![]() Couple that with the polish on the multiplayer side and I continue to lose hours to this game. Without giving more away, it simply feels like the culmination of everything World was trying to bring to the series. This new region keeps you out in the world, keeps the monsters coming and reacts to the ones you hunt, evolving as you play. The endgame is a promising new kind of format for the series that makes its hunts feel more organic, instead of the trawls through the quest board that the game utilises most of the time. No matter my complaints there's no denying how compelling Monster Hunter remains and how much Iceborne excels at improving the fundamental experience. So why these fumbles? It's an objectifying gaze that I'd hoped the series would've grown out of. Worse, the other half of the women's armour is great, stylish stuff. If the game's whole style was impractical outfits then maybe it'd sit better, but when the dudes are rocking elaborate but practical armour, it's sad to see the women stuck with mini skirts, their asses pushed into the camera through every crawlspace. If there's one disappointment besides the iffy storyline, it's the fact that the game still has gendered armour sets and insists on making half of the women's outfits a combo of boob armour and bikinis. When it comes to the monster hunting itself, Iceborne is Monster Hunter at its peak. Importantly, it all feels substantial and integrated in ways that complement what's already there, instead of just being gimmicks to artificially expand the game's scope. Like the regions of its game world, Monster Hunter feels alive, bursting at the seams with things to try and, eventually, master. Iceborne isn't a full blown sequel, but it still has touches of the radical that revitalises a game that's still thriving. The grappling claw that lets you latch onto monsters and try to steer them into obstacles opens up a whole new skillset to master, and one that changes everything in the base game too. ![]() That's no easy feat given the game's elaborate nature, and doubly so when Iceborne piles on new mechanics. The imagination on display is maintained right through to the final fight, finding ways to surprise and challenge even the most experienced of hunters. If it's not the cold eating at your stamina, it's monsters dripping explosive goo everywhere or wiping you off the map by summoning waves of water. The new fights feel crafted to poke at the weak points in a player's preparation and tricks. ![]() Yet, in spite of my misgivings, it has to be said that nothing has battles quite like Monster Hunter, and Iceborne is the challenge I'd been waiting for since mastering World. But the juxtaposition between these elements becomes harder to reconcile when the game keeps drawing attention to them. The craft that goes into all the details of these spaces is absurd and so vital to offsetting the unpleasant moments where you brutally murder a monster fighting for its life. You'll need a top tier PC to see MWH at its absolute best, but it still looks and runs much better than the console versions on medium settings on mid-range PCs. With the High Resolution Texture Pack installed and everything turned up, it runs 60-90 fps depending on the action with a GTX 2080 and an i9-9900K. A few performance patches made 60fps at 1080p easier to hit for most mid-range PCs and improvements to mouse and keyboard controls have since made MHW feel right at home on PC, but it's still a hog at higher settings and resolutions. An extra graphical option for snow will tax your GPU RAM a touch more if you crank it up, but that's about it. ![]() Monster Hunter World is a much more stable PC game than it was at launch, and since Iceborne is an extension of the same build, it performs as you'd expect. Yet the better Capcom gets at this, the more convincingly animated and sounding their beasts, the greater the tension between what the game says it is and what it is to actually play. Whether they're collapsing ice shelves or tearing up trees for battering rams, there's a sense of connection between its creatures and their surroundings that sells a rich, tactile world. There is a lot more however, with new region Hoarfrost Reach adding a whole biome to expand the delight at the heart of Monster Hunter: getting to traipse around in its ecosystems and see how its monsters interact with them. Capcom has made this for their dedicated fanbase, and to its credit, managed to offer up not just something that will satisfy the desire for new content, but provide a new structure for the game’s hunts that goes beyond simply offering 'more'. For those who dipped their toes in World or didn't see it to the end, Iceborne has almost nothing to offer. Iceborne is a mix of new monsters, regions, mechanics and a whole new endgame, all geared towards veteran players. ![]()
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