Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak (PC) — A review at MR85ish, with one monster left to unlock.

Yes, while I still have one more monster to unlock, I rolled credits on Sunbreak on the 6th of July and have been playing the end game pretty much every day since then, so I feel like I have spent more than enough time with it at this point to get some thoughts down (given some publications posted reviews before they even engaged with the Anomaly system, just sayin’).

This is probably going to be one of the longer reviews I have written, because speaking about Sunbreak just neutrally as a whole product is so difficult. Your experience will vary wildly depending on taste, patience for things, the weapon you use, your build, your skill level, your teammates etc so a lot of this “review” is more like a catalogue of my experience going through Sunbreak on the Hunting Horn, and then eventually changing to other weapons. As such, I am going to throw a mini sort of TL;DR Review below for those who don’t want to read the whole thing and then it expands below, for those who want to read more personal anecdotes.

Here is the TL;DR review:

I have somewhat mixed emotions for the DLC, overall. I think I come from a different place than some, in that I actually didn’t like World that much and I thought Iceborne was mostly frustration and very little joy. To me Rise was a solution for almost all of World’s and Iceborne’s problems, and was an improvement upon that game in almost every aspect.

Sadly, I do think some of the things that made Rise such a joy for me got lost in Sunbreak. I don’t think this is necessarily an antidote for those who didn’t like Rise, but if you enjoyed Rise but just eventually fell off because you thought Rise was too easy, well stick through maybe like the first dozen hours of Sunbreak and be ready for all the difficulty you can manage, and so much more. If you are one of those Souls fans who lives for the frustration, this expansion seems to have been designed for you!

That doesn’t also mean it isn’t for people who were happy with where Rise was, Sunbreak does try to give you a lot of extra power to balance out just how absurd some of the difficulty spikes are here, but you are definitely going to need to make adjustments and accept that Sunbreak sets the pace now, not you. Should you survive the adaptation process, you may still never end up having as much fun with this as you did base Rise, however, you will still find plenty to enjoy. I went through this when I played World for the first time, and I would argue Sunbreak offers less of a rainbow to cross and a much bigger pot of gold at the end.

That said, while I know that all sounds very negative, I think overall, Sunbreak is an excellent expansion in so many ways, and easily one of my game’s of the year. I just think it would be disingenuous of me not to stress just how punishing and miserable this game can be at times, the level of difficulty on offer here will spoil the experience for a lot of people. The people who survive the punishment, then may drop off due to the repetition or grind, which the game features in abundance. There are deeply rooted flaws here everywhere, and I feel that is important to be laboured. However, I also feel it shouldn’t take away from everything Sunbreak achieves and just how addictive and wonderful this expansion can be, when it all comes together.

Sunbreak is effectively more Rise, just at times, infuriatingly difficult. After playing through many multiplayer game launches over the last few years, Sunbreak had very few connection issues, bugs or crashes. And between the new monsters, gear, skills, all the quality of life improvements and my new found love of the Lance, no amount of punishment ever got me to the brink of just wanting to give up entirely. Your mileage of course, may vary.

For me, I can see myself logging on for many more hunts to come, long after the MR100 journey ends and I am eagerly awaiting the new free Title Updates.

And here is more of my more personal and anecdotal experiences with the expansion:

Sunbreak addresses Rise feeling a little front loaded with new monsters by doing the complete opposite and packing most of the new stuff towards the back end. This feels like a weird decision, especially as some new monsters feel somewhat unceremoniously dropped in the middle of your levelling curve. I feel like everyone is saying this, but while new moves and tweaked sets/weapons are all nice, I could have done with far less of the returning monsters and would have preferred a bigger deal made of the new ones, which we should have gotten to quicker.

This feels especially so, as they then go and repeat exactly the same cycle all over again, as you go through the Anomaly Endgame. I have no idea if they plan to add them later, or if they will be added post MR100, but so far some of the most interesting monsters in the game for some reason do not have an Endgame version. So that unceremonious dumping of some of Sunbreak’s best is currently all you are getting.

They also withhold your full arsenal of new Switch Skills until you are pretty far into the expansion, meaning you spend maybe the first ten plus hours not really engaging with many of the new systems in the expansion at all.

