The monster hunter is a fun game at it's core, but there are just so many bad features that just add up to me being more frustrated with the game rather than enjoying it. I'm afraid there is no going back for me after games like dark souls, sekiro, bloodborne. The hitboxes in Monster Hunter are a last century, who hasn't been hit by Diablo's or Nergigante's shoulder slam while standing on the other side of the monster? Or by random charge attack while standing behind one? Or have their charge blade clip right through the monster's tail without doing any damage at all? The typical fight is supposed to follow a routine more or less, where you fight the monster normally, monster eventually enrages, monster eventually tires out allowing you to deal a fair bit of damage. What really happens more often than not is monster just flees to another area right after the enrage is over, making you chase it through the map. Or some other monster drops in for a turf war making youi watch from sidelines, fun the first time, annoying when it happens for a 100th time. These are not the only examples of this, but basically the feeling that I generally get is that of being cheated. I've played through vanilla MH, it was OK. But I've made a mistake of buying the icebourne, you know how all the people rave about G-rank this G-rank that, and how the master rank (HM equivalent of G-Rank) is where the game is going to be at. Well it is not, it's just more of the same crap, except now it takes 3 times as long to kill everything. The expansion is overpriced, at 40€ it adds just a single new biome for a total of 6 (and a 2nd one, which is kind of a mix out of all existing biomes) and a couple of new monsters + reskins of the previous ones. Is it harder than the original, well technically no, but simply by virtue of taking three times as long people are bound to make a couple more mistakes during the fight.
First Monster Hunter game I really played in the series, others never really took off for me. MHW is by far the most first-timer friendly game in the series. I've beaten the game now at about 70ish hour mark, haven't really been rushing though, took quite a few optional sidequests etc. Enjoyed the pace of low rank. High rank was grindier but ok. After that the game is basically garbage. It is a combination of small things that make later gameplay a chore. The controls are supper unresponsive, it feels like there is absolutely no input buffering whatsoever. Sometimes input gets ignored completely. Everything is so drawn out, even outside of a fight. I mean do I really need to wait 10 seconds for that steak eating animation to play, or when drinking a potion to buff my attack? Do I have to press X 3-5 times every time I go to pick up quest, hand in bounties, get my stuff from the botanist? The game never bothers to tell the player that radial menu and sort order of the item bar are part of the load out, go figure why every time a loadout is selected everything gets resorted. Story is meh, characters are forgettable and often annoying. As a long term Dark Souls and Co. player, I have my own criteria for what makes a good boss. And one hit kills + RNG is a big no no. A player should be loosing because they consistently make mistakes, not because RNG consistently screws them over. Big monster fights and turf wars, are very nice, but get really old really fast when they happen like every two minutes. Betelgeuse here is the worst offender. The monster roar is used way too often. I mean can we fight already instead of being stunned half the time? Uninspired achievements: hunt 100 of that, capture 50 of this, complete hundred quests etc. Saw "honest review" of Monster Hunter series on youtube, although of course not a serious review, the statement at the end couldn't be more appropriate for MHW: there is a good game somewhere there it is just buried under a pile of garbage.
I've logged about 200 hours with this game and gotten couple characters to final stages of merciless difficulty, and had mostly a good time. The game picks up slow at the start, but quickly gets going. You smash foes collect loot, and develop your character. The character development is unforgiving, forcing you to think what skills to pick, a glass cannon with massive dps might sound cool and it will even work on normal and up to cruel difficulty levels, but beyond that it will be very hard to be advancing with such a build, so if you want to go the distance you have to sacrifice dps in favour of survivability. This is all very good in my opinion and for new players there is no need to be afraid of the massive skill tree, you'll be navigating it in no time. The journey up to about mid merciless difficulty is a lot of fun, and can be done by most build with self gearing. At about lvl 65+ is where the grind starts to set it and the game becomes very much an elitist affair. Because there are so many mods on a given piece of equipment, a good combination of these is very rare, and you need good equipment to be doing merciless difficulty without too much frustration. So there really two choices, grind the same map over, and over and over again, in hopes that one of those rares that drop are actually worth anything, or sell your soul and trade for some gear with other players. I like steady progression with these kinds of games and there is literally an artificial block put in place in Path of Exile. One of my character is doing Piety and Dominus runs because they are the best bosses for low tear end game gear, but those are same bosses on the same maps populated by the same monsters. And after doing this for a week, with xp bar craaaaaawling slowly forward I must say the game got really boring. XP bar crawls forward a bit faster in maps, which are random areas with high lvl monsters, but even there, there is only so much to see and do. While Grindin Gear Games doesn't charge you to play the game, most other players at high levels will, for allowing you the privilege of joining them on a high lvl map run. Well to make long story short the game stops being fun at later stages, but definitely worth playing though. Oh and if you are playing for any significant amount of time, remember the game is free, but devs definitely deserve a reward for making a good game, don't be a cheap skate, spend some cash in their "cosmetic stuff only" shop.
