Recent reviews by SLURP JURT

Why censor and remove details just because of the current political climate? That's not a remaster if the things removed are pertinent to the world and its story. Lame.

Get the originals on GOG since they're delisted here.

Played it on PS4 when it first came out, and loved the hell out of it. One of the most original and memorable games I've played, so of course it never got a sequel. Was wanting to play it again for years but it never got a PS4 Pro/PS5 patch so I'm glad to play it at higher than 30fps for once. Still looks great after 8 years, and still feels great too. Looking forward to getting all the achievements again.

Tried giving the game a chance after all these years. Felt lost and confused the whole time, and the controls/menus feel terrible. It doesn't help that you basically get a PNG control guide during the startup cutscene, missing it all and getting overwhelmed with info that's never explained again (meaning it's not taught to you in a way that flows). Mission after mission gets dumped on you with no real explanation as to why, and your reward for completing a mission is unlocking another mission (or five at once).

And then to top it all off I learn it has microtransactions? Really? For what?

Was in early access nearly 10 years ago and is still is early access with over 5 years of no communication from devs.

I already 100%'d it on PS5, but after getting a PC it was definitely on my list of games to get again. Still good. Every time I play it I'm reminded of how creative some people can be, and their ability to make unique games.

RIP River Boy, you were a legend.

I want to start off this review by saying I've played Monster Hunter since MH4U, so while I'm not as much of a 'veteran' as some people would prefer in order to respect someone's opinion on a MH game, I've played these games enough to see where it's come from and how it has evolved.

I've made note of things as I played through, and while I'm still not fully finished with the game as of writing this, I found way more good things to say than bad in about 20 hours.

Good:
• Changes to some weapons helps flesh out the playstyle without sacrificing their identity.
• Putting a bit more story into main quests makes them feel a bit more cinematic, rather than "we saw a monster, go get it" and then you hunt it, repeat.
• Your palico having better knowledge of hunts like knowing when to dismantle traps after a monster leaves is really nice.
• Splitting craftable armour options between the 'male' and 'female' versions is great, and allows for more options for making your hunter look cool. Especially since the difference is purely cosmetic, so you don't have to choose stats over fashion (in that regard, at least). This new system both lets female characters armour up more if they want, and male characters to show a little more skin than before.
• Being able to spot a small/large crown monster with binoculars is really useful. Having done crown hunting in previous games, measuring some of them is a real pain.
• Using the slinger to grab distant items including ammo is really convenient.
• The story definitely feels more fleshed out than previous games. While it's not a very story focused franchised in general, it feels like there's more going on this time around. Which is surprising considering I'd seen 'critic' reviews complaining about it. Probably because they aren't aware of the things I just mentioned. It's also definitely longer than 15 hours, even if you tunnel straight through. Games don't always end just because you reached the credits (especially with Capcom games). I get the feeling that reviewers just saw the credits and turned the game off.

Bad:
• Some systems like upgrading armour using spheres being locked behind story progression a few hours in is a bit weird. Not game breaking, but an odd change from the previous games. It made me feel like I was hindering my ability to hunt efficiently if I didn't focus on doing the story to unlock stuff.
• Hunts involving one target monster and multiple other 'smaller' ones that are not required for successful completion are a bit cumbersome and tedious, having to always use large dung bombs to be able to focus on your target.

Ugly:
• Graphical performance could be better, but I'm not going to pretend like my 12th gen i5/4060 are really qualified for a game like this anyway. Still, I hope performance improves over time with future patches and optimizations. Even with having to use DLSS and frame gen, I didn't encounter a lot of issues. On rare occasions, usually only during cutscenes, I could see a bit of ghosting, but it wasn't prevalent. I also didn't experience any input delay as a result of frame gen, but considering I'm using an Nvidia GPU, it auto enables Nvidia Reflex when using frame gen.

There isn't really a category to put this in so I'll just say it here: At least one 'critic' said the hunts were very short compared to previous games, saying what used to take them ~45 minutes was now sub-10 minutes, and that it's somehow a bad thing. I personally would rather not spend 40 minutes on each hunt, but not that they ever did for me 99% of the time anyway. Hunts dragging on too long =/= good game. Sounds like they just stopped being bad at Monster Hunter.

Anyway, as of writing this I recommend the game because I'm having fun and always looking forward to playing more. And I think that's the whole point. If my opinion changes or if I have more to add I'll edit this, but I seriously doubt I'd change it to "not recommended" unless some patch makes it impossible for me to play anymore.

Lets me put pixels. Maybe one day I'll be good at it lmao.

I enjoy pixel art games, dungeon crawlers, farming sims; everything this game takes inspiration from. Unfortunately, I can't in good conscience recommend this game. While there's a good number of things about it that are good, like the art style, sound design (mostly, but I'll get to that), they're overshadowed by glaring issues that not only don't get better over time, but become more and more frustrating. Since this is a negative review as of writing it, I will be focusing on my criticisms of the game. They're not in any particular order, just the order in which I thought of them:

• Random secondary weaknesses for spirits are really bad. You could get a strong earth spirit early on and then be totally screwed because it's randomly also weak to water, which is very common in early areas too. So you'd have to just keep trying to tame more of that same one until you got lucky. That much RNG is not fun.
• Going back and forth between the barn, lab, and medallion is tedious, and only slightly made easier by spending rare resources on an item you can place to access the lab remotely.
• The town feels empty and even after 8 hours I still don't know where anyone lives since no one is ever home when I go there unless it's a shop.
• All NPCs being romanceable also resulted in them all feeling a bit homogenized; they're all safe, and vaguely Tumblr-friendly. It felt like no real risks were taken beyond one character constantly hitting on you. I say this as a queer person myself, that simply giving all the characters specific pronouns to use doesn't automatically make them groundbreaking in design.
• Important game information is often relegated to little tips at the bottom of the screen while in the inventory menu, which makes using outside sources for information almost mandatory, which isn't helped by the fact that the "official" wiki is sorely lacking in information. Though to be fair I suppose that isn't the game's fault.
• Related to the above point, I played for nearly 7 hours thinking I couldn't go to poison, electric, and fire islands yet because I thought you needed something to protect you while there. Turns out you just take stamina damage for no discernible reason.
• Fishing feels lacking in that there aren't a lot of fish to catch and don't seem to serve much purpose. Not to mention, upgrading the fishing rod being locked behind certain fish when you can upgrade all the other tools from the get-go only limited by materials and money, all of which you can get really early.
• Radial menu is finicky and feels like it should've considered the total number of tools available, since switching wheels is clumsy. 75% of the time when I flick the stick to select one it fires back into the opposite one, so I have to move it extra delicately, wasting time.
• The game wants to be too many things at once and as a result ends up being mid at all of them. Jack of all trades, etc.
• The buzzing sound on electric islands is way too much and started to give me a headache after just a few minutes.

If I played any longer I'd probably find more things to list, but I really don't feel like it after sitting here and writing all this. It's not a bad game in theory, and has some fun aspects, but I just can't recommend it. Sorry.

Loads the mods. It's cool.

Doesn't really feel like it innovates at all. Maybe that will change someday.