Monster Hunter Rise Xbox review: A World of new possibilities

Monster Hunter Rise launches into Xbox Game Pass later this week, and it should come as little surprise that Capcom's popular Switch game is still really good, but it's even better on Xbox...

It still blows my mind that an esoteric PS2 game I loved back in the day has evolved into the behemoth that is modern Monster Hunter, today one of Capcom's biggest brands — Monster Hunter: World is comfortably the publisher's best selling game ever at almost 20 million copies, with Rise looking certain to push past Resident Evil 7 to slot in just below World in second after these new ports of the former Switch console exclusive arrive on January 20th. Monster Hunter was once all but impenetrable for newcomers, but its many systems have made bold strides towards breaking down that barrier to access, and while there's still an awful lot to digest if you're new to the games, Rise is still easily the most approachable game in the series so far. New friends join the hunt, fiddly weapons have been simplified (perhaps a little too much in a few cases), and getting top-end gear has arguably never been simpler thanks to faster, easier hunts with more generous rewards. As mentioned, it might be a step too far towards simplifying the series for veterans, and the new 'spectacle' mode will likely prove pretty divisive, but just as when it launched on Switch, there's no denying Monster Hunter Rise is a great game whichever way you slice it. And trust me, you'll be slicing it a lot of ways.

Monster Hunter Rise joins Game Pass this week

Monster Hunter Rise takes us to Kamura Village, where a great calamity known as the Rampage has riled up all of the local beasts and sent them on the warpath. As the village's new protector, it's up to you to get out there and teach any monster acting up to behave, which naturally involves the use of oversized hammers and giant swords, and ultimately get to the bottom of (and hopefully stop) the Rampage. It's your typical MonHun setup really, although Rise does perhaps have a bit more going on in terms of narrative progression then most other games in the series. Hunts themselves are similarly familiar — you know the drill... grab supplies, hunt/trap big monster, then turn their parts into new gear to power up as you slay your way up the food chain — and are further simplified from World, doing away with tracking altogether and just showing you large monster locations on the open mini-map, plus you now have your Palamute companion and Wirebug for fantastic mobility, and the former will even help out in combat. When you start out, you'll likely want to work through the Village quests, tailored as they are for solo play to help you learn the ropes. But as your skills and gear improve, you'll need to work through the Gathering Hub missions to further the story and unlock new stuff. Hub quests are more difficult and tuned for multiplayer, with monsters having significantly more health as a baseline and gaining even more based on the numbers of players in a hunt. Completing the Low Rank Village quest line will actually unlock test missions that allow you to skip straight into High Rank hub missions if you can beat them (Village has no High Rank), though you might want to jump into at least a few of the low tier hub missions just to get a feel for how much beefier the enemies can be. Multiplayer itself is as idiosyncratic as ever, a little weirdly arranged at first but you should soon get used to it, and hunting with friends is as much fun as ever... you even get to bring your canine companions along with you!

Along the way, though, you'll need to jump right into the heart of the Rampage, which takes the form of a special new kind of hunt that borrows from the tower defence genre. It's basically a new twist on the cannons and Dragonators of Monster Hunter's usual 'spectacle' missions like Zorah Magdaros in World or the first quest to repel Velkhana in Iceborne, and while it's certainly good that Capcom has changed things up from those typically weak fights, that's not to say that the Rampage quests themselves are actually good. Arenas are small and options pretty limited, and once you work out a decent strategy for preventing the horde from reaching and destroying the final gate to cost you the quest, it'll pretty much work every time, no matter what you're facing. Large monsters here come thick and fast, and while there's certainly a novelty to the absolute chaos, it also can't help but cheapen some of these ferocious beasts — on a normal hunt, you might spend a good 15 thrilling minutes chasing down and hacking up a raging Tigrex, but in the Rampage, you just stick it with a few ballista bolts and it runs off with its tail between its legs. Rampages all feel much the same and run far too long, and only the 'final boss' counts as a monster hunted (the rest are repelled), although having siege weapons on hand can make quick work of the major threat at the end, in case it's a monster from which you need something but struggle to beat in a stand-up fight. Later Rampages do admittedly mix things up a bit by introducing powerful new Apex variants of several monsters, each with new mechanics and ultimate attacks. But even these can feel underwhelming despite their ridiculous moves since they too don't last longer than five minutes or so when you're bombarding them with cannons, beams, traps, mortar fire, and all the rest. Out in the open on the proper Apex hunts that unlock after facing one as a Rampage boss, though, these things are absolutely savage — true endgame monsters, which makes it a bit of a shame that they don't have their own gear sets and their drops are only needed for upgrading the all-purpose Rampage weapons.

