Monster Hunter Now strips the MonHun experience down to its very basics

14.09.2023 - 01:41 / theverge.com / Andrew Webster / Pokémon Go

By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

There are few game titles more literal than Monster Hunter. This is a world filled with monsters, and your job is to hunt them. But what makes the series so engrossing is the gameplay loop tied to those hunts: the way you prepare by collecting the right gear, weapons, and potions; how you spend time studying your target before heading into battle; and finally, using the downed monster to craft better gear so you can take on even more challenging beasts. It’s a long and involved process but also one that feels so satisfying when you pull it off.

Monster Hunter Now, a collaboration between Capcom and Pokémon Go developer Niantic, attempts to take that formula and streamline it into something that works in short bursts on your phone. In a lot of ways, it’s successful: the hunts in Now are quick little battles that you can mostly complete in under a minute while waiting in line for coffee. But while the game feels good in those sessions, it is missing much of the strategy and planning that MonHun uses to get its hooks into you. Monster Hunter Now has a lot of potential, but in its current form, it’s more of an introductory MonHun than something that will satisfy existing players.

The game actually has a story, which is about the MonHun realm bleeding over into our world — a bit like the Monster Hunter movie starring Milla Jovovich — but it’s mostly just an excuse for you to walk around killing monsters. Now is a location-based game from Niantic very much in the same mold as Pokémon Go and its less successful successors. That means that you’ll have to go out into the real world to find locations for mining resources or to seek out monsters. The game doesn’t count your steps — there’s always Pikmin Bloom for that — but getting out of the house is a big part of the experience.

What really makes Monster Hunter Now different is its battles, which are the main focus. Initially, combat is pretty straightforward. When you first get into a battle (which you do by tapping a monster near you on the map), the controls are very simple: you tap on the monster in front of you to attack and swipe right or left to dodge. It’s very easy and, at least at first, I was able to win basically every battle just by quickly tapping on the monster in front of me. But as you level up and progress through the story, the combat expands quite a bit.

Most importantly, you unlock bigger and more dangerous monsters to fight. Not only do they look great, with detail and animations that rival the console Monster Hunter games, but also they add some much-needed