to know about how to use Hammers in the game.
