Where masters rise
As a long time fan of the Monster Hunter series, I considered Rise as an excellent entry in the franchise that arguably has the best combat and movement in all of the series so far. However, while the PC port was successful in solving a lot of the technical shortcomings of the Switch version of the game, some innate elements like the boring and overly long rampage quests and overall lack of challenge were not addressed.
With the release of the massive expansion “Sunbreak”, Capcom manages to address a lot of the issues from Rise while introducing a few new concerns in the process.
New monsters like the flagship Malzeno are fun to fight and bring unique elements to the game.
MSRP: $39.99
Platform: PC, NSW
Played on: PC (i7 9700K 4.9GHZ/RTX3080)
Played: 50~ hours
As this is an expansion to Rise and cannot be played without it, I won’t delve too much into the basic gameplay elements and instead focus on the new additions. If you’d like to know my thoughts on the PC port of Rise, feel free to read the full review here.
As an expansion, there isn’t much in regards to any kind of notable visual upgrades. However, I found that the newly added monsters were designed well and animated beautifully. The new areas available to explore had charms of their own and I had a good time just looking for secrets in every nook and cranny.
My favorite addition of the bunch in terms of monsters was definitely Malzeno. With its mysterious vampire motif and ability to teleport around and suck the life from other monsters and hunters alike, it was quite the spectacle to hunt it for the first time, not knowing any of its moves. When it teleported behind me and grabbed me, I imagined it was whispering “nothing personal, kid.”
Returning favorites like Gore Magala and its evolved counterpart were highlights of MHU4 and looked better than ever in Sunbreak. There is a healthy selection of new and returning monsters and with title updates promising even more in the future, I’ll be sure to keep coming back whenever new content is released.
The new hub town is fun to explore and cleverly designed so all necessary services are close to each other.
As for the story, there is a mystery that unfolds over the course of the game about these strange creatures that seem to be draining the life out of monsters and making them hyper-aggressive. It’s not a particularly inspired story and typical MH fare but overall, I thought it was paced well and introduced some fun new characters.
What sold these new characters to be more than just cookie cutter NPCs was that now I was able to take them on missions and have them fight alongside me.
While I won’t say that they’re better than having a squad of hunters who know what they’re doing but they certainly pulled their own weight and the first time I noticed my NPC partner go missing for a little while only to show up riding a dinosaur, I couldn’t help but appreciate the work they put into the AI to make them as helpful as possible.
It’s just a shame that currently, they can only be summoned for a handful of missions and cannot participate in anomaly hunts/investigations which is the end-game content that most players will be grinding out post game.
Hopefully they expand the use of NPC helpers to allow them for all missions in the future but there’s no current plans to do so.
NPC partners for hunts is a great addition, I just wish I could have them join me for all types of missions.
On the note of anomaly hunts, I also found that these monster types had rather over tuned HP and gave me the impression that they were more damage spongey than they needed to be. As their move set doesn’t change much from the original counterpart outside of speed/damage and overall aggression, knocking them down by doing damage to certain areas and just unloading all my most powerful attacks over and over for more than 10 minutes felt irregular.
Luckily, Master Rank did bring a welcome injection of challenge to the overall experience as I found myself carting more often than I did in the original, forcing me to learn the patterns of the monster and use the newly added mechanics like the ability to change skill loadouts in the middle of combat.
Using my hammer, I was able to initially start with a skill set that focuses on being mobile and doing damage steadily but when I was able to stun the enemy, I would quickly switch over to the skill set focused on doing burst damage. Being able to plan ahead for what would be suited for each skill set and swapping between the two in the heat of battle made me feel more in tune with the weapon and gave me great satisfaction as I mastered different weapon types.
As for rampage quests, there are no longer any required rampage quests during the story campaign for Sunbreak and overall, I got the impression that they’re stepping away from the mechanic which I think was for the best.
Lastly, one area I wish they improved was a better way to search for multiplayer games. While I could search for certain missions in progress, it would have worked much better if I could search based on the criteria of rank/type/monster. That way, my search could include multiple types of missions at once instead of one specific mission which often led to there being no games to join. As it’s clear that there are a ton of people playing the game right now, I should not be having difficulty finding games to join.
Multiplayer with other hunters is still where the game shines best, I just wish it was easier to find games and have others join my game.
Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak offers new content that is not only impressive in scale but also in its quality. While there are some notable elements like difficulty in searching for multiplayer games and afflicted variations being a bit over tuned holds it back from being a perfect expansion, the positives very easily outweigh the negatives.
Fun Tidbit: I’ve seen reports of users suffering from losing save data and crashes while playing the game but aside from one crash during my playthrough of over 40 hours, I have no had any technical issues.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
