Monster Hunter: World is the latest title in the Monster Hunter series, which focuses on giving players an open-zone exploration experience while continuing the experience of tracking, hunting, and capturing monsters. With tons of craftable armor, fourteen different weapon options, and tons of zones, Monster Hunter: World has a lot of gameplay to offer. I played the game on PC, hating the clunky multiplayer but enjoying the game’s world-building and combat system.

Monster Hunter: World is a third-person role-playing game with a fairly heavy focus on the role-playing aspect. The game starts off with you chatting with other fighters in a tavern, before you’re asked to create your character. The character creation process is very detailed, and if you’re like me, you can spend at least an hour choosing your cosmetics. After you’ve created your monster hunter and chosen your Felyne, or cat, you’re cut to a cutscene where tensions in the tavern are rising. The ship you’re on is being attacked by a giant monster rising from the sea, and you’re thrown into a tutorial that asks you to perform a series of actions in order to survive.

After surviving this series of events, you finally arrive in Astera, where the Research Commission gives you your first mission: to go out and kill some of the large monsters that roam Astera. The goal of the Research Commission is to study these creatures, fashion them into armor and weapons, and hopefully gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of each monster. It’s clear that this idea informs the gameplay of Monster Hunter.

There’s a lot of detail to be found in the Monster Hunter world, and you can dive deep into it or slip beneath it. You can talk to Ecological Research to help you upgrade your field guild, you can craft more weapons and armor than you could ever need, and there’s a huge variety of dishes that the Felyne chef can cook for you. Also, watching the cat chef cook you a meal is one of the highlights of the game, and it’s undeniably adorable. Overall, the world that Monster Hunter has created is rich and detailed. By far my favorite thing about the game was the world building and how lost you could get in it. Each zone you explore is uniquely rich.