Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak

Monster Hunter Rise was first released on the 26th of March 2021 on the Nintendo Switch.

- Dylan Pamintuan

Taking what was learned from Monster Hunter World and its expansion Iceborne, the gameplay was improved and expanded upon to make hunts a lot more fun. Our review (which you can find in issue 141) was generally positive, with the biggest problem at the time of release being its lacklustre endgame. It slowly improved with many updates, but as someone who clocked in over 200 hours of playtime, it didn't exactly keep me playing for more than a quest or two whenever an update came out. The new monsters were cool and the Event Quests had some good layered armour, but it still just came down to grinding out talismans.

There were also a few complaints about the underutilised Switch Skills and it's generally regarded that the difficulty was lowered for this entry.

However, the new DLC expansion, Sunbreak, resolves to correct that by introducing a whole bunch of stuff. New monsters, new areas, new equipment, new Silkbind moves, new quality-of-life features, and a new difficulty to conquer: Master Rank (MR).

Can Sunbreak improve where the base game was lacking?

A new threat is endangering Kamura Village: an invasion of monsters from a kingdom far away. They'll need the best of the best hunters in the village, so Elder Fugen chose the Fierce Flame of Kamura (that's you) to be sent to Elgado Outpost to help stop it and prevent Kamura Village from turning into a crater in the ground, like what happened to several other civilisations every 50 years or so. The story is nothing special; it's your standard Monster Hunter plot that you could probably predict if you've played any of the games before. The main draw of Monster Hunter is the monsters themselves, anyway. The characters are nice and quirky though.