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Monster Hunter Rise Review

There is nothing quite like driving a fire-breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex through a raging volcano like a runaway train before using it to stomp the heck out of a dragon. Monster Hunter Rise continues a franchise that is recognised for offering action-packed combat that are hard to find elsewhere. Its scope and progression can sometimes seem flatter than that of Monster Hunter World at its inception (including a glaring absence of Elder Dragons), making it seem like a foundation just waiting to be built upon. However, after spending dozens of hours with Rise’s wonderfully enhanced mobility and faster pace, it will be difficult to ever go back to the way things were before.

For those who are unfamiliar with the franchise, Monster Hunter Rise revolves around slaying or capturing enormous, amazing monsters in order to transform them into pairs of trousers (among other items of clothing), this time with a fantastic feudal Japanese theme all throughout. A successful hunt rewards you with materials used to craft better equipment that will, in turn, allow you to defeat harder monsters, and so on and so forth. Purchase Monster Hunter:Rise from some known game reseller sites such as SEAGM and start grinding the fun. Each hunt is essentially an epic boss fight against one or more specific monsters, all of which are incredibly diverse in both visual design and behavior. The variety of 14 radically different weapon types you can switch between, the strategic challenge of breaking and severing specific parts of a monster rather than just whacking at it mindlessly, and the never-ending allure of that next cool piece of gear keep the game fresh. Success depends on a healthy balance of preparation and skill.See more info from here Second Hand Mobile Phone

Monster Hunter has a reputation for being difficult to master due to the systems that contain all of that richness, but 2018’s Monster Hunter World broke down that barrier by reducing several elements and making the series more approachable to a larger audience than ever before. (For background, World sold at least 11 million more copies than the previous top-selling game in the series; hence, for a sizable portion of contemporary Monster Hunter fans, World is all they’ve ever known.) This is significant since Rise plays more like a sequel to Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate than it does like World itself, which makes sense considering that World was never released on Switch and Rise is a sequel to Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate.

This indicates that there are a variety of concepts presented here, some of which are more effective than others. For instance, many of the streamlining improvements made in World have been brought over, such as load-free maps, the removal of consumable whetstones, and the addition of walking-useable healing supplies. These changes seem essential after using them for hundreds of hours in the World. Other elements from earlier Monster Hunter games are also included, such as the option to modify a weapon’s playstyle and separate Village and Hub questlines for single- and multiplayer play. Rise seems like a tremendous mechanical stride forward in comparison to Generations Ultimate, but more of a sidestep in the context because of this amalgamation of old concepts with some fascinating new ones of its own of World and its Iceborne expansion.

Both entering and exiting hunts, load times are startlingly quick. It should come as no surprise that Rise’s story is as thin as tissue paper because narrative has never been the focus of a Monster Hunter game (Capcom actually has a series called Monster Hunter Stories for that). It’s recounted through a meager number of sequences in which English voice acting is stammeringly overdubbed to match what seem to be unmodified Japanese lip flaps in a way that neither party benefits from. The battles that take place around such settings are still interesting despite this, but it’s crucial to note that World made other enhancements as well. Although the tale wasn’t much thicker, it did offer a good feeling of continuity and discovery that gave you the impression that you were genuinely discovering its new continent. Although it’s by no means a deal breaker or even necessarily something I’m looking for from Monster Hunter, I missed that a little in Rise, where unlocking new areas or being sent on key hunts rarely had much relation to the story or your actions in it. Despite this, Rise takes a noticeable step backward from World in this area.

Smaller concerns like these, though, pale in comparison to the enormous (literal) step forward Rise makes with the hunts themselves. The purpose of Monster Hunter is to hunt down some damned monsters, and in this game, the options, settings, and methods for doing so are, on the whole, excellent. It’s quite amazing how close Rise comes to the pristine visuals I became accustomed to with World, despite the Switch’s comparatively subpar technology. This includes how well it typically functions as well as load times that are startlingly quick throughout both the start and end of hunts. Capcom also deserves praise for creating an online system that simply works and enables you to easily join the lobbies of your Switch buddies. On the Switch, that’s now an excruciatingly rare norm of life (I’m looking at you, Animal Crossing).

Rise uses a more straightforward adaptation of the outdated Key Quest system to let you choose from a wide variety of hunts right away, and only requires you to finish a set number of your preferred hunts before you can advance to the next tier. This immediate variety of monsters Rise throws at you also impressed me. That adaptability is much valued, story be damned. There are many creatures to face, but it seemed like I had seen most of them by the time I completed Rise’s single-player Village questline, making the second half of its advancement in the Hub a little less interesting. This is the main disadvantage.

