Monster Hunter World is a 3D action-adventure boss rush game – and a quite good co-op experience, though with some significant annoyances due to questionable multiplayer game design choices on the part of Capcom. I played through the entire game with a friend, and I had a blast doing it – and yet, we had to engage in some shenanigans to be able to actually play through the campaign together cooperatively.
The basic gameplay cycle of the game is pretty straightforward – you eat some food and craft some items in your home base, while talking to a few NPCs who give you various items for completing tasks and quests. You go and take a quest from the quest board, which is almost always to hunt a big monster out in the world.
When you accept the quest, you are taken into one of a half-dozen zones and need to go find the monster. Typically, you do this by collecting some monster footprints, and once you collect enough of those, you get a trail guiding you to where the monster is. At this point, you start fighting the monster.
You will battle the monster for a while, but eventually it will run off into another area of the map; you don’t have to track them again, and you can rather easily pursue them there, where you continue the battle. Rinse and repeat until you have killed the monster or have used a trap from your item inventory to subdue it.
After you win, you carve the monster’s corpse up for body parts and are given a quest reward (which gives more body parts – and even more if you captured it, to make up for not cutting it up) and then go back to town to craft more items.
All of this sounds pretty basic, but in practice, it’s actually really fun. There are dozens of monsters in the base game, and then dozens more in the Iceborne expansion, which is basically another game unto itself tacked onto the end of Monster Hunter World. These monsters almost all have unique attack patterns and appearances, with only a handful of monsters that are just recolors. As you progress through the game, you unlock first high rank, then master rank monster hunts, and the monsters at higher difficulty levels are not only tougher and deal more damage, but also gain new attack patterns (including entirely new attacks not seen at lower levels!) and are significantly more aggressive. This gives the game far, far more gameplay variety than is seen in many games – there are a huge number of fairly elaborate “boss monsters”, and your goal is to defeat them all so you can kill them and wear their skins.
In addition, you are given a whopping 12 different weapon types to choose from. This includes nine different melee weapons and three different ranged weapons. These have a very high degree of variety – the attack patterns and reach of different weapons are wildly different, with weapons ranging from the extremely slow and powerful great sword to the extremely fast dual blades. Some weapons allow you to block attacks with shields (or in the case of the great sword, the flat of your blade), some allow you to move around while you have an attack charged up (instead of being stationary while attacking)… there is a great deal of gameplay variety in them, and they all favor different playstyles. All of them are viable in the game, though some are a bit better than others, and some weapons (like the bagpipes, which give group buffs) are stronger if you are playing with other people.
In addition to all this, you have a “Palico”, a cat who you bring along with you. You get to choose their appearance, and dress them up in cute armor of their own. These also get “palico tools” that you level up and which give you various effects – be they healing you, stealing items from monsters, buffing the party’s attack and defense, or stunning the monsters with traps.
There is also an inventory of, frankly, far too many items, which consist of healing items plus items that do various other things, like grant temporary invisibility, allow you to regenerate health faster, lay down traps for monsters, give you special ammo types temporarily, or buff you in various ways. Your inventory space is limited as well, which can be an annoyance when you pick up too many things on a mission.
And on top of all of that, there are decorations and special skills associated with your weapons and especially armor that allow you to customize your character in various ways, giving you resistances to various types of damage, letting you use items faster, or buffing you in a broad variety of ways.
The core gameplay, thus, is really good – you not only have a ton of different boss monsters to fight, but also a bunch of weapons that you can fight them with, all of which feel pretty different to use, and a high degree of character skill customization on top of that. You make your weapons out of monster body parts, so you can experiment a bit but also are given some direction on which monsters you want to hunt next. As none of them require too many parts, you generally don’t need to farm a specific monster more than a few times at most to craft a better weapon.
The cooperative gameplay is pretty good as well – you can join someone else’s session and go around hunting monsters with them, joining in on their quests with them. Additionally, there is an “SOS flare” that can be fired off during a mission to allow any player in the world to join your game and help you out. Up to four players can play together alongside each other at a time.
The game uses a scaling mechanism to make monsters tougher when you play in multiplayer – playing with two players doesn’t quite double the monster hit ponts, while playing with 3-4 doesn’t quite quadruple it. The result is generally that multiplayer makes things easier, as the monster ends up more distracted and you have more time to heal or otherwise prepare yourself. Playing with two players felt fairly ideal – you get to keep your palico companions, which is useful due to their special abilities, and it also doesn’t feel as unfair as it can with four players all beating up on the monster simultaneously. The only downside of playing in multiplayer is that missions are failed based on the number of faints for the whole team – so while a single player fainting three times would end the mission, so does three players fainting once each. Against some enemies with powerful area of effect attacks, this can be something of a liability.
The biggest problem with cooperative gameplay is that the core missions of the game are ill suited for it. You are not allowed to join a mission until the host has seen all the cutscenes – but if you haven’t seen all the cutscenes for that mission yet, you can’t join theirs, either! The only way to play through the story together is for one player to enter the mission, trigger the cutscene, then exit out, then wait for the other player to get to the cutscene so they can enter their mission to complete it together. This is even worse with 3+ people, as all of them have to do this in order to play through the main story together. There is no reason for this – indeed, some of the later special missions have cutscenes but allow players to play together on them from the get go, meaning that the restriction was entirely arbitrary.
Playing through the whole core campaign is great, and is a very fun experience. And then you get to Iceborne, which is basically a full extra game added onto the end of the first one!
This is really cool, but unfortunately, it does end up dragging by the end – the core game is about the right length, and playing it plus Iceborne back to back is just TOO long. My friend and I were getting kind of sick of the game by the end of Iceborne – even though the Iceborne monsters were great, it was all just too much to do back to back.
The other weakness of the game is that it pretends like it is a live service game in the endgame. There’s a grindy endgame where you can go try and farm materials to upgrade the endgame weapons, but… it just feels so pointless, given that you’ve already completed every meaningful challenge. All it has left is throwing up arbitrary barriers to progression, so there’s no real point to playing the post game.
Finally – the story and dialogue suck. This is not a game that is really played for those things, but the world you live in is full of cheesy dialogue and half-assed excuses to kill monsters and wear their skins. It doesn’t really matter too much, but it definitely is a weak point.
All in all, Monster Hunter World and its expansion, Iceborne, is a really great game. It takes a bit of getting used to the combat, but the game is a blast, especially with a friend. Just don’t keep playing after you’re sick of it; you can always come back at a later date if you really want to, but my suspicion is, you’ll more than have gotten your fill by the end of it. Each half of the game clocks in around 90ish hours of gameplay, so you’re really getting your money’s worth here.
4.5