APEX PREDATOR

It’s been a genuine pleasure over the years watching Monster Hunter go from a niche favorite 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 take on the series, which has the fundamentals but is a seriously big-budget endeavor—a visual and aural spectacle with gorgeous, flowing animations and jaw-dropping monsters. is the other branch, following in the footsteps of games like and hewing closer to the series’ portable heritage: Smaller, more contained maps rather than larger more open-world style exploration. 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 did. Nor can it is the better game.