Magpie Gamer

The Monster Hunter franchise alternates between mainline releases with big budgets and more experimental spin-off titles such as Rise. And a lot has changed. Farming has been meshed with the Argosy (trading ship), Tailraider Safaris are now the Mewcenaries, and the lizard mounts have been replaced by a palamute (dog) that the player can customize and ride. This makes getting around Rise's surprisingly vertical maps a breeze. The downside is that there isn't much of a reason to move vertically because most of the fights happen at ground level. A new 'wirebug' mechanic can be used to zip through the air and to take direct control of weakened monsters in order to puppet them into fights with other monsters. For some reason players now start every mission with a chunk of their health and stamina bar locked out. The only way to access this missing section is to collect glowing spirit-birds in the environment, which isn't so bad at first but becomes tedious over time, e...

Review based on patch 1.02. Gameplay: The gameplay is real-time strategy with pause (RTwP), although you only really 'pause' when selecting unit paths or rolling back an action. The deployable unit size is abnormally small at just four main units, each with its own backup member that can be swapped out a set number of times per battle. This limits what you can do strategically, and besides deciding what order to target enemies in and sometimes what direction to approach them from, there isn't any real tactical depth. There are no terrain hindrances or elevation to consider, no shortcuts to open up. Every mission has optional goals that are almost always to keep every unit alive and to finish in 6 or 8 minutes. The actual main mission goals are equally static, being to kill all enemies or on rare occasions to guard a barricade or protect a wagon. On the battlefield units auto-attack and will do additional 'ambush' damage when positioned behind an enemy, but...