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I love the new combat but it has one major flaw that gets worse the higher your level/stage level. There's no option to turn off the incredibly annoying action camera that stops you in your tracks every time anything happens on thy battlefield. In the later stages at higher player level this happens so frequently that you struggle to get a single combo off without being constantly interrupted. All they needed to do was add an option to turn this disruptive feature off and it'd be an easy 9 or 9.5 but as it stands it's just far too tedious to play any longer.

It's unfortunate that Ubisoft still don't understand how to make fun open worlds. It's a game that gives the impression that the developers were targeted on increasing playtime as many of the choices made here are just needless bloat rather than fun. The map is a huge let down as usual. Between the countless map markers there's just nothing to do here. It only exists to make you travel from one space to another which can take a while if you're yet to unlock a travel point near to your destination. The world looks pretty but that's about it - even going off the beaten path is met with either slopes too steep to traverse or vegetation so dense you can't see where you're going and keep getting stuck. There's no wildlife you can hunt, no resource nodes to farm, no random secrets or puzzles to discover. You may find the odd chest but these are few and far between and also your scouts can locate them when you unlock that ability. So what other purpose does this world have if not to provide bloat and a metric that Ubisoft can use to brag about their map size and average time to complete but that doesn't make it fun. The combat is fun however. Naoe is your typical stealth character with a grappling hook for more traversal options and Yasuke is the brute that wades in loudly and destroys everyone. The only problem is that many of the viewpoints are only accessible to Naoe or things like scrolls in temples that are on roofs that only she can get to so for the most part I play as her as switching back and forth can get tedious after a while. The story bored me very quickly. "Why use 5 words when 1000 can do" is their motto here and it really drags on with cutscene and cutscene. You can skip them at least but it's not exactly gripping enough to warrant me spending that much time watching them. Like being stuck in a cinema watching a very mediocre film - you'd walk out and find something fun to do. I'd advise staying away from the franchise - they'll never learn how to make fun open worlds of activities for players sadly. The potential is there, they just don't use it.

The game has the makings of something very good but I cannot forgive the awful performance on PS5 Pro. The constant stuttering, flickering, tearing and frequent crashes make it frustrating to play to the point where I just gave up and uninstalled. It's a good example of the need for far better refund policy making on the Playstation store as games like this absolutely need that option.

Cheap. That's the word I'd use to sum up this game. I've played every souls like I can get my hands on and enjoyed them all from all the FromSoftware games to Nioh, Lies of P, AI Limit and so on with multiple NG+ cycles so this comes from a lot of experience in this game genre. The early part of the game is very good. Combat is satisfying, changing your build when you want is great, the madness mechanic is kinda fun etc. but at the end of the first region you come across a boss that sort of sets the mood for the rest of the game and it's not fun. This game relies on the lazy old trope of having bosses and enemies spam attacks relentlessly to provide the difficulty and all too often you're left frustrated. Usually when you die in these games you think "okay, I know what I did wrong" and adjust but here you're often relying on sheer luck. There are traps everywhere, enemies launching projectiles from platforms you can't reach until later, normal enemies spamming attacks that just take you out and it takes you way too long to get up from being knocked down. Some bosses have moves where they repeat the same attack over and over for a combo and if you get hit by one of them you get knocked down but it takes you longer to get up than the time between attacks so the boss wipes you out as you're getting up leaving no chance to dodge or deflect. There are many normal enemies like this too that just spam attacks leaving you dodging all over - this is not fun combat, it's tedious and cheap. There are also far too many enemy ambush situations leaving levels themselves frustrating to navigate. It's a shame as I like the level design, enemy variety, weapons and much more but the level of frustration is making this an enunjoyable slog. I'm quite far through the game now and haven't had that endorphin rush from beating a tough boss yet, just relief that I got lucky and can move on to the next annoying part of the level but I'm damned if I'm giving up after spending money on it. The devs have acknowledged that the cheapness, slow stand up time and number of traps is an issue that they intend to fix but it should never have been released in this state unless their playtesters were masochists.

