Monster Hunter — a tactile game that’s all about dodging with split-second reflexes, pinpointing subtle weak spots, and pulling off complex combos with lots of button presses — shouldn’t be running on mobile. It simply shouldn’t; there’s just too much to condense, minimize, and comprehend with swipes, taps, and presses. Yet, somehow, Monster Hunter manages it now. It was nothing short of magic.
Pokemon on (or in) your phone make sense: explore, collect them, enjoy quick encounters in 10 seconds or less, and team up with your friends to catch them! Monster Hunter — though it’s also a very social game at its core — feels more like a console game. But scaled down and displayed on your iPhone or Android…it fits so well, it’s amazing, something like this has never happened before.
The core loop – hunting, carving, upgrading, repeating – is complete and wholesale. Find a monster, kill it, hammer its body parts into your gear, and get back on the battlefield. Break its horn or cut off its tail and get better drops, level up faster. Monster Hunter Now doesn’t interfere with the formula of a game that has sold 22 million games. OK
But how you do that, how you get your hunters to slide, roll, jump, slice and carve, that’s the impressive thing here. Like spinning and throwing your PokeBall, it’s all done with your index finger: swipe left or right to dodge, swipe up or down to go forward or backward, tap to attack, hold to charge or grid block. You can manually tilt your phone to aim your bow or ranged weapon, if you like (but I really can’t stand the motion controls). simple! So easy, even the non-Monster Hunter players in my session were dancing around and interrupting monster attacks, like they’ve been playing since Monster Hunter Tri when we had to return our phones.
I’ve been a devoted sword and shield user for years, so it felt great to block the advanced Kula-Ya-Ku, watch it fall backwards, and then unleash a barrage of slashing and smashing attacks in response. Not quite as good as it did on Switch, for example, but it’s still pretty exciting. Team up with an ally (you can bring up to four people into a fight, and the game will auto-detect who’s around you — no awkward menu wrestling here) to open up your options; you’re going around on Pukei-Pukei’s tail , and hit its head with a hammer and slice it off, or do you work on the front legs and hope the claws snap off?
this is your choice! You have 75 seconds to kill something–considering that the mainline Monster Hunter games usually take about 30 minutes, you’d think it’s too short. It’s too superficial. But it’s not: condensing the whole thing into a rock-paper-scissors game of dodging and parrying attacks is intuitive, fun, and compelling. You put one monster to bed and you crave another.
If you’re on the road – you’re at the gym and you see a Charmander but can’t shoot it yet – you can paintball it, effectively saving it for later so you can shoot it at home . If there are other players in the household (maybe you’ve got your buddies on board for this), you can choose to fight together, which allows you to walk around town in your matching shoulder armor. bookworm.
Like Pokemon Go, your hometown becomes a featureless map with just a few points of interest. But unlike Pokemon Go, the map is divided into biomes–and those biomes are updated every so often. So if you live in the city, don’t worry; you’re just as likely to get a snow map, desert map, or jungle map as someone who lives in the country. These biomes have specific resources that you can collect, such as ores or mushrooms, and are populated by beasts that you need to destroy.
Monsters seem to respawn quite often, but who knew that rhythm would show up in the final game. Build up challenges in bigger battles with harder monsters with their own unique animations, and there are even Palicos that run around and grab resources for you. This is a monster hunter game, an authentic monster hunter game.
Everything is taken from Monster Hunter World – animations, character models, weapons and more. So, if you’re a big grumpy gamer, you can justify playing a mobile game (at least until we get the real thing) by telling yourself this is Monster Hunter World 2.0. The potential for expansion is so great — more monsters, more weapons, more biomes — that the developers tell me they’re already thinking about doing things like community days or real-world celebrations like Pokemon Go. Follow this space.
Niantic, while somewhat unpopular with the Pokemon Go player base at the moment, has proven time and time again that it can work magic when it comes to using complexity and intimacy to make IPs special and making them work on the small screen. Pokemon Go’s success may have been a fluke. A global phenomenon enclosing “right place, right time” lightning. But Monster Hunter Now proves otherwise, that Niantic is a developer with as much talent, creativity and business acumen as any Capcom, Bethesda or – I mean – even Nintendo.
The IP might not be that big, and the game might struggle to find an audience outside of Japan that Pokemon doesn’t, but Monster Hunter has a loyal player in me right now, that’s for sure. I went from thinking it was a weird little experiment, to waiting for the release and signing up for the beta within 10 minutes of picking it up — something I and millions of others have done with Pokemon Go. Even if Monster Hunter isn’t your thing, you should give it a shot—you might just have a new favorite game to play on your phone.