Reaching High Rank, a harder tier of Hub hunts that increases difficulty and rewards, however, does more than simply add more life and damage to each monster’s numbers; it completely changes how they fight. This is one of Monster Hunter’s oldest and finest tactics. The entire zoo will exhibit some new behaviours, including more aggressive ones; the increased numbers that go along with them will only serve to further rekindle their sense of danger. Though by no means novel to Rise, this is one of the most crucial things Monster Hunter accomplishes since it helps maintain encounters with the same enemies as interesting and novel.
Almost all of the new monsters are total bangers.

And my my, this time around there are some fantastic creatures! More than 30 need to be taken down, with nearly a third being brand-new to Rise (though there are a handful imported from World as well, so Generations Ultimate players will have even more fresh tails to chop off). The best part is that almost every new addition is a definite banger. They all have fantastic designs, both in terms of appearance and fighting methods, and they undoubtedly represent some of my favourite hunts in Rise. That includes the absurd bird-monkey Bishaten, who hurls persimmons at you, the platypus-turtle Tetranadon, whose design is reminiscent of sumo, and the graceful fire-crane Aknosom, who wields some of the most stylish armour and weaponry on the market.
Speaking of weaponry, there is an obvious sense of visual diversity throughout, which feels like a direct reaction to a popular criticism of the World.
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The designs range from really badass to extremely ridiculous almost immediately, yet when you advance them, their appearance doesn’t change as dramatically. Similar to the monster variety, this can cause Rise to feel a little weaker in its second half than I had initially anticipated, both in terms of visuals and power level. For instance, I was a little taken aback to discover that I essentially didn’t need to switch off the straightforward Insect Glaive from the Ore Tree (which, hilariously, just looks like a rifle) for nearly all of High Rank.More Movies Download from here 4movierulz

How the Insect Glaive Has Changed

In Monster Hunter Rise, almost every weapon has undergone some kind of modification, no matter how little. I nearly solely use the Insect Glaive while playing with the IGN Wikis crew, who have a lot of expertise with a variety of weapons. However, because many people are like me and just use their primary weapon, I decided I’d break down a bit of it here so those who aren’t interested may safely go ahead. This weapon has evolved significantly since it made its most recent appearance in the World.

The Glaive’s initial moveset is essentially untouched from World, but if you choose to employ the Switch Skills that enable you to tweak some strikes, it may have a huge influence on your combos. Since the Glaive’s agility is one of my favorite aspects of it, I was a fan of both alternate possibilities since they trade slower huge hits for quick strikes, which fits my preferred playstyle. Additionally, one of them is a draw attack that allows you to spin forward while unleashing a barrage of hits and automatically launches you into the air with a dodge if you take damage while striking, which is just so much fun.

The Silkbind movements of the Glaive first struck me as dull aerial tricks for a weapon that arguably doesn’t require them, but the one linked to ZL+A quickly became a mainstay of my hunts. I can deliver harm for a longer period of time while remaining undetected because to this emergency dodge button’s absurdly extended invincibility window. Unfortunately, the Silkbind Switch Skill you gain at High Rank can only be exchanged with the one I actually used. I prefer to employ Rise’s trademark new Wirebug system defensively, making the ZL+X choice less helpful and more of a reason to rush into a fight.

The Kinsects that travel with the Glaive, however, have undergone the most significant alterations. Kinsect nurturing is no longer an option; instead, as you advance, you’ll simply be able to purchase new bug kinds, with each Glaive having a unique Kinsect Level that affects their stats. Currently, kinsect kinds are divided into three groups: When all three essences are gathered, Assist will attack alongside you for enhanced anime flair, Speed will charge up while on your arm before doing more damage on their initial strike, and Powder will be the only type that can auto attack and leave detonatable clouds behind, like previously (and damage).

This is a very remarkable shift, giving each kind a preference for a certain playstyle while World offered you very little incentive to choose anything other than the fastest choice. In fact, the well-known Pseudocath turned out to be one of my least favorite alternatives in Rise, utterly wrecking my world. The Assist Kinsects can really ensure that they always gather a red or white essence regardless of where you strike, greatly accelerating close-range collecting and ensuring that I always had my red attack combinations accessible. However, that’s just what I liked better; someone else could enjoy the dust clouds that are now only present in Powder types. In any event, what’s amazing is the increased availability of actual options.