At its heart, Monster Hunter is one big boss gauntlet, so monsters themselves play a huge part in how good any game in the series (or even the wider genre) can be — players are unlikely to stick around if only handful of fights are fun. Fortunately for Rise, it has a fantastic hit rate with its new and returning monsters, with the new ones typically being strong enough that they slot comfortably into the roster and often even feel like they've been there for a while. Dancing bird wyvern Aknosom feels like a more graceful cross between the dino-like members of the species and those closer to the wyvern end like Yian Garuga so does feel quite familiar, whereas the lumbering yeti-like Goss Harag feels completely new with its savage blows and ability to form icy blades and clubs that alter its attack patterns. Returning monsters have some new tricks up their sleeves without deviating too much from what made them such good fights in earlier games, at least until you get to the Apex ones which blow the lid off and have a lot to relearn in the same vein as Generations' deadly Deviant forms. Oddly, though, for a series that has long pushed a focus on logical natural ecology, there are a few surprising omissions. The little shark-like Zamites wander the icy region but their alpha, Zamtrios (a favourite fight of mine from MH4), are nowhere to be seen, doubly strange since several of the new monsters borrow some of that fight's mechanics. Meanwhile, there are plenty of Jagras everywhere but no Great Jagras, perhaps fed up with getting bullied by greedy Bandit Mantle firing squads in World and just deciding not to turn up for this one. No Bulldromes either, but let's be honest, that's probably for the best — comedy value of the fast-forward High Rank version aside, that's long been a horrible fight.

Also new to Rise is the ability to actively take control of monsters, another neat perk of the Wirebug beyond speedy movement and special weapon attacks (more on those in a moment). This replaces World's mount mechanic and Iceborne's Clutch Claw while serving as a hybrid of the two — skilled use of the Clutch Claw would let you throw monsters into walls, hazards, and even other monsters, and this is an evolution of that system. Available after sufficient monster in-fighting or dealing enough aerial damage (look out for the blue damage numbers), Wyvern Riding lets you freely move your mounted monster around, and on top of Iceborne's ability to send it running into things, you also now how have light and heavy attack buttons (which trigger a few of their common moves) and a dodge with which to interrupt other creatures' blows. The goal is to fill the gauge before time runs out (taking damage also eats into the ride's duration), which will allow you to perform a Mounted Punisher, ordering your ride to pull out its best highlight reel attack to do serious damage to the enemy while toppling them. Since the ride monster will flee to another area after being brainwashed by our weird puppeteering insect friend (understandable), you'll still get time to get in some extra weapon damage as well like after a mount or wall bash, making it a familiar system in some ways, but an original and ever-enjoyable one in its own right. It's especially good in the Rampage, where hijacking one strong monster can let you plough through entire waves of foes in seconds, so you'll often find yourself urgently Wiredashing across the map when an opportunity arises to grab that ticket to ride.

While move sets for the 14 returning weapon types have changed, some a fair amount (Hunting Horn's kit is simplified to the extent that it's barely recognisable) and others hardly at all, they're all further augmented by another use of your handy bug buddy with special Silkbind Attacks unique to each weapon type. These expend the same regenerating Wirebug resource as mobility and recovery options, so while they can be great when a clean opening presents itself, overusing them could leave you unable to close or create gaps quicker with Wiredashes (say, chasing down a Zinogre to prevent it from charging up, or escaping from Teostra's supernova) or recover with a Wirefall to prevent further damage. Usefulness varies by weapon type, although there are plenty of good options here and even more to unlock as you experiment with each of the weapon types. If you want to use these skills more often, you might be able to find wild Wirebugs during a hunt, which will assist you temporarily by adding to your gauge, and those are far from the only helpful things you'll find out there, either.

