Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak Review (Saph)
Despite all the negative things I'll go on to say about it, Sunbreak is a good expansion with plenty to offer. Steam doesn't allow for neutral reviews and to me the good slightly outweighs the bad here so I lean more toward positive if only a little.
Sunbreak had a lot to live up to after the gem that was Iceborne and I much prefer the format of both over having to buy an ultimate edition of every instalment in the series or waiting for one to release before getting to play them. Iceborne brought new features, a ton of new monsters and a few returners that I had been missing to the game. Sunbreak follows suit in the same way however it feels a lot less heavy on the new monsters.
What we got was great, Malzeno and Lunagaron are both fun to fight, the fight before the credits is good too. The sad part is that it didn't hit the same heights that Iceborne's "final" fight did despite doing plenty to differentiate itself. It was just a bit too easy compared to its predecessor. I carted one time over the course of the expansion so far and it was to Gore Magala. One of the few returners I was genuinely happy to see again.
I'm not a stickler for every hunt needing to be heavy on preparation and being punished for it, but that is what made me fall in love with the series as far back as Tri. The problem I have with Rise's difficulty is that nothing was actually able to twoshot me in high rank gear until I hit MR4. Every hunt was over in 5 minutes because the game has way too many damage tools and less focus on defence which has become the meta.
I don't know about other longtime fans of MH, but I loved and still love the hunting sim half of the series' title. I like stalking prey across the map, having it feel like an actual hunt. Now that's almost non-existent in the series with how groups of 3-4 players can just stunlock nearly every single monster in the game in one zone, killing it before the timer can hit its second pip at the ten minute mark.
Solo hunting still scratches the hunting itch from time to time but that has never been the sole focus of the series and it shouldn't have to be for users like me to actually enjoy the game. Base Rise had a pretty good curve and felt well paced, but Master rank just felt like bum rushing through hordes of monsters I already killed en masse before the expansion dropped with the occasional sprinkling of new monsters, reskins and some returners.
Seregios, Astalos, both Magala variants, Espinos. These were all great fights that were more than welcome in the new more mobile format Rise and World have taken. I never got too far into Gen U and didn't get to play Frontiers. As such Espinos particularly was a completely new fight for me. It was great fun solo, feeling out its attacks and exchanging hits. It's the closest all of Sunbreak came to embodying everything I love about the series and it was mostly just downhill from there.
New turf wars, more quality of life, new skills, these are the things I looked forward to the most and was not disappointed. The worst offender in the game however, the Petalace remains one of the worst aspects of the game and it feels like not much was done to curb the reliance the game expects you to have on it outside one great wirebug that takes you to a ton of spiribirds in ONE of the new maps.
The feature is so mind-numbingly boring that time and time again my all offence bow user friend would cart in one hit because taking a second to nab a few green and orange birds is not fun in the slightest and NOTHING was done to make the process any less moronic by design.
Now do I fault people for not wanting to run around the map gathering dumb hummingbirds for the first 5 minutes of a hunt? No. Because it's boring as sin and should have been reworked to be either entirely or at least semi-autonomous or at worst removed from the game completely. It's a massive design flaw in an otherwise great MH game and watching the Quest failed screen pop up from time to time because of that last paragraph's friend is more than a little annoying.
Upgrades cost a lost of zenny, this was true in the base game. Getting ~155z a hunt because one of your team double carted is not going to pay the bills and I blame it entirely on the stupid Petalace encouraging people to be lazy in what is supposed to be a key part of hunt prep. The game actively incentivises the less defensive weapon types to have a purely offensive skillset because that's what gets hunts over with faster and as a direct result of that I have to grind more if we even manage to clear the hunt.
When every hunt is finished within five minutes because of this focus on speedrunning them, it kills what is one of the biggest draws the series had for me and it's depressing to think that going forward this is how every game is going to feel to a more extreme degree and ultimately it sapped a lot of the steam I had going into this expansion.
Maybe I'd have had more fun doing it all solo aside from all the repeat fights. But playing with friends is supposed to be fun too and at times it is. Just not in the way the series used to be.
Like I said at the start, I lean slightly more toward recommending the DLC because the actually new content is still great and flashy. But there's just so much negative that I can't ignore it and being silent on that would just eat at me. I wish Steam would add a neutral option to reviews and maybe one day they will.
If you liked Iceborne, this is in the same vein and will scratch some of the itch. Just be prepared for some of the less fun things that were left in.