Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak isn’t loaded with content, and I love it for that

digitaltrends.com:

Returning to a game like Monster Hunter Rise is not at all like riding a bicycle. It’s a lot harder than you remember and muscle memory is not enough to save you from getting yourself knocked out.

However, I am a glutton for punishment and decided to get back into monster slaying with the newly released expansion Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak. It follows in the footsteps of live service expansions before it, including the excellent Monster Hunter World: Iceborne. The new DLC brings more monsters and story content to the Switch and PC game, but it lacks some of the essential hooks that this genre usually demands.

And surprisingly, it’s better off without them.

After completing the main story in the base game, players are invited to Elgato, a European-inspired fort filled with knight-like chevaliers. The people of Elgato are struggling with monsters with strange afflictions that are causing the entire biome to go out of whack. Players are tasked with helping out Elgato and its chevaliers with solving the mystery of the land – and of course are compensated with various monster parts that can be turned into a hat or two.

Besides the narrative, the actual minute-to-minute gameplay of Sunbreak is an absolute treat. The expansion brings more monsters to fight, new armor skills to think about when creating a build, and an enjoyable hub to traverse. The story mode of Sunbreak ends with what might be the best final boss in a Monster Hunter game. It’s so good that it painfully reminded me of how bad the base game’s final boss fight is. Veterans of the series are certainly blessed with the content in this expansion.

But it’s a daunting expansion too. Sunbreak brings back a feature that was seemingly absent from the base game of