I have MHW and while I liked some of that game, the amount of youtube I had to watch just to play it properly was absurd.
Even when I *was* playing it properly, I'm just not sure WHY I was playing it, or that it was even fun. I find the same to be true of this so far. There are a lot more tutorials here than MHW had, and you'd think that would make the game less confusing. In fact some of my favorite respected reviewers said this was the easiest MH game to get into. What are they smoking!? As someone who only played these two games, I find in both, but especially this, that the UI almost unbearable. There are so many menus, submenus, items, multiple currencies (?! WHY), and the explanations are in text from 4 generations ago - tons and tons of so much text. Prepare to get your reading glasses polished, because there are novels worth of material to read through here. There are tutorials explaining the tutorials. Explanations in-game for things that you NEED to know how to do are disjointed, boring, confusing, and chaotic.

When you finally find a big monster to bash, it runs away without any reason, even if you've smashed it's head in a gajillion times - and from what I've seen there are no firefly trails to track them as there were in the other game. Not that you really need them, as the map looks like they ripped it right out of the original Tribes game, aside from some detail textues. I've spent nearly an hour just picking up hundreds of items that I don't understand. Dodge-rolling feels dramatically underwhelming, and overall this game (except for some pretty good ? textures and lighting, truly feels like it was a switch port money grab. There was literally no work done beyond reskinning and superficial stuff from what I can tell (yes I can play it at 4k and 200 fps but this runs on a 2GB 1050 as well as it does on a 3090. I'm utterly underwhelmed at this point. Confusing, incoherent and overwrought in literally every direction. By 1 hour into a game you should be able to figure out what the hell you're supposed to do, and you should be able to do it without going through 12 sub-menus and reading 13 tutorials to figure it out. The controls for items are literally to the point of just WHY would you design a game this way. It's like the devs have never played another game before. I thought Nioh 2 was convoluted and confusing but this game makes that feel like a baby's game. I guess if you're broke and really love this series and want to squeeze every last drop out of it so you feel like you have stuff to do because you blew your mom's money on it and feel like it's worth ignoring the countless arbitrary stuff littered up and down every tiny map and screen clogging up something that should be smooth, simple, and skill-based - then man you're gonna love this. But for me, I'm feeling pretty angry about how terrible the whole thing feels so far.

I'll update my review as I progress, if I can even stomach it. And I guess I'm progressing - I just "finished" a "quest" and "leveled up" but I have no idea why I did, what I did, or why I needed that egg I was lugging around. Why am I doing what I'm doing?! Why is it fun?! IS IT FUN!??! I'm not so sure just yet. So far I mostly am frustrated and hate it.

If you play a variety of games and enjoy many types and know what good feels like, your brain is going to be exploding with the amount of clicking through menus, running in circles and trying to figure out why things are the way they are, and why it looks like every element of the UI was designed by a blind man from 1990's.