Monster Hunter Now Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Niantic, the company behind the uniquely popular Pokémon Go, has spent the past few years trying on IPs like a kid at a hat. They’ve tried everything from Harry Potter to the NBA with limited to no success, and now that its new game, Monster Hunter Now, has been out for a few weeks, it’s time to see how it has shaped up.

As always, Niantic’s latest augmented reality romp is effectively a reskin of their own less successful IP, Ingress, but this time with a Monster Hunter veneer – and a seriously uninspiring name. PokéStops are now mining points and monsters are now killed, not caught, but the core mechanic of real-world exploration is still very much front and centre. The key thing is that, unlike Wizards Unite or Pikmin Bloom, this common formula actually lends itself incredibly well to Monster Hunter Now.

Instead of catching monsters you kill them, and instead of farming for Candy to level up a respective Pokémon, you farm monster parts to level up your swords and equipment. As in the main series Monster Hunter games, if you want a fire-based Anjanath sword, you have to go hunt some Anjanath. And you really gotta hunt em all because loot drops are random. You can easily spend hours in the main series hunting the same monster looking for the 1% drop rate Rathian Mantle that just won’t drop. The same thing happens here, given how stingy loot drops can be.

However, to find a given monster, you need to go looking for it in the correct biome — a real-world overlay that makes certain parts of your neighbourhood either a Forest, Swamp or Desert for a three-hour period, before the map cycles to a new biome.

Beyond that, PokéStops/Gyms are farming points that you can only harvest once per day. All of this is major encouragement for