The game looks really beautiful. Theme is Japanese culture, with armour and to some extent weapons having the samurai look. The character combat stances and weapon handling fit really well with this theme too. But the strongest point of this game is the action. The combat is fluid and has some weight to it. Breakable limbs add some depth. You are not just dodging hits and hitting back, but you are at the most effective when hitting exposed essence parts of the Onis. This also adds mini-objectives to a long fight, since unlike Soul Sacrifice and Monster Hunter you aren't there for a 20 minute fight, but instead take the Monsters in milestones: first that limb then the other then the tail an so on. Many monsters also change their attacks when limbs are broken. A bladewing for example will stop flying and start hopping a lot more when one of it's wings is damaged, not that it makes it any less dangerous. And then of course there is the phase 2 that most of the Onis have when they are sufficiently damaged. Another big plus are your NPC companions, they are generally a big help. In Soul Sacrifice taking an NPC with you on a missions was more of a liability than anything else, in Toukiden it is other way around. The game is somewhat light on content when not fighting monsters. There isn't that much to do in the village, except spend money to feed the spirit tree and send your pet tenko on gathering missions. What's really missing are some long term collectables, something that will make you go back to hunting those monsters again and again just to get some rare material that you need, because other than 6 weapon types and some armour, there isn't that much what you can craft. But the game costs 20 € on PSN, and for that price I really can't complain, not with what Toukiden does deliver.
WAKFU has very nice character animations and from art perspective it is a very good looking game, and a lot off (as of yet) unrealized potential. All characters have a choice in what way to specialize, in a form of 3 Elemets/Spells (5 per element) + Support skills, however due to the game mechanics one is generally forced to specialize in one element, as in your character gets locked into a particulare "build". The problem is there is often a particular element for a specific class that is at an obvious adavantage to any other choice. This can either be due to the buffs/debuffs or damage of the said spells, or it can also be due to the cost of a particular ability (remeber this is a turn based game, with action points per turn being limited). Bottom line is, alot of abilities suffer from poor balancing, reducing all that seemingly large choice in developing your character to 1 or maybe 2 viable builds. The game also uses "practice makes perfect" principle for leveling your spells, meaning the more spell is used the more it levels, but in practice the pool of spell experience that can be earned per battle is fixed (as a % of total exp) and using more then one spell per battle just spreads experience between these spells, in end effect the system penalizes using more then one spell per battle. And because of elemental mastery (the more "fire" is used the more bonus one gets to that element) using differenet elements is not recomended. So thats the picture of this game, the whole strategy part is reduced to using one spell per battle in all battles, and the only thing you can really strategize about is your positioning. Not all classes suffer from this to the same degree but I see it as a problem. When your choices are reducved from 3 elements and 15 spells, to 1 element and 1 spell, the whole thing becomes grindy really fast.
The game is relatively new at this point so alot of the problems that it has can be attributed to the growing pains. Others however are more baffling. Generally I came to expect a degree of quality from bioware games, so thats why I find some missing aspects of the game strange. Gameplay: Leveling is actually pretty good, compared to other MMORPGs. Personally it never really felt like a drag, even though the formula is very standard, mostly of a variety go there kills/loot that, there is a voiced over story background to go along with all of that, and this makes all the difference. The problems start to become apparent once players reach lvl 50. Max lvl is where most of the gameplay in MMOs actually takes place, that where you start to get into big groups of people and raiding very difficult content. What keeps people in the game at this point is the challenge and objectives that are to be aimed for. This can be things like gearing up, getting some rare recipes, all in the drive to progress further to get rare piece of armor and to finally kill that particularly hard final boss. The problem with SWTOR is not that there is no end game content, but that its is poorly executed, uninspired and too easy. Arguably the last bit is particularly deadly too a MMO, there is no ammount of content in this world that will keep people happy and occupied if it is too easy. People will blow through it in no time, after that people get bored and bored people leave the game to go play something else. I hope that in the future Bioware rectifies this problem. Graphics: Atmosphere in the game is great and really feels like star wars, but quality of the graphics is rather poor for a game released end of 2011. In a way they are even comparable to WoW, but that game is 7 ears old! I'm not talking about amount of pretty colors on the screen, both games have it in abbundance, what is lacking are the details on character models and armor. It all feels so flat, almost like a reskin of a base character model, this is especially visible on a character loading screen, which shows your toon in its full glory. Game features: This part is an absolute disgrace. For a game that involved 800 people in its creation I get a feeling that the interface and associated tools were written in year 2000 and never touched since then. There are no tools for finding groups except the very basic LFG flag, there are no tools supporting guild beyond giving them option to chat, there are no tools to optimize the interface, no ****'s like Bioware forgot that they are making a MMO instead of single player game. Crafting: Can't say much beyong that it keeps you more or less decently geared through the leveling process, beyond that, it is mostly useless. PvP: I am generally not into PvP aspect of MMOs, preffering to do my PvPing in games like counter strike and TF2, but this is apparently also not in the best of states. So here is my score of 6 out of 10, with a big hope that Bioware picks this game up.