I've sunk a lot of hours into this game and it's quickly become my go-to game for when I can't decide what to play. The environments are incredible and a joy to explore. Weapons feel all unique, poweful and impactful whilst being easy to pick up but difficult to master. What seems like a simple weapon on the outset soon turns into a complex and engaging one when you start really experimenting. There's only a few things that let it down which are mostly QoL features. Weapon crafting menus are a little odd - I'm glad they combined the forge and upgrade options into one screen in Rise so you don't have to go back and forth anymore. Losing your food buffs when carting is also a bit annoying but not the end of the world. The end game grind is also a lot more enjoyable to me than Rise - the Guiding Lands are fun to explore and the mechanics are at least more engaging than simply grinding anomaly investigations over and over. I always feel like when I jump back in that I'm making some form of progress. The monsters seem a lot more balanced to me than Rise as well. I wasn't a fan of some of the crazily mobile and spammy monsters in Rise as they were just difficult for all the wrong reasons. At least in World/Iceborne you can learn the openings a lot easier and you feel a greater sense of learning to overcome them rather than just getting lucky. Fatalis is still one for me to down but every time I attempt it I feel I'm learning something and getting better. I just didn't get that feeling in Rise as much. I sincerely hope that the next iteration of MH expands on this one as it's so much more immersive than the more arcadey experience that Rise has.

Whilst I appreciate the incredibly depth in this game and the vast amount of choices you have at your disposal I often can't get over some of the bugs on PS5 and some gameplay choices that I find a little too much. I love these kinds of strategic games and the complexity of them however I haven't played them for such a long time so it felt quite punishing to come to this with very little in the way of guidance. A few quests to introduce some of the quirkier mechanics and get your brain into it wouldn't go amiss for sure and it would certainly attract a lot of newcomers to the genre. Gameplay wise there are still a few bugs. There's a quest that's been broken for 3 years and now I'm stuck being unable to complete it - why on Earth has this not been fixed yet and despite having a huge patch drop lately with a ton of bug fixes this is still broken. I've also come across at least two areas where there was poison but nothing appeared and I walked into it unawares - a quick re-load and the green mist suddenly appears. There's still a bundle of little bugs like that which spoil your immersion and enjoyment. Some of the sections in the game that require jumping can be very annoying as I've found I can jump up a ledge with one character but not another and even then I have to stand in a pixel perfect spot - if this is tied to some stat then fair enough if I missed that but give me a break once in a while - not everything needs to be such a skill/stat check as it just grinds everything to a needless halt and there are moments where progress feels like running in treacle. Pathing for your companions also can be a bit broken, they'll often get stuck near jumps and even though they can make it you have to muck about switching characters to get them to do anything so that again breaks the immersion and enjoyment. It can be a little frustrating at times as well - one quest had me find an npc for more information but he died in an earlier fight. I searched online and found that you're meant to use the spell to talk to the dead but then it says it sustained too much damage. Great - now I'm stuck on that one then. Don't get me wrong here - there is a fantastic game here with a lot of content, creativity and replay value to keep you going for a long time. The characters are all fleshed out and get you attached to them quickly. Combat is fun with tons of options which is also true of the character building side of it. I just wish they took a little more time to ease you into it - I'm not after training wheels like in most games, just a little extra in the very early stages to get you going in the right direction that's all.

