Monster Hunter Now: A Fun Mobile Experience with Some Room for Improvement
As an official Capcom Creator, I recently got the honor and pleasure of getting to participate in a closed beta test for Monster Hunter Now! After playing so many hours of Pokemon Go, especially now that I live in a much more walkable city, it was exciting to try another game that allows me to be a giant nerd in the wild.
With Monster Hunter Now launching on September 14th, I think we have yet another real-world game that will create fun gaming experiences, both solo and with friends. I do wonder how long it will be a success though, as there are features in this game that I feel could still use some improvement. Despite my qualms, it’s still been a game I genuinely look forward to playing throughout my week.
They asked in the email I received about entering this closed beta not to share any screenshots of the game (any in this article will be from previous announcements or ones already authorized to share), so I won’t be able to show you how cool my character looks, or all the cute cat-based puns the team must have enjoyed writing, but what I can tell you is that this game is fun. After I got one taste of hunting monsters while out on one of the many walks I take per week, it became my go-to walking activity. If you’ve enjoyed Monster Hunter games in the past, the game hits all the notes you’d look for in a game from the series, just condensed down to make the game more conducive for a mobile experience.
Landmarks in the world out your front door serve as gathering spots, which have items required for completing quests, and forging new weapons and armor. While it doesn’t seem that we can gather from these spots too frequently, I haven’t had too much of a problem forging and upgrading equipment, and that’s with approximately 2–3 hours of playing the game per week. The gathering spots seem to at least refresh daily, so even if you can’t get materials from them multiple times a day, there seems to be enough spots around the map to get what you need for forging and upgrades.
Forging and upgrading weapons/armor is straightforward enough, and I’m enjoying collecting them all. There’s a wide assortment of different aesthetics for armor thus far, and the array of weapons has been fun to experiment with. My preference is for the sword and shield, as it makes it easy for me to continue walking while hunting, because it’s the most responsive, quickest, and easiest to use of all the weapons. While the game currently doesn’t offer any tutorials for how to use any weapon that isn’t the intro weapon (sword and shield), it didn’t feel too hard to get a feel for the weapons in combat with smaller monsters. I would still like to see some form of a tutorial for the various weapons, since a few of them are radically different in gameplay from the one they teach you on.
Monster hunting is fun in the way I hoped it would be, offering easy-to-learn combat against smaller monsters, which are downed fairly quickly and give a small amount of material, and combat against the bigger monsters, which is where the gameplay gets even more fun. Fighting the large monsters is where the multiplayer aspect comes in, creating a team of 4 players to take them down and grab that sweet, sweet loot for that strong and fashionable gear.
The large monster hunts are where the game starts requiring a bit more skill, but I feel that the game makes it easy to understand. While the difficulty of some of the monsters scales up as your Hunter Rank increases, there are mechanics similar to the console Monster Hunter games that long-time fans can look forward to (different weapon mechanics, breaking different monster parts for gear-specific loot, satisfying special attacks) while also being simple enough for new players to jump in easily.
There’s a loose story to follow that continues to expand as you complete the mainline quests, which is at least entertaining enough to read through while you complete each quest, and a bulk of your experience points come from completing those quests. There are daily quests to look forward to as well after you reach Hunter Rank 11, offering more zenny (in-game currency used to forge and upgrade gear) and experience to collect each day. While there currently doesn’t appear to be any official daily login bonuses other than receiving your daily healing items (the game gives you 5 each day you log in, with your inventory capping them out at 10) and completing daily quests, I haven’t felt like the game lacks ways to keep boosting my rank and complete quests.
The quests and hunts provide so much to do throughout the game, but my favorite feature in Monster Hunter Now is, without a doubt, their Paintball system, which is unfortunately not the ability to forge a paintball gun and turn your favorite monster Barbie pink. (Idea for the future, Capcom/Niantic? I’m thinking yes!)
Paintballs in the game allow you to mark a large monster to hunt later, which could be helpful if you’re on the go and can only log in for a minute or two to check what’s around the area. You get a certain amount of auto-paintballs that mark large monsters for later depending on where you are while you have the app open in background mode, but also a set amount of manual ones on top of that to use whenever you see a large monster on the map you want to fight later. You can get the most out of this feature by actually going outside, and I’ll always think it’s pretty rad that we’re in an age where creating video games that encourage us to get out of our homes for a bit.
Assuming Niantic also made it easy to find these large monsters in more spread out/rural areas, the incentive for anyone playing this game to get out and interact with the world around them is definitely there.
There are also a couple items to help with increasing the area in which you can access monster hunts and gathering stations, but they’re available as quest rewards so rarely, and here’s another fun fact you won’t love to hear: you can also buy them with a currency that I’m almost positive will be exclusively locked behind a paywall.
“Gems” are what you can use to buy these items, or extra potions in a day if you run out of your daily allotment, or more manual paintballs. Though I do remember having some gems to start, the game has not given me any additional, and I’m at Hunter Rank 27 as I’m writing this. This makes it much easier for those who can put a lot of money into this game to get way ahead of those who cannot. I understand wanting to offer rewards that benefit the players’ experience, but if they’re only going to be behind a paywall, that’s going to be a problem. That shouldn’t feel like a completely inaccessible part of the game, and I would love to see this currency offered more often throughout the daily quest rewards (or even the hunter rank progression, since that hasn’t offered much past rank 11).
A small something to thank the players who continue to log in and actually play the game would be nice, because let’s be real: a LOT of us would fund the most iconic wardrobe for our hunters, would there be any optional outfits to purchase in the future. Some of us wouldn’t even wait to save up on any amount of daily currency we could farm (I say that as someone who never thought I’d spend extra money on Final Fantasy XIV to buy an outfit…but then, eventually, I did.) Maybe it’s just a hunch on my part, but that currency being solely paid is a missed opportunity for players to have something extra to work for.
Overall, I think the game has the potential to give games like Pokemon Go some healthy competition. Unlocking more large monsters to fight as you rank up, hunting more than one of the same to get enough materials for new weapons/armor, and the desire to be the most fashionable hunter in the land keep bringing me back to the game. I will be bugging all my friends to play this game with me the day it comes out, because that’s the one feature I wasn’t able to test, due to a lack of local friends who are also testing the game. I think the multiplayer would be a genuinely fun way to have an outing with friends, but I also appreciate how accessible the game is to just pick up and play on your own time.
While I feel there could be more incentives to log in and play the game for a set amount of time per day, and not having a currency that feels solely behind a paywall, the game as it currently stands has me hooked, and I’ll be continuing to play it, even past writing this review. With enough attention to keeping the game fresh, and offering players more value for their time spent playing the game, this can be a real powerhouse in this genre of mobile gaming.
Pokemon Go started a fascinating way to play video games, and Monster Hunter Now is showing how well a game like it can be done in a way that doesn’t just feel like they copied the game that pioneered it. There was some real work put into this to make it stand out, and I have faith that, with the right attention to making the game worth the time we put into it, this will be a highly notable experience.
