Monster Mash

MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD sets up a reverse Jurassic Park scenario and adds high fashion to make dragon murder infinitely entertaining.

- James Davenport

Monster Hunter: World is an action game about dominating the food chain and looking good while doing so. It’s renowned for its endgame, where you go on challenging hunts in search of rare items needed to craft an armor set that’ll crown you the min-max champion of the world, but Monster Hunter’s essence and greatest strength is its prolonged, desperate, and tragic fights with beautiful beasts.

Unlike the story, murdering World’s dozens of intricately designed monsters has a point. There’s no levelling up and skill point allocation in Monster Hunter, so crafting armor and weapons is the only way to permanently buff your stats. Gear crafted from monsters reflects their strengths and weaknesses, so if you’re having trouble with a thick-skinned fire type creature, you’d best go take down a flame-spouting rathalos for a set of fire-resistant armor, and seek out a poisonous monster to create a weapon that does a bit more damage over time. Clear affinities between behavior, aesthetic, and the hard numbers that govern monster stats make deciding which monster to hunt next and what gear you’ll need to ruin them quite easy to determine.

All 30-something monsters (with more on the way via free updates) have distinct personalities brought to life through realistic animation, observable behaviors, and detailed models. My favorite, the paolumu, is a fuzzy pink and white bat creature that balloons like a blowfish when threatened. The kulu-ya-ku is a big dodo bird that uses big rocks as its first line of defense. The anjanath, a fire-breathing, chicken-winged

T-rex, would be a final boss in most games. Hitting one until it stops moving for the first time is an immense, sad accomplishment.