Monster Hunter: World

Monster Hunter: World is a fantasy role-playing action game with a third-person perspective, where you will hunt and capture various interesting monsters, such as huge dinosaurs with inflated noses. The continuation of the series retains the progressive leveling technology and a powerful crafting system. You will also need to strategically use the environment, including the landscape, vegetation, and wildlife, to your advantage, to fight monsters despite the danger they pose.

The Monster Hunter series has been around for many years, but it was quite complex and obscure, and therefore not well known to the general public. Thus, World has become simpler, with no ties to previous games, developed with modern trends in mind, and should primarily attract the attention of newcomers.

The series takes place in an alternative reality, where dinosaurs from various eras, terrifying monsters from many cultures around the world, and simply fantastic creatures inhabit one ecosystem.

Players will encounter several vast seamless locations, each with its own unique landscape and sometimes complex terrain (which can be flown over), where various monsters graze with their young.

Connecting the hunting grounds is a hub location with its gameplay opportunities – communication, purchasing ingredients, food, crafting weapons, armor, as well as upgrading them and selecting quests.

The game begins with character creation (the Hunter) in an advanced editor – in addition to customizing the face and body shape, you can set the voice, facial expressions, choose clothing and armor. Besides a human, you need to create a companion… a cat, and there are also many settings here, including ear shape, whiskers, and unusual fur patterns.

Next, the player learns that their character is a member of an elite squad of monster hunters and, along with friends (and kitties!), sets out to track the migrating Elder Dragon. According to genre conventions, a huge monster attacks the ship, the hero survives only by a miracle, and now they need to acclimate to the wonderful new world and finally find the Elder Dragon.

This is the setup for the plot of Monster Hunter: World, but don’t expect any special story. The characters serve as background and are forgettable; the writers were so indifferent that they didn’t even come up with names. Almost all dialogues are dedicated to the Elder Dragon, its search, and the desire to take it down. The quests are straightforward – most NPCs refuse to talk to you until you kill a couple of monsters.

The single-player mode does not aim to save the world. Everything in Monster Hunter: World is dedicated to resource gathering and monster hunting, crafting items, and through them – leveling up the character, which opens up the possibility of hunting more serious monsters and gathering resources from them, thus completing the cycle.

There are no rules; moreover, the game encourages exterminating everything in your path, with a particular cynicism: By killing a large monster, you can make a new sword from its bones, and then slaughter all its offspring, as they drop extremely rare materials and components.

Thanks to quality implementation, grinding does not cause rejection, but the single-player mode does not offer any other opportunities. Rewards are also given for completing story and similar secondary quests.

Monster Hunter: World features cooperative gameplay for 4 players, and the monster's strength increases depending on the number of players in the party. The quests in single-player and cooperative modes are the same, so farming resources will be easier with a team of friends.

The game allows you to create a guild of 50 people, and the fact that up to 16 players can be in the location at the same time simplifies interaction between them. This means any player can join a party and help take down a monster as long as there are open slots.

in Monster Hunter: World is not a hunting simulator: the process of preparing and tracking local game is casual, while hunting is tied to the number of hits needed to take down the next beast. If you have ever killed a particularly tough boss with annoying abilities in action games by methodically pressing buttons, you can imagine what this is about.

The game features 14 types of weapons, including classic sword and shield, great sword, dual blades, spear, as well as exotic ones – shotgun spear, transformer hammer, bagpipes, crossbow-machine gun, and more. Each weapon has its own gameplay and combinations of attacks, interesting features. All this defines a play style that cannot be ignored; you have to follow it.

As for abilities, the protagonist does not have any on their own; they are determined by their armor and weapons, which can be crafted from available resources and then upgraded, sharpening them for specific damage, say, from electricity, fire, or ice. There are also no classes in Monster Hunter: World.

In practice, of course, hunting is not that simple. The player needs to keep traps, grenades, ammo, potions, mixtures in their inventory, regularly eat hearty meals, and perform a number of other actions to increase their character's (and cat's!) defense, raise damage, and have the ability to stun or blind the monster. You need to monitor the enemy's actions, roll and take cover at the right time, block hits.

Enemies are very well designed: each monster has vulnerable points and limbs, unique attacks, a daily routine, and behavior logic – tired of fighting you, it may fly away to sleep or head into the forest to snack and replenish health. So battles with them can take up to half an hour.

During the hunt, you can drop rocks on the target, flood their hideouts, bring in other monster foes, or lure one to another. You can also take a cat into battle – it has useful attacking, defensive, or healing abilities.