I dunno, I just think this expansion is really oddly paced throughout. From the honestly pretty boring first couple of Master Ranks, to the insane difficulty spikes during later ones, to the bullet sponge Anomaly Monsters, all the way to the same crap MR threshold grind they used in High Rank (and it sucked there too), they seem to do everything they can to undermine all the best parts of the expansion, to artificially inflate the amount of content on offer here.

The first couple of MRs are honestly pretty easy, if you spent any time in Rise’s sort of end game prepping for Sunbreak, you could quite easily clear a bunch of those earlier MR ranks with your farmed, end game, HR sets. But then around the time you get your full arsenal and new monsters start getting introduced, the difficulty spikes and doesn’t ever really come back down again.

I dominated the end of HR and those early MR ranks with my Hunting Horn set up I created, and this only got stronger as I introduced new MR rank pieces of armour/weapons, which usually allowed me to add in huge amounts of bonus damage, more skills than ever and further introduce even more defence to my build.

However, I went from feeling like a God, to an ant, in basically one MR transition to another. I am pretty sure my first cart came against a particularly nasty combo from new monster Garangolm, but already as me and my hunting buddy were going through MR3, we were finding fights getting longer, sweatier and generally less fun. Then from like MR4 onwards, you seemed to have so few openings when using a melee weapon and you were taking near fatal damage to do any damage of your own, the fun just really seemed to start drying up for me, and was replaced with oppressive difficulty. This created a level of frustration I don’t remember experiencing at all in my hundreds of hours with Rise across Switch and PC.

As a player with maxed out gear at that stage of the game, every hit shouldn’t be a choice between healing or risking a cart to do any damage at all. This sense of powerlessness was what made World and Iceborne so miserable to me, and something I thought they solved in Rise but I guess too many people cried about it being “too easy” and so they stole the joy to make the minority happy. Thanks a lot.

By the time Aurora Somnacanth rolls around, all pretence around difficulty design appears to evaporate, with them simply creating completely artificial difficulty by having the monster go on fast forward, spamming attacks like a bullet hell game, creating infuriating cart situations where you feel powerless as a player, with nothing to learn from the cart.

I dunno, I just think the later monsters set such a tedious pace. There feels like there is so much downtime in every fight, which just wasn’t present in base Rise. I feel like I spend so much of Sunbreak just standing there as I wait for the monster to finish its spam and it becomes my turn to attack, like some weird turn based battle. It is the slow, eggshell, gameplay of a Souls game and the complete antithesis of the joy of base Rise.

It also creates weird rubber banding in the opposite direction, though, too. Nargacuga was one of my roadblocks in Rise, but in MR he feels way easier than almost anything else at MR3 because they just hit hard and move fast. There are no status effects you need to deal with, or some kind of anti-melee aura they can activate or some sort of ranged hit that can be fired across the map. It is still really challenging, but it’s the fun kind of challenging for me that base Rise delivered. It is an all out battle, with no downtime. You never need to run away to put out some sort of ailment or whatever, and you never need to facetank huge amounts of damage just to do any damage of your own, in the way you need to do with many others.

This also made the second Lord almost feel like an anti-climax too, because while they do have the ice ailment, in the grand scheme of them all, this is one of the lesser of evils, as it doesn’t do massive direct damage to you until you clear it. Since it was a fight of mostly just straight damage for the most part, and since it doesn’t have any moves really which create downtime while you wait for it to finish, this went down way easier than a lot of the stuff that I had to fight on the way to it. This is one of my favourite monsters in the game, and I enjoy the fight immensely, but I shouldn’t struggle more on returning monsters from base Rise, than the new flagship monsters. It just seems all kind of busted to me.

And like I say, I don’t wanna labour at this point, but this miserable rollercoaster really runs through Sunbreak as a whole. You’ll early on fight new monster Shogun Ceanataur, they can apply bleed to you very easily, crouching on a controller is really unreliable and this thing is crazy aggressive, so it ends up being a pretty tough fight on your journey. Shogun might have actually caused my largest number of carts, or it might be second to Gore Magala.

