Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak - Review

Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak has now been released, and many fans of the franchise have been looking forward to it, since it was first announced. The question is, does this additional DLC offer enough content and worth, to make up for its hefty price tag?

Firstly, to undertake this new quest, you’ll have to interact with Rondine the trader at the village entrance. This is not only explained to you at the start of the game, but through various areas of the village, should you decide to try and bypass her and talk to other characters with a yellow speech bubble marker. Clearly the developers wanted to make sure that players were aware of how to begin their Sunbreak adventure, it would have been nice if they were a little more subtle about it though.

Monsters from the Kingdom are starting to invade other territories, which includes you village, Kamaura. Being you’re the village defender, you’re automatically enlisted to stop these invasions and investigate what’s causing it, and without giving anything away… things steamroll into something a lot more than a simple invasion of monsters. It’s the same classic narrative from many games in the Monster Hunter franchise, which allows the developers to keep adding bigger and fiercer monsters, so no surprises there. One thing some players may notice, at least without giving too much away, is that the franchise does lean towards the Universal Classic Monsters series, for those who are film buffs.

Sunbreak sets players up in a new hub known as the Elgado outpost, which brings back some familiarity from Monster Hunter World, due to the aesthetics of this area. ‘Move around village’ has now been updated to ‘open world map’ to accommodate the addition of the Elgado outpost. Thankfully navigating between the two locations is as easy as fast traveling, when you select the options in open world map.

Speaking of additions, Master Rank starts at 1, which pretty much makes your previous hard work and progress of attaining a higher Hunter Rank from the base game obsolete. It’s an easy way for the game to keep expanding and growing, but at the same time resetting the parameters of players’ higher levels now that the game has been around for a while, feels cheap. Unfortunately, the addition of the Master Rank tiers feels like a lazy in a way, that the game has just slapped on a higher tier to keep players moving, as opposed to integrating it in a more unique manner. On the flip side, the weapon trees have been expanded upon, letting players build newer weapons, making full use of the new monsters, or keep expanding on their current weapons. Of course, the trade off for all these new weapons is that you will spend even more time exploring the world, attempting to locate the parts you need to craft your next weapon or upgrade. The same things happen when you start to mess around with the new armour sets that the game has brought to players, so its an extra layer of material collecting to be aware of. It is however great to see new armours and slightly updated and tweaked sets return and while the changes are minimal, they are at least refreshing.

A new mechanic to this game is the Switch Skill Swap. In a nutshell, it lets players swap between their attack loadout skill sets, to another one, without the need to go back to town and equip new gear from there. So instead of sticking to, or building up to only one combo or movesets, you’re able to switch it out on the fly, giving you more of a variety of fighting styles. While this is not necessarily a mind-blowing feature, it’s definitely one that’s welcomed, not only for bigger battles, but also to help break up the tedious grinding when you’re needing to farm for upgrade materials. The fact that it lets players try different attack loadouts and skills mid gameplay, is just fun to mess around with as well.

Visuals look relatively polished across the board and given that it’s on a unit that is extremely limited in terms of power and visual capabilities, just how nice it looks is still impressive. While looking great, most players will likely compare it to games on other platforms, especially games that are defined by their visuals and yes if this was made for the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, it would likely look a lot better, it still isn’t bad. A lot of that can be attributed to the original games art style, it was done so well, that it helps make things look better, but with a limit in power, all those little elements like hair, water and additional effects are missing.

Just like the visuals, the core gameplay mechanics are just what you’d expect, which brings up the old adage, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. Seeing that the core of the experience is very much like that of Monster Hunter Rise, those coming in expecting something big for Sunbreak are going to be let down. While the game will have you revisiting some locations over and over again, that being a key of the Monster Hunter experience, Sunbreak does welcome some new locales into the mix. These new locations do spice things up and can help break up the feeling of revisiting the same places again, they do tend to shine more with all the farming and grinding you’ll have to do.

If you loved Monster Hunter Rise and were just wanting more of it, then Sunbreak is definitely something you should get. You pretty much get exactly the same experiences, but now with a few minor tweaks and added extras, with the core formula of Monster Hunter staying the same across multiple games, these new tweaks are a welcome addition. It’s also pretty much what you’d expect it to be from a narrative point of view, a new threat that is riling up new monsters and some familiar ones, which requires you to investigate as to why they’re showing up. The expansion of the weapon and armour trees are welcome, which will give some players a reason to head back out and obtain new materials. However, where it doesn’t do so well is in the feeling that it is just the developers slapping on the Master Rank, the same way a 2-year-old would just squish together various colours of playdoh. That being said, it doesn’t hinder too much from the actual gameplay, apart from having to grind and farm for more materials, which really ends up being the bulk of most Monster Hunter games anyway.

If you are a fan of the series, or even if Rise was your first game and you want more Monster Hunter, Sunbreak is definitely that, and there really isn’t anything wrong with that.

The Score

7.5

Review code provided by Capcom

The Pros

+More of the same formula and gameplay from the base game

+Weapon tree has been expanded, giving players more to unlock

+Added new levels and monsters

The Cons

-Master Rank has been slapped on lazily, as well as armour in that category

-More grinding and farming for stat increase

-Could come across stale for some players