So far it's been quite a messy disappointment really. I've had multiple crashes every day since buying it, there's been bugs and character killing lag spikes on numerous occasions so no, this has certainly not been a smooth launch - with a ps5 on a ridiculously fast internet connection I know it's not a problem at my end. These are problems that numerous people have posted about on various sites so seeing reviews stating "smoothest launch" seem incredibly suspicious to me. Next you have the odd design decisions. Just lots of little things that make you wonder if there was any quality control going on or if they had two teams working on it that couldn't agree on anything. Like when I'm trying to create an outfit on my druid and I can't see the top of the staff which is the bit with all the detail on, when looking at the challenges if I expand one that has a lot of requirements I can't see them all as there's no way of scrolling down (there's a scrollbar but this is ps5, not PC so you can't use your non-existent mouse to scroll it down) or their rather odd way of making it cheap to change your class build anywhere but it's a tedious endeavour to do so and there's no option to save your build as they want to encourage people to commit to a **** why let us change out our build wherever and whenever we like then? The combat feels clunky - they wanted to slow things down from the arcadey feel of D3 however it just comes down to hitting more resource builders and fewer spenders so it doesn't feel very satisfying - they could've tried something new or different instead of just slowing down a system that was fine for faster combat but feels sludgey in slower combat. The builders do absolutely no damage as well so the flow of combat is wonky as hell. The world itself is a nice idea and having active events is welcome however the core dungeon grinding is bland. There's nothing new here, the layouts feel all too familiar, however they've opted to have every dungeon use one of about 4 different mechanics that all involve backtracking as you fetch items to progress to the next area, kill a room of mobs, do another similar mechanic then do the boss. It becomes very tedious, very fast and when you think there's over 50 dungeons it just feels incredibly lazy to only have a handful of variations on how to progress through them. There's things missing too like all the random traps that added little bits of flavour here and there or the joy of finding a randomly generated dungeon of epic size just teeming with mobs to kill - I'd actually groan if I found such a dungeon now with how tedious the combat can feel and how far I'd have to run with all the backtracking. Build wise it looks good at first - there's lots of options to try out and have a play with but sadly this just makes the lack of being able to save your builds even more frustrating. It harms absolutely nobody to just let people save them - the cost of changing skills is negligible even in late game so why half a*** it like this? There are also some incredibly powerful builds that rely on "uniques" dropping which are incredibly rare and when you combine that with the bug where druids get a lot of barbarian drops (in the first week I had 9 uniques drop and 6 were barbarian) it just saps all the fun out of grinding - you see that unique item colour drop, get excited, pick it up, look at it and realise it's not usable (they have acknowledged that this is a bug). There is also a caveat to this build variety however - when you get to late game you absolutely must have ways of afflicting the vulnerable status as well as ways of becoming unstoppable to break out of the constant CC chains which make the already sluggish combat feel even more tedious so your build variety becomes somewhat limited which is a real shame. I like a challenge - in fact I'm drawn to difficult games like a moth to a flame but this isn't difficulty to me, it's just frustrating even when it's not particularly challenging. I feel hamstringed at every turn when I just want to move around and have fun. edit: based on the recent big update I'm lowering the score by another point. Boosting the damage of basic skills slightly does nothing - they still hit like a wet noodle whilst you build resource for the core skills. They apparently bumped up the resource gains but not nearly enough - it still feels slow and dull, if you run out of resource you're left casting up to 7 attacks or so to fill it back up again then spent it all in 3 core skills. They also allegedly bumped up the xp gains from nightmare dungeons. I completed one with enemies 2 levels higher than me and got around 10% of a level and one legendary item. This is painfully slow levelling when combined with the dull combat. I'm not asking for it to be lightning fast, just for your time investment to mean something more than the paltry rewards you currently get.