Much later on you unlock Seregios, as far as I can tell they can only apply bleed with their projectiles, but they are easily avoided. So while it still hits hard (it wrecked my shit the first time), you are going to have less of your attention pulled away focusing on statuses and more time focusing on the battle itself. This means once you figure out it’s fairly basic moveset (and battle with the game’s sometimes frustrating camera and tight FOV) this ends up becoming a much easier fight than Shogun ever ends up being, despite Steve coming so much later. You have to wonder why they placed it in this way.

Then, another example, is later on, you fell flagship Malzeno. The first time I fought Malzeno, they completely wrecked my shit, but this quickly turned into one of my favourite fights in the whole expansion. It is a big, epic, confrontation that leaves you feeling elated and triumphant when it is over, but it is also free of so much of the bullshit of other similar battles. You can just enjoy fighting this thing head on, rather than spend all your time stressing about ailments that kill you in a flash. But as you ride high on your mastery of Malzeno, you then once again go back to unlocking a bunch more boring returning monsters and they just wreck your shit instantly. The curve just never felt good to me.

All of this being said, it wasn’t until Anomaly Rank 3 where I really felt like I had hit my wall. I had been struggling and frustrated for a long time up until that point, but it was really here where I just couldn’t take it any more. The viability of straight melee had basically completely disappeared in almost every fight. The multi hit, status effect, combos you had to tank to get in any hits would kill you before you could do anything, you could spend the fight dodging, but then you weren’t doing any damage.

At this point I decided to give in, and accept what the game was telling me. Sunbreak is a game of range or a game of counters, the base Rise cadence was long dead. You deal with it, move on or you give up. And I wasn’t giving up.

I tried the Light Bowgun first, as while I know the bow is by far the most broken weapon in the entire game, at least in previous titles the bowguns were usually the strongest weapons overall. I have to admit, this change lifted my frustrations almost instantly, as I felt like I was playing the game the way it was intended and designed for, for the first time. Rather than smashing head first into their design choices, I would chill at the backline, raining down damage, while I watched my melee team mates struggle to try and get in hits at close range. I would chuckle at those peasants, still fighting against the oppressive status quo of Sunbreak only the most skilled of players could overcome.

However, while it was a more pleasurable experience for me, the flipside was I seemed to be doing far less damage than I was with the Hunting Horn. I mean if I looked at all the damage numbers flashing on screen, it seems like I should be doing way more damage than my previous Hunting Horn build, but the time to clear hunts became absurdly long.

The other issue with the gun, at least for me, is that you need to be weirdly precise on some monsters to get your yellow numbers (I swear the weakspot for the Light Bowgun on Rathian is like the teeth or something). This might be fine if I was playing on mouse and keyboard, but I feel like I have to play the game on a controller, because binding all the various mechanics and modifiers to the keyboard makes the game feel horrible to play without going through the faff of dedicated macros.

I eventually had to accept that while I was having a better time, I was being actively detrimental to whatever party I was in. At this point, I turned to a weapon that had always fascinated me, but I had never had the incentive to pick the weapon up. That weapon being the lowest performing, regularly lowest ranked in the popularity polls, Lance.

And oh boy, this is the one.

Sunbreak really came together for me for the very first time when I made this change. Is my damage crap? Yes! Is the learning experience a chain of carts as I now need to process every fight in a new way? 100%.

But man, the Lance exists in like a whole other world from the other weapons. In a good way! And when the clouds part, and the Sunbreaks (heh), and it just all comes together… Géilleadh do mo thoil!

It feels like every other weapon is built around one big, heavy hitting move. You try to find ways of making it as strong as possible, and getting to it as quickly as possible. Once you figure out your sequence, you sorta just copy paste that into every fight with minimal adjustment. You aren’t ever really thinking about or engaging with your full kit, you don’t take really into account what you are fighting, you are just copying and pasting the same dance into every scenario.

