Hammer Time
A few days ago, I was struck by inspiration and booted up "Monster Hunter: World" at 5 a.m. I found it absolutely necessary to rearrange my radial menu before I continued playing the game.
Being able to quickly access healing items is crucial to survival in this game. So before I jumped back into hunting, I sorted out my items and renamed my radial menus from generic "Shortcut 1/2/3/4" to "Heal", "Attack", "Communication", and "Capture".
Then, I went back to sleep because I was only up at 5 a.m. to fix a menu.
This is my first Monster Hunter and first attempt at playing a hunting game in general. Not even hearing praise of "God Eater" and "Toukiden" as "Monster Hunter-killers" convinced me to try out this niche genre. But now I can't get enough of it. As I write this, I'm sorting through menus now, crafting items and creating specific gear sets that counter specific monsters.
If you love micromanagement and crafting, this game will have you hooked before you even start hunting. There are a huge amount of skills that allow you to cater a build to your particular tastes. I'm running a poison-themed build currently: a hammer that can poison on hit, armor pieces that give me Level 3 Poison Attack so my poison stacks quickly and does more damage, and a bonus to critical attacks when I hit a poisoned opponent.
However, Monster Hunter is not a micromanagement sim where you spend all your time crafting gear and items. It happens to be a very enjoyable action game as well. There are tons of weapons with vastly different playstyles, but I was connected with the hammer from the minute I picked it up. The hammer does a lot of KO/stun damage. Your goal is to smash the monster in the head, breaking off their horns and tiring them out. Eventually they will start moving slowly, enabling you to dizzy them and hit their head even more. Think of it like a stun bar in a fighting game, except these matches generally last longer than 10 minutes.
Monster Hunter really nails that feeling of combat with a heavy blunt object. The windup for a lot of moves is slow, but when you connect there's a perfect combination of screen shaking, hit stop and the monster reeling back in pain from a heavy blow.
The menus are smartly designed, making sure you're spending less time fiddling and more time getting things done. There's a "Crafting List" you can access from the pause menu that immediately highlights what items you can craft from your pouch or item box. If you're grinding for a specific piece of gear, you can add it to a wishlist and get notifications when you pick up a crafting item you need.
Early in Monster Hunter, an Anjanath was a brick wall that I could barely beat. I would use up all my healing items and still barely make it out alive. Now I'm running a quest where Anjanath is the first of four monsters to beat in a row, and I can take it out without even losing half of my health bar.
In Monster Hunter: World, crafting that new piece of powerful gear you've been working at for hours is just as satisfying as taking down the monster you just lost to twice in a row. It's what an action RPG should be. And at 60 hours, there are still mechanics and monsters being introduced to me. I feel like I've just really started playing the game for real, and I'm excited to see what's next.
