Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Release: January 9th, 2020
On: Windows
From: Steam
Price: 35/$40/ 40
First things first: you need to be Hunter Rank 16 to access Monster Hunter World: Iceborne, which basically means you need to have beaten the base game s final story boss before you pick it up. I know this is an incredibly dry way to start, but I asked myself what the first thing I d hope to learn from an Iceborne review would be, and that was it. So there you are. Never say I am not here for you.
Right, then, let s try again. For the uninitiated: Monster Hunter World is a third-person boss-rush game, styled as a shounen anime nature documentary about komodo dragons the size of buses. You hunt a big lizard over one of several open-ish world maps, kill it, turn it into a pair of studded jorts and a giant bone hammer, and then use them to kill a bigger lizard. In this fashion, you work your way up the food chain from dreadlocked iguanas to majestic, deadly dragons. You can do it solo with an adorable cat companion called a Palico, or you can do it online with up to three other players, tooled up with complimentary builds like in an MMO raid. It s exceptionally beautiful and enormously deep – and it s silly amounts of fun, so long as you don t think too hard about what it’s saying about the relationship between humans and nature. I reviewed it here.