The Lance exists in almost complete inversion of this. The Lance doesn’t really have any such move or elaborate combos, instead the Lance is all about learning your monster, learning your kit, working out the best places to use your available kit against the specific monster you are fighting. Power comes not from big moves, or from the strongest talents, but from your own knowledge. Learning the right move, for the right scenario. Learning when the right time is to guard, or counter. To think about where you are positioned in accordance to what you are fighting. To think before you rush. And most crucially remember, while all the other melee peons may need to stress about this, you must steel your will and never pull back. Lances don’t run (unless they are jousting).

It is giving me a level of satisfaction I have probably not experienced since I first switched to Insect Glaive in base World and saw that game come alive in a similar way, for similar reasons. I guess these style of weapons are my calling.

It has kinda given me a new lease of life with the game too, just in general. I really hate the artificial grind to an arbitrary number to unlock a monster thing, but now there is a lot of satisfaction for me in fighting a monster over and over again, as each fight is like a new level up just for me. It is just such a satisfying feedback loop as each fight becomes smoother and smoother, not because you have found the most efficient combo or combination of gear talents, but from learned skill through perseverance. Every achievement on the Lance is earned and is always all yours, you are never carried by an overpowered weapon or combo of moves. This is how I think Monster Hunter was always supposed to be played, and enjoyed.

I am thinking about monsters in ways I never really did before, and just engaging with the game in whole new ways now, too. Really paying attention to all the information Sunbreak gives to the player in really understated ways. Learning patterns, audio cues, telegraphs, monster design decisions, hit boxes and animation timing on moves and so much more. Maybe to some, breaking the game down so mechanically might spoil it for them, but for me, figuring out how something works is always more interesting to me than seeing it actually working.

At first I was a nervous little turtle, cowering behind my shield, doing little pokes and probably mistiming my counters. But with each fight, your awareness grows and slowly, you come out of your shell. You turn from turtle to wasp, stinging with unrelenting pressure, every hit the monster throws at you, you counter, and then you are straight back on them. Is your damage low? Maybe. But as other melee users must constantly weigh the cart risk, there you are, just chipping away, never stopping. Sure, you carted A LOT getting to this point, but now you are the most dependable member of your team. As others fall, there you are, still poking away. Each sting may only be an inconvenience to the monster, but the monster won’t be saying that when they have a thousand stings by the time the fight is over. And the best of all? You fully earned this reward. You did this. Only you. Is this the thing that gets everyone addicted to Souls games? I can see it.

In terms of new additions, I heard a lot of good things about the new Follower Quests, however, I am… less than impressed. I love the idea of the Followers and I guess if you are predominantly a solo player, or don’t have internet, and want somewhat of a multiplayer experience then this is a solution for you. Some of the stuff the AI can do will surprise you, but I guess they are balanced in such a way that they don’t smother the player, because while they may offer utility, they rarely offer much damage. It isn’t a touch for me on a true multiplayer hunt, where you face something you really struggled against, and four players are just kicking it on the ground and laughing at it. Follower Quests never get there. So, personally, I have no desire to sink any significant time into them, but still try and play enough of them to unlock their armour sets and weapons.

In terms of the new “loot”, I really do hope the next Monster Hunter game puts most of its focus into fully reworking their gear system. I think one of the weakest aspects of Rise was the gear, which is ironic, as it is a big part of the whole loop.

In World, sets had unique perks, so each set had an identity. In older games you weren’t stacking skills, but points, to proc both positive and negative effects which really made you think a lot more about what you were crafting and really engage with the set building mechanics.

In Rise they pretty heavily limited the skills you could stack, so it was a lot of boring maths as you figured out the most efficient way to stack the most amount of point x percent miniscule bonuses on top of each other you could. Sure, maybe every now and then a gear set would have a unique bonus, but it often wasn’t worth building around, outside of really niche scenarios.

Sunbreak does address this to some degree, it feels like more sets have something unique about them and given we can now stack so many skills, I feel like I can experiment much more with mixed sets, as I can feel like I can fit in so many extra weird things, without sacrificing the core parts that make my build tick. But compared to other modern ARPGs or Looters or whatever you want to compare this to, I still feel it is very boring, overall. Very dated.

So yeah! Sorry I don’t really have a clean sign off point on these extended thoughts, but if you read through all of my rambling to get down to this point of this review of mine, then know you have earned the power of friendship or some shit.

Much love.

— Locke.