Long time fan of the series, played through the beta, hell I even liked the specialists but man..... From the first match this was a bad experience, I'll skip past the horrendous launch issues and many bugs that plagued the game early on as well as the completely empty maps with zero cover. Instead I'll talk about what the game is now. I will say that much has improved and there is fun to be had but even after a break of several months it's only taken a couple of matches before the glaring problems drag me down. In one match I tried Lis as I wanted to see if her launcher was improved at all but immediately ran into a problem where whenever I fire her launcher the camera glitches and sticks to the ground pointing at my feet! After a brief search I find this problem has been going on for around 5 months. This is simply unacceptable to have a specialist's signature tool rendered unusable for that long. I also found this issue on another specialist that has the minigun turret as well as spawning into helicopters so it's a pretty major issue. The other disappointments are still present too - the weapons from earlier games have arrived but we were promised full customisation options but this hasn't fully materialised yet and many of these weapons from older games are just terrible as a result. One of the core game modes for the PS5 version had also been removed since launch - I got the game based on it having both of those 128 player modes so to have a feature removed that I paid to access feels like a real kick in the teeth. The fact this game launched with so many issues and still has so many game breaking bugs is an absolute scam. More protection for gamers and their money needs to be put in place around this kind of thing - if you bought any appliance and it didn't work as advertised you'd be able to get a refund within a pretty large window of time but 2 hours is ridiculous. Edit: I just wanted to add that although the specialists were incredibly cheesy and a poor attempt to appeal to the hero shooter fans it was still a kick in the teeth to have the flexibility they afforded removed. A large group of very vocal people voiced their dismay at the lack of the class system present in previous titles claiming that it was necessary for team play as people played the roles of the medic/engineer etc. Well now it's changed and guess what - bots are still more reliable and reviving you compared to human players so it wasn't about that at all. If somebody doesn't play the objective and just focuses on shooting then re-instating the class system will do nothing to change their playstyle as people do what they enjoy doing and that's fine. I used to like playing as Angel with a rocket launcher so I could provide a range of options from reviving, ammo packs, loadout drops and explosive damage so having that flexibility taken away for a to solve a problem it was never going to solve kinda ****. As a result it now feels like a game with an identity crisis as it doesn't have a clue what it wants to be since everything is a fix on top of big change on top of yet another fix - it's like Jenga in a hurricane. I've been checking in on the game every month or two when there's been a few updates but I find myself feeling less and less likely to even bother. They created a game with way too many problems and still haven't been able to fix them all.

I liked it at first, it had a big old sandbox of game modes and the dmz was a fun new addition however I bought this on the premise that we were told it would be a two year game then not long after release they scrapped that. I'm sure that was the plan all along as they have to have had something in the pipeline to be able to release something within a year so they lied through their teeth to everyone. In the midst of a huge cost of living crisis this is absolutely disgusting behaviour. The seasons are now all shortened with rehashed and rushed "content" using the same old maps we've had in previous games as they don't care anymore, they've made their money. Trying to grind through the battle passes with half the time I'd normally have is an utter joke so I've just stopped playing and won't be returning to the franchise. Being lied to and scammed like that tends to leave a bad taste!

I was quite looking forward to this game before it released but held out as I had a couple of other games to play so it was a narrow escape from the abysmal launch. I picked it up a week ago on sale and must say I'm really glad I did. The details in the world seem all very nicely thought out, people of all shapes and sizes walk around at different paces and although that doesn't seem like much it certainly feels more like a world rather than every npc having the same build and animations just with different skins. Gameplay wise it's a lot of fun. Combat feels good with punchy weapons and plenty of options to adjust your approach which helps with your decision on how to build your character with their skills. Driving controls are responsive and make it fun to whip around the incredibly designed city with all its many side streets and interwoven paths I enjoyed being stealthy and taking out enemies one by one with rear grapples, I enjoyed sneaking behind them with a high powered pistol and watching a gaping hole form in their head, I also thoroughly enjoyed blasting them all to bits with a high powered machine gun and various other methods so yeah there's enough there to keep you yearning for that next fight. I'm not usually bothered about story as much as I used to but this game got me listening to the dialogue and investing a bit in the characters and so far it's been very rewarding. There are still bugs - I've had a friendly npc talking to me then to carry on the story he walked right through my car and me but so far nothing game breaking. It can be amusing at times but it can break your immersion. Overall I'd highly recommend getting into the game now. If you're looking for an open fps rpg with character building, weapon loot/crafting/levelling where you can also go full GTA and steal cars and cause mayhem in an amazing looking city with a killer soundtrack then go for it - definitely happy I bought this now.