MONSTER HUNTER RISE

My first hour with Monster Hunter Rise had me wall-running up a cliff face, grappling across a canyon, then bodyslamming a dragon into a rock wall while my buddy on his Palamute gave chase from below. That first hour set the tone for everything that follows: this is a game built around movement, momentum, and moment-to-moment spectacle in a way the series had never quite managed before. The core loop is the same one the franchise has always run on. Hunt a monster, strip its bones and hide, craft better gear, go hunt something nastier. What Rise changes is how you actually move through that loop. The Wirebug is the defining addition here - a grapple tool that works on a charge-based gauge and opens up wall-running, aerial dodges, and recovery from knockbacks that would have been cart-worthy in older entries. Each of the 14 weapon types gets its own set of Silkbind Attacks tied to the Wirebug, meaning a Hammer hunter and a Bow hunter are playing almost entirely different games. The Switch Skills system lets you swap out individual moves within each weapon's kit, which adds genuine build variety without demanding a spreadsheet to engage with at a casual level. The Wyvern Riding mechanic - where you can seize control of a monster after wearing it down with Wirebug attacks and ram it into walls or set it loose on its friend - is the kind of feature that makes four-player sessions erupt. Monsters also scale up their aggression and tactics when you bring a full squad, which keeps co-op feeling earned rather than trivially easy. Your companion situation is worth knowing upfront: you get a Palico (the resource-gathering cat that veterans know well) and the new Palamute, a rideable dog that cuts traversal time dramatically and lets you sharpen your weapon mid-chase. In solo play you can take both. Drop into online co-op and you swap one for another human hunter. The hub supports up to four players online, and the PC version added in-game voice chat, which is a genuine quality-of-life win over the Switch version's rely-on-Discord setup. No split-screen or local co-op exists, which is the one place Rise falls short for a couch gaming night - this is strictly online multiplayer or solo. The one mode that divides the community is Rampage missions, a tower-defence detour where you man ballistas and cannons to fend off waves of stampeding monsters with an Apex beast at the end. They are fine with a group and yield useful talisman crafting tickets, but they drag solo and feel tonally out of place next to the main hunts. Treat them as an occasional change of pace, not the reason to play. On the PC version itself: it runs well on modest hardware - a GTX 1070-class card handles 60fps without drama - supports uncapped frame rates and 4K textures, and loads fast enough that the old Nintendo Switch "walk slowly to the hunt" pre-load wait is basically gone. If you bounced off older Monster Hunter entries because they felt opaque or slow, Rise is worth a second look. It is more compact than World and assumes some prior series knowledge - tutorials exist but the game does accelerate - yet the Wirebug and Palamute make the whole thing feel snappier and far more forgiving of positional mistakes. Veterans get genuine depth in skill builds, endgame High Rank grinding, and the massive Sunbreak expansion waiting on the other side. The story is irrelevant, the Rampage missions are tolerable at best, and the visuals do carry their Switch origin. None of that stops Rise from being one of the most purely fun co-op action games on PC, and the kind of thing a group of four can sink a whole weekend into without noticing.

Riley · Scout Team

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