Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak Switch review – a beast of an expansion

metro.co.uk:

The Nintendo Switch (and PC) exclusive Monster Hunter gets its first big paid-for expansion and a spooky new Halloween theme.

It’s four years now since Monster Hunter: World finally made the franchise a hit in the West and given it had it its last major content update some time ago we’ll probably hear about a sequel relatively soon. Capcom will likely want to take their time though, as the subsequent success of Monster Hunter Rise, for Switch and PC, suggests they’ve finally discovered the secret formula for attracting a mainstream audience. Something which is well in evidence with this new expansion.

Sunbreak is the equivalent to World’s Iceborne and while it does need the original game to play its scale is such that it feels like it would’ve been easy to turn into a standalone release. As it is though you need to have progressed surprisingly far into Rise (the 7-star quest Serpent Goddess of Thunder) to even access the new content, so this is absolutely not the place to start for new players.

The story continues on directly from the parent game and, inevitability, revolves around the appearance of a new monster. This leads to the arrival of a knight from the kingdom of Elgado, which in turn ends up with you travelling to her homeland to help with a different monster. Or to summarise: there are monsters and you hunt them.

Considered by many to be the best in the series, Rise had such a huge volume of content – together with fun new gimmicks like a grappling hook, animal mounts, and Tower Defense style mini-games – that it was able to appeal to both veterans of the series and those that have never played it before.

As implied, that’s certainly not the pitch for Sunbreak, which is aimed squarely at those that have played Rise