The most potent new gadget in Rise is available to everyone, regardless of the weapon you use: the Wirebug. You may employ wirebugs as a recharging resource to jump into the air, scale any wall, recover from significant damage, and perform unique Silkbind techniques. It’s difficult to emphasize their impact on both the tempo of battle and non-conflict situations. As you summit mountains and hop over great distances, Rise suddenly not only doesn’t have loading screens between its map zones, but it hardly really has any borders. Additionally, in the heat of combat, Wirebugs may be employed on special attacks and maneuvers specific to each weapon, such as epic strikes and increased mobility.
However, the maneuver that has the most influence on altering the speed of fight itself is also the subtlest: if a powerful blow knocks you back, pressing ZL+B will deploy a Wirebug to lift you back up and sheathe your weapon. On the surface, that might not seem like a game-changer, but the amount of downtime it eliminates during a battle might be significant. Now that taking damage is an opportunity rather than a setback, you may move aside while you heal yourself or rapidly re-engage without losing a beat (with potions now giving you half their healing right away to speed things up even further). Simply put, this motion is Rise: cut the fat, fill the dead air, and get you going as soon as possible. In a nutshell, it is fantastic and I’m not sure I’ll ever want Monster Hunter to be without Wirebugs.
In a nutshell, Wirebugs are Rise: fill the empty space and speed you up.

That attitude is evident in other areas as well, such as how Rise expands on Iceborne’s fantastic monster riding premise by granting you complete control of a rideable canine companion that is far faster than running about on foot. But more than that, some of the pre-hunt preparations, such as certain meal buffs and tool options, have been streamlined or put into collectibles for mid-mission. While preparation is still essential, you may now go right into a quest and pick up important Endemic Life and stat boosts to help fill in some of the gaps as you go.

The most significant of them are the vibrant Spiribirds that can be found scattered around each map; depending on their hue, you can get more attack, defense, stamina, health, or any combination thereof. Finding the best pathways in each area to gather them before entering the fight was a fun game. I particularly liked that these not-insignificant stat enhancements were gained through exploration rather than menu manipulation (one I could ignore against weaker monsters to save time). But following the same path of birds for five to ten minutes at the beginning of every hunt to max out my stats may become boring after a while, and I did start to miss just choosing the extra boosts I wanted more directly through meals. In the end, it’s a worthwhile experiment that makes use of Rise’s improved mobility, but I wouldn’t miss it quite as much as I would the movement itself.

The recently enhanced monster riding system, which is both awesome and crazy, gives me a similar impression. A monster will ultimately become rideable after taking enough damage from specific assaults (or from another monster inflicting pain), but unlike in previous games where the monster was still voracious and difficult to manage, Rise offers you entire control over it. They are easy to control like a dog, you can slam them into walls at whim, and you can even employ their light and heavy strikes with a combo and parry system that is shockingly precise in its timings. You have a lot of time to do all of this, allowing you to send monsters across the entire area to engage in kaiju battles with one another, dropping more resources and dealing out some heavy damage.

It’s a tonne of fun, but a side consequence is that the other creatures on the map go from being fearsome beasts into useful tools. It’s no longer exciting when a different monster appears out of nowhere and hilariously complicates your battle; although some may like the absence of pandemonium, it also reduces the differences between those creatures and the small Endemic Life waiting to be picked up, which is a little odd.

It was not unusual for me to employ three or four different monsters to defeat my true target throughout the course of a 20-minute search. There are several methods to quickly ride or coax creatures into combat. That’s thrilling once again, but it also means that Rajang, who I once feared, is now little more than a tool to be manipulated. (The infamous Deviljho and Bazelguese are not present in Rise, but I’m not even convinced their intrusive interruptions would fit in here.) 

Although the new monster riding system is entertaining, it reduces other monsters to the status of mere tools.

This impression is somewhat present in Rise’s new Rampage hunts as well. Rampages allow you to put up ballistas, cannons, and other defenses to protect gates against waves of monsters. It’s kind of like a bizarre cross between Monster Hunter and a tower defense game. It’s a strange but entertaining oddity that is reminiscent of earlier siege conflicts like Kulve Taroth, but with a lot more customization and a lot less stress. 

The monsters who rush your gate are weaker than normal, so instead of fighting them on the ground with your weapon, you’ll spend a good portion of each rampage at a turret dousing them in bolts, explosives, and even machine gun fire. It’s a very fun side mode, and playing with a group of friends makes it even more fun. One person could man a turret, another could set up new defenses, and a third could shovel coal into a kiln to shorten the cooldown on potent superweapons like the well-known Dragonator and what is essentially an aerial nuke.

Rampages have been fun to finish, but they also don’t vary much from run to run, essentially only being changed by a variety of easy side objectives to boost your overall score, such stunning a set amount of creatures. There are only four different stronghold layouts that may be used to protect them, and while the monsters that assault may differ in appearance, a Khezu and a Basarios will effectively destroy your gate in the same way. The actual appeal of them is going up against the really powerful Apex creatures that end some High Rank Rampages, but soon I simply hoped I could fight those in the field rather than having to repeat the tower defensive routine in order to avoid them.

Despite this, Rampages does pay off for your time by giving you a tonne of Defender Tickets and a scattering of crafting materials from each sort of monster there. With the use of a brand-new system called Rampage Skills, you may utilize them to modify your weaponry by adding your pick of one of three extra perks. That might range from basic effects like raising attack, defense, or affinity to more unusual ones like delivering more damage to adversaries in the air, among other things, or increasing damage as your weapon dulls.Each type of Rampage skill comes with a cool Rampage weapon, which is essentially a blank canvas on which you may apply three Rampage skills instead of one, allowing you to create your own unique tool of destruction.

