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Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak is exactly what you’re looking for in an expanded version of Monster Hunter. The Capcom team has made some great quality of life changes in addition to adding better content. Let’s take a quick look at the new challenges waiting for us at Elgado Outpost.
The story so far
Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreaks occur after running most of the main story of the base game. You are a famous hunter in Kamura village. You have defeated all the threats of rampage and new monsters that seem to scare your home. Who is Narwa? Yes, that’s right. Things are peaceful around the village and it is reopening as usual. Then you will receive the words of the messenger at the entrance of the town.
Here, for the first time, I meet Dame Fiorein, a knight of a distant kingdom. She came to your village and sought help for her people in search of a famous hunter. You go with her to the Elgado Outpost and help investigate her strange uproar. It’s more fun to experience new content than to read about it here, so I’ll leave it at this point.
What’s New
Regardless of the game, one of the main things needed for a successful sequel is more content. We are happy to report that Sunbreak meets that standard and extends it significantly. You’ll be given new quests and new monsters, but I won’t really explain them here in order to leave something that players can discover for themselves. This is a new addition that does not include spoilers.
First, one of my favorite additions to the game is the follower collaboration quest. When you meet and meet the people of the Elgado Outpost, some of them open special quests. In these quests, you will take one of your followers and they will help you hunt. Unlike multiplayer quests, you can help with both paramute and pariko. These hunts are a new way to give NPCs time to expose and crush monster materials.
Another new addition is the ability to switch silk bind skills on the fly. With the new skills of each weapon, this is a good way to add more usefulness to your character in hunting. Not sure exactly what you need to equip? Throw different skill sets at your character and move back and forth freely! And since each of the 14 weapons in the game has new skills, you may want to do that.
Finally, the new level of Sunbreak is vast. Like the base game, these maps have a lot of verticality. Each has plenty of space to explore every corner of the discovery.
Good things in life
One of the great things about expansion, and what Capcom is making the most of here, is to rebuild the system to streamline the gaming experience. All the feedback and play data we collected during the first release almost always led to improvements. That is certainly the case for Sunbreak.
Start with my favorite addition, Hands Down. You can use your stamina to climb the surface of the cliff. This one change makes moving the map much easier. In the base game, if you wanted to climb something, you had to use a wire bug. Up to 3 wire bugs can occur and require creative placement to reach the top spots in the game. Now the character can climb anywhere until he runs out of stamina.
Also, new features in this game are new skills for your peers. Palicos can be equipped with these new abilities, called secret support skills, to assist in hunting. The special abilities of your peers are based on their particular expertise. For example, Healing Parico can get a new ability Healing Clover Bat. It attaches to hunters and heals them over time based on the damage done to the monsters.
This extension features far more tweaks than it is realistic to cover here. This extension affects many systems, such as gambling at the dumpling skill level with hopping skewers and lottery changes. Did you also mention that you can save the radial menu to the item’s loadout? Almost every part of the sunbreak is better than the base game.
Next hunt, and then hunt
After spending more than 60 hours on a new expansion pack, it’s one of my favorite game expansion packs in recent history. If you’re a fan of Monster Hunter Rise, you should consider playing new content. I enjoy my time at Sunbreak and can’t wait to continue my adventures with my friends, take on new challenges and get paid. Alright, hunter. See you on the spot.
Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak will be released for Switch and PC on June 30th. Capcom provided the PC code for this review.
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