Lizstar

I have a couple of friends who have gotten into it and they seem to have pretty positive opinions so far. They're pretty critical of Niantic, but it seems like everyone who plays these games is.

It's a pretty good way to get a walk in

I'm too stuck in the previous Niantic titles to check it myself, but the MH communities I tap into, along with my friends, say it's a pretty good game, if a little barebones at the moment.

Not all weapon types are present yet, and hunts are 60-second little minigames that - apparently - have translated the MH movesets to just a few taps and slides very well. Or, so they tell me.

Personally it felt more like a MH-themed Niantic game than a MH game. Combat was trivial by just button mashing (well, screen mashing), which didn’t feel right for a MH game for me.

But I’ve also seen that quite a few people quite like it so maybe I need to give it another try, I only really played it for 2 days before I found Pikmin Bloom and latched onto that instead.

I've put a pretty substantial amount of time into it now. A summary:

• The combat system is REALLY good, maybe the most faithful recreation they could possibly do with one-hand touch controls. The early game makes it seem kind of easy/simplistic but now that I'm hitting 4-5 star monsters I'm regularly getting the crap beaten out of me. It genuinely does evoke the thrill of monster hunting in tiny form and it's IMO the #1 reason to play this game
• Weapon types currently in the game: S&S, GS, LS, Hammer, Light Bowgun, Bow. I was shocked to find hammer gameplay feel so familiar, tho you can't run around while charging up, you have to stand still (oh well). Oh, and yes: you can break parts/cut tails
• Weapon/armor stuff is pretty much what you'd think it is, the usual stacking skills are back. Elemental resistances are reduced to being skill based and aren't inherent to armour now. Weapons have elements or don't.
• EXTREMELY minimalist metagame; plot is mostly an excuse to do things you'd already do (kill monsters, pick up items) and mostly is used to unlock higher difficulty fights and new monsters.
• Basically no multiplayer elements other than that players can join each other in a fight, but it's rare to nonexistent to find randos in the wild, so expect to play singleplayer unless you have friends locally. There's no equivalent of pokemon go gyms, no territory or pvp at all
• Economy is fairly straightfoward; upgrading requires monster parts and harvested stuff like ore, which is available as freely as you can walk to go get it. It also requires gold. You get about 3000 gold from dailies and the rest from hunts is a pittance (10-30 per fight), so that's kind of a soft-limiter.
• Premium currency is used for the following: * Healing items, range-increasers, paintballs (let you "tag" a monster to fight later at your convenience). None of it seems that essential. You recover about 50% of your health over a half hour and you get 5 free healing items a day. There's also inventory space increases you can buy directly for cash but I'm drowning in items and nowhere near the base cap so idk

Overall I'd say that it's fairly minimalist so if you need motivators like a good plot or a variety of stuff to do it's not gonna do that for you but if you just wanna beat up monsters and upgrade your shit it's a pretty good time actually