Capcom really doubled down on letting players make use of all kinds of endemic life in Rise, with plenty of Hunting Helpers that can be grabbed and deployed with varying effects. These range from the now-portable toads that can inflict status ailments on monsters to other critters that can manipulate monster behaviour in several different ways or enhance the efficacy of your consumable items. There are plenty of other creatures in the wild that can be useful as well, some offering temporary buffs to things like stamina usage or damage output, but the most common are Permabuffers called Spiribird. These colourful things are everywhere, and are another example of Rise offering a crutch to players who might be struggling a little, with each conveying a hunt-long bonus to health, attack power, defence, or stamina, stacking multiple times. Skilled players will probably just grab a few of these on their way to a target as they probably won't need the boosted stats too much, while newcomers can take their time to round up as many birds as possible in order to give themselves a decent buff going into the big fight. It's a neat system that is another part of Rise lowering the barrier to entry of the series, and you can even equip a variety of different Petalaces to change the maximum caps for each of the bonuses around what you think you might want or need.

As a port, Monster Hunter Rise is a fine effort indeed. The game has a slightly more stylised look than World and this helps it upscale well, and there are a host of graphics options to mess around with alongside the stock Graphics/Frame Rate modes, so you should be able to find a setup that gives you the best of both worlds, looking crisp and clean and without giving up that silky-smooth frame rate which I haven't once seen stutter. Better yet on the new consoles are the load times, or should I say the lack thereof. Aside from that first initial load as the game checks add-on content, connects to servers, and all that fun stuff, there's virtually no downtime. Hunts ready instantly and typically load in a second or two... a far cry from the lengthy loads of World on last-gen hardware and something that really proves its usefulness in a game with as much back-and-forth between areas as this. One other significant bonus for this release of Rise over the 2021 Switch launch is that this version actually has an ending. Back at the very beginning, Rise felt extremely light on content, to the point that the story just stopped near the end and didn't go anywhere until the new missions and monsters that would finish things up arrived via an update several months down the line. The good news is that this new Xbox version has it all from the start, including everything up to expansion Sunbreak, due this spring — with all 50-odd monsters, hundreds of missions, and pages of Event quests to unlock new gear, there's more than enough to keep you going for hundreds of hours here.

That's just as well, too, because the Monster Hunter Rise achievements actively demand as much. We've not pulled in the list yet but what I've managed to unlock tallies up with the trophy list, and it's pretty savage. Just hunting 1,000 monsters will take a good while through normal play (I'm currently at about 300 after 80 hours), but at least that and the other grindy ones are within your control — the RNG hell of getting miniature and giant crowns for every standard monster is back, plus there's a new nightmare in the form of Sturdy Padlock. For this all-encompassing achievement, you need to collect every single decoration item for your home. Some of these involve finding all collectables on every map, others require you to grind out ten hunts against every monster, but the worst come as random prizes from the lottery that refreshes every few hunts (I only have one of these so far, out of 12). There are a bunch of cumulatives that look pretty daunting on paper, but you'll be done with them long before you even put a proper dent in some of these full-on grinds, and the completion will easily run into the hundreds of hours... this one's likely to find its way onto our rundown of the hardest and longest Game Pass games, but certainly more in the latter category than the former.

Summary

Monster Hunter Rise is a fantastic action game that will keep you busy for hundreds of hours, and the upgrades on Xbox compared to the Switch original are considerable. Veteran hunters might feel like the streamlining has been taken a little too far in places, but Rise does often manage to add different kinds of depth in new ways, even if series fans are unlikely to find too much of a challenge here outside of a few notable quests. The Rampage being something of a chore is a shame, especially with it being a key part of the narrative, but it is what it is and aside from the handful of required quests and a related achievement for running 50(!) of the damn things, you can largely ignore it and enjoy the series' more traditional hunts in typically entertaining fashion. Expansion Sunbreak is due this spring — which apparently moves away from the Rampage, thankfully, and brings even more new stuff to the table — and just as World went from a solid 8 at launch to a comfortable 9 after Iceborne and all the additional support that followed, I fully expect it to improve the overall experience and bump the game up further. Time to get cracking with Rise so you're ready for Master Rank soon... happy hunting!

* Luke spent around 80 hours slaying, skinning, and wearing the many monsters of Rise, unlocking around 30 achievements in the process. A review copy was provided by Capcom, and played on Xbox Series X.

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Review

Written by Luke Albigés

Luke runs the TA news team, contributing where he can primarily with reviews and other long-form features — crafts he has honed across two decades of print and online gaming media experience, having worked with the likes of gamesTM, Eurogamer, Play, Retro Gamer, Edge, and many more. He loves all things Monster Hunter, enjoys a good D&D session, and has played way too much Destiny.