APEX PREDATOR

MONSTER HUNTER: RISE is as good as Capcom’s flagship series has ever been

- Rich Stanton

NEED TO KNOW

WHAT IS IT? Murder monsters then make cute hats out of their faces

EXPECT TO PAY £50

DEVELOPER Capcom

PUBLISHER In-house

REVIEWED ON GeForce GTX 1070, 16GB RAM, i7-7700HQ

MULTIPLAYER Four-player co-op

LINK monsterhunter.com

It’s been a genuine pleasure over the years watching Monster Hunter go from a niche favourite to wild success in Japan, making inroads in the West, before smashing through and becoming a global hit. That’s perhaps over-simplifying the arc for Capcom’s beast-basher par excellence, but the series now has a huge fanbase and the kind of resource behind it that has resulted in years of better and better games, as well as a distinct split.

There’s the Monster Hunter: World take on the series, which has the fundamentals but is a seriously big-budget endeavour – a visual and aural spectacle with gorgeous, flowing animations and jaw-dropping monsters. Monster Hunter: Rise is the other branch, following in the footsteps of games like Generations and hewing closer to the series’ portable heritage: smaller, more contained maps rather than larger more open-world style exploration. Rise was, of course, originally designed as a Nintendo Switch exclusive and, though this PC release is a good port with everything you’d expect, it has nowhere near that immediate visual ‘wow’ factor that World did. Nor can it compete on things like textures or the stunning bespoke animations for monsters fighting each other. Thing is, though, Rise is the better game.