Monster Hunter Rise is tremendous — if you haven’t played it, you only have to look at our review to see how much we loved it — so when Capcom asked if we fancied having a pop at the honking new DLC expansion titled Sunbreak, we couldn’t say no.
We got to have a go at just two of the quests on offer when we visited Capcom’s UK offices, one hunting a Lunagaron, and another taking down a Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate classic, a Seregios.
The Lunagaron was your standard quest, but we were pleased to bump into another new monster by chance, a great big ape-looking thing called a Garagolm. Suffice it to say that all three of these monsters made absolute fools of us; anyone like us who felt that the base game was bordering on being just a little bit too easy will breathe a sigh of relief on firing up this expansion, mere moments before their innards are used to decorate a nest.
The Seregios quest was also one of the new Follower Quests, which teams you up with an NPC to take out a monster together. We were expecting things to be a little bit more different given how they’re presented, but our tussle alongside Arlow felt almost like he wasn’t present for a lot of the time.
It’s likely due to our familiarity with playing with other hunters online, but we were a tiny bit disappointed that there wasn’t more to this mode than just having that NPC there. Other Follower Quests may be more interesting (especially if they feature fan favourites such as Minoto or Hinoa), but as it stands we left the encounter feeling lukewarm.
The opposite is true for everything else we were able to get our hands-on, though. The swathes of new quality of life features such as the Swap Scrolls that allow you to flip between two Switch Skill loadouts on the fly, your various moves being displayed on screen, and new Dango options are all substantial enough that they elevate the Sunbreak experience to feel like a true refinement of what Rise introduced. It doesn’t just feel like more missions and a higher difficulty ceiling, it feels like a game-wide upgrade that brings more to the table than you might reasonably expect for a hunk (a big, pricey hunk, granted) of DLC.
Minor disappointment with the Follower Quest aside, our biggest complaint following our time with the game is how brief that time was; we feel like we’ve only been able to see the smallest sliver of what this new DLC has to offer, and we can’t wait to sample more of it.
In a nutshell, it’s more Monster Hunter, but more than just new monsters and new quests — it’s shaping up to be an integral, essential upgrade to the Monster Hunter Rise experience.
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