First thing I gotta say about this game is that it's visually fucked? Like it's just utterly deep fried. They clearly struggled terribly with performance at whatever level of visual fidelity they were targeting and had to make some harsh cuts to make the game run at tolerable frame rates on consoles, resulting in a game that looks substantially worse than Monster Hunter Rise on Switch. Must have been a horrid experience for this team; I assume they simply got bulldozed by EA on some level, either with the imposition of unfamiliar tech (is this game running on Frostbite?) or unrealistic production deadlines. I can't imagine this was a visual target anyone wanted for the game.
Mechanically, there's interesting stuff here but honestly the visuals make everything so muddy and indistinct that I don't really want to play it. The creature designs are overall busier and more detailed than they are in Monster Hunter, which is bad for visual clarity both inherently and in the specific context of the whole game looking like it's been covered in panko and dipped in hot oil. One of the weapons you can make early on is built around parrying and predictably the parry timing is totally inscrutable.
The idea of mixing quick building, Fortnite-style, with a monster hunting game is cute. But in practice it feels like you're learning a whole extra weapon with its own set of awkward controls; to compensate, the actual hunter weapons in this game are pared down to really simple combos and don't have the complex escalating mechanics that weapons do in Monster Hunter. This game is streamlined and approachable relative to MonHun, but only to a point.
Overall, I've found this pretty disappointing. I am normally very tolerant of graphical fidelity issues but in this game it just kind of breaks the spell and makes the entire game not work; and the way it introduces its systems is haphazard enough that I don't feel like investing the time to look past the immediate presentation problems.