Rise restores some of the prior playstyle complexity that World simplified away when combined with this customizability and another new feature called Switch Skills, which enables each weapon to change out a few particular techniques for other ones. These options, which included switching a powerful overhead hit with a quick forward spin and prioritizing personal preference over sheer power, often didn’t have an obvious right or wrong answer (although I’m sure min-maxers will find some perfect combination soon enough). Despite the fact that each weapon appears to only have three Switch Skills at the moment, one of which is a Silkbind move, this is still enough to noticeably alter how a weapon behaves.

It’s unfortunate that Rise doesn’t presently have any kind of ending to really test the boundaries of all the options it provides. I spent just under 50 hours playing through Rise to see pretty much everything there is to see and finish the story; this is by no means a short amount of time, and I still have a few optional quests to complete to unlock better meal options or Switch Skills for other weapons. Despite this, Rise ends on an unsatisfying cliffhanger and feels like it’s missing the final challenge that would have put you to the test. I was saddened to learn that, other from a few Elder Dragons that can only be battled in exceptional encounters, there are no more challenges that become available once you reach this stage, Tempered beasts, replayable locales like Iceborne’s Guiding Lands, or Tempered monsters (which, avoiding spoilers, are at least extremely cool).

Rise ends up appearing more like a fantastic foundation for Capcom to expand upon than a rich game on its own at launch when you combine it with its very flat-feeling equipment and advancement. That’s not to say there isn’t anything here now, and the outstanding support of the World gives me a lot of hope that Rise will develop in some form. Even though its first free content update isn’t due until the end of April, it’s probably for the best that it does so soon because I’m quickly running out of personal objectives to keep me hunting.

PC Impressions and Post-Launch Updates

Nearly a year after its Switch premiere, Monster Hunter Rise is now available on PC, and it comes with months’ worth of post-launch patches straight now. It was wonderful to get the opportunity to wirebug my way around its regions once more, this time at a considerably higher resolution and fps. Rise looks amazing here and has so far performed well on the two PCs I’ve tested it on (each of which is fairly powerful, with RTX 3080 and 2070 Super GPUs, respectively), whether I played online or alone.

Another issue I had with Rise at launch was a general lack of things to do in the late game. However, having every event quest, new monster, and content update immediately available does help alleviate this issue. While the plot is still as thin as a Kinsect’s wing, it is no longer left on an offensive cliffhanger and may now be promptly followed by some spectacular Elder Dragon hunts as you raise your Hunter Rank.

Having said that, Rise hasn’t had any improvements that have had the same impact that I had hoped for a year ago. There weren’t any unexpected hunts to shake things up the way something like Monster Hunter World’s Kulve Taroth siege or Witcher crossovers did, but the new monsters have been fun to fight and the tie-in event quests have been entertaining (including one where you race to pick up rings as Sonic Adventure 2’s iconic “Escape From the City” plays). It’s really simply “more,” thus the updates never really hooked me for very long. Thankfully, though, “more” is still a lot of fun.

Now that I’ve played Rise for about 200 hours, there are a few gameplay aspects I can notice with more clarity. Rampages are, without a doubt, a massive miss. They were already beginning to lose their appeal, as I noted in my first assessment, and as I played more and more, I realised that I had completely lost interest in doing them—especially once updates made the more terrifying Apex creatures available to battle in common places.

In a similar vein, the Spirit Bird and monster-riding mechanics, which I certainly liked but had mixed feelings about, have, as far as I can tell, been almost entirely ignored by the larger community, as almost all of the random players I’ve queued up with over the past year simply don’t interact with them at all on hunts.

All things considered, Rise is still a tonne of fun, and I’m delighted it has performed this well for me on PC thus far. While the updates (while they didn’t build on its promising foundation as much as I’d hoped) didn’t quite live up to my expectations, they still mean PC players will receive the more comprehensive package at launch that Switch hunters had to impatiently wait for. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Monster Hunter World on Steam. The Sunbreak addition, which is set to release this summer, has already caught my attention. The improved graphics could be all I need to persuade me to finish my Switch save on PC after all.

Final Thoughts

Monster Hunter Rise combines tried-and-true Monster Hunter concepts with some of World’s greatest upgrades and a tonne of ingenious new elements. The introduction of Wirebugs and the movement they provide to every fight is so fantastic that I never want to give them up. They are not all slam dunks, but they are all enjoyable. Even without the post-launch additions Capcom has already hinted at, Monster Hunter Rise is still an exhilarating step in the series’ journey toward the new normal World that was so audaciously proposed.

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