Hit credits on it tonight. Despite the technical issues (mostly solved by the latest PC patch for me, though I'm sure other people are still having problems) I was able to play through the whole thing without too much interference - the main problems were some FPS drops here and there and a tendency to freeze when joining multiplayer sessions. I struggled a lot early on with a bad AI quirk in the game, where if enemies can't reach you they run away - but after a few 30-minute-long hunt ordeals, I finally figured that out.
It suffers from some repetition via "palette swap" boss types, though they at least change their movesets around which helps it not get too stale. I can imagine this game getting boring much faster than a main series Monster Hunter game would, but in 48 hours of play time I didn't really find myself at that point with any of the enemy types, so they did their job. I found a few of the enemy types tremendously annoying to fight as a bow user, but that's probably the designers trying to coax me into using a melee weapon (I refuse.)
I was worried going into the home stretch that the last boss would be a chore or have a lot of the same design problems as some of the other bosses, but in my opinion they actually knocked it out of the park. It's got a bunch of visually and mechanically distinct boss phases so it's pleasing to experience it and doesn't get stale like some fights do once they drag on. The attacks are generally pretty clearly telegraphed and easy to understand, so unlike most of the other enemies in the game it felt really achievable to clear it in one life on my first attempt despite still being hard, which is a nice sweet spot for a final boss.
I found myself mostly playing in co-op because it alleviates my main grievance with the enemy design (a lot of the enemies just throw out attacks constantly, so your timing windows to dodge are very tiny and you often don't have space to attack) and the way they've tuned enemy stats means it doesn't really make the fight much slower or nudge the overall difficulty of the boss too much. You'll still die in co-op if you screw up and still have to learn to dodge the enemy moveset and aim precisely to break parts off (though breaking parts does seem easier with other players distracting enemies.)
The game is loaded to the brim with extraneous mechanics and I found some of them kind of tedious to interact with, like crafting food for buffs and all the inventory management and base building it requires. But it's nice that all that stuff is there because I know some people go wild for it, and I didn't feel forced to do any of it to complete the game. It's cute to be able to build little houses for your orb friends and set up pens for your tamed animals to live in.
The "it's like if monster hunter was fortnite" in-combat building mechanics felt awkward to the end but they really do enrich the game and make it feel unique. Once you get into flow it feels really natural to drop a crossbow down to distract an enemy, or throw up a deflection shield in a panic to parry a charge attack from a giant boar. They even let you build onto bosses later on, so you can attach climbing footholds to them or strap a giant pile bunker on to give 'em a big poke, which is satisfying. Unfortunately, they tie unlocking some of these to special trigger events in certain boss fights, so I still don't have some of them unlocked... oh well.
Overall though, enjoyable game with a great soundtrack (nice work Masashi Hamauzu et al), great art direction, tight mechanics (mostly) and a more-than-good-enough story. I can't imagine this game winning any awards given how poorly it's been received, and that's a shame, since I kind of hope they do at least one more of these so I can see them further explore the mechanics.
I enjoy that your friend orb sets off fireworks and throws boxes to distract enemies in combat. As far as orbs in video games go there is a lot of orb content here to enjoy, even if having a cat or dog friend like in MH would probably have been more fun.
Oh yeah. The game's autosave is really janky. Make sure to manually save before doing online play (it's in the pause menu)
