APEX PREDATOR

MONSTER HUNTER: RISE is as good as Capcom’s flagship series has ever been

- Rich Stanton

NEED TO KNOW

WHAT IS IT? Murder monsters then make cute hats out of their faces

EXPECT TO PAY £50

DEVELOPER Capcom

PUBLISHER In-house

REVIEWED ON GeForce GTX 1070, 16GB RAM, i7-7700HQ

MULTIPLAYER Four-player co-op

LINK monsterhunter.com

It’s been a genuine pleasure over the years watching Monster Hunter go from a niche favourite to wild success in Japan, making inroads in the West, before smashing through and becoming a global hit. That’s perhaps over-simplifying the arc for Capcom’s beast-basher par excellence, but the series now has a huge fanbase and the kind of resource behind it that has resulted in years of better and better games, as well as a distinct split.

There’s the Monster Hunter: World take on the series, which has the fundamentals but is a seriously big-budget endeavour – a visual and aural spectacle with gorgeous, flowing animations and jaw-dropping monsters. Monster Hunter: Rise is the other branch, following in the footsteps of games like Generations and hewing closer to the series’ portable heritage: smaller, more contained maps rather than larger more open-world style exploration. Rise was, of course, originally designed as a Nintendo Switch exclusive and, though this PC release is a good port with everything you’d expect, it has nowhere near that immediate visual ‘wow’ factor that