Disclaimer: I haven't played it in a couple years. Things could have changed?
I honestly hated it. I'd recommend skipping this title.
Pros:
1. It looks awesome.
2. All the various weapons feel unique to play.
Cons:
1. Everything has far too much health. I should not get bored when a monster is trying to kill me, but I do. Every fight just sticks around far too long. I'm bored and thinking about other games I could be playing far before the enemy finally either dies or is captured. They could nerf the monsters' HP by 25% and it would probably feel a heck of a lot better.
Even the hyped-up fights like the Ice Dragon fell victim to this. The collab fights also got real boring real quick due to this problem.
2. They then expect you to kill the same monster over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. It is OG-EverQuest-level of grinding. You need to get parts from the monsters, most of which have a low drop rate and in numbers that make you get them to drop multiple times. I can 1000% see why there were mods to put all the monster parts on a vendor because doing it the right way was incredibly boring.
3. The story is awful. You are there to cull some monsters to maintain the island's ecology. The biggest threat to the ecology is you. A monster even hatches right in front of you at one point and you just immediately go for the kill. The Iceborne story wasn't much better before I uninstalled.
4. They keep throwing the same enemies at you with some minor differences, making the #2 con worse. Even the various monsters don't really have much of a difference in how you approach fighting them.
5. The UI is horrendous. The scrolling-inventory-wheel thing made me want to gouge my eyes out and toss my monitor out a window. A simple hotbar that games had 30 years ago would have been nice. An enemy health bar wouldn't have been too much to ask, too.
6. The introduction to the Iceborne expack (bought it to play with friends) was bad. You start by killing monsters you've killed already before finally meeting a new monster, but the new monster is super boring to fight. It just burrows into the snow and you spend an eternity running after it. The biggest threat to me during that fight was not falling asleep out of sheer boredom (I'm serious, I was nodding off).
This expack somehow took all the faults of the OG experience and made every single one of them worse.
7. It is one of the most anti-multiplayer games I've ever played. They kept restricting me to single player. Why?
All in all, you would be much better off just skipping this game.
1.0