Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak (DLC) Review

Player(s): 1
Extra Features: Online Co-op play (1-4)

Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak is the latest update and rerelease of Monster Hunter Rise, which is the sixth installment in the Monster Hunter franchise. Sunbreak is available for PC and Switch. Sunbreak is my first time to experience Monster Hunter Rise and it was quite a pleasant experience. Monster Hunter Rise has a BUNCH to offer and the Sunbreak DLC adds a lot more content.

Before going into Monster Hunter Rise, let’s go over the new additions that Sunbreak has to offer. In Sunbreak, you go to a new land to fight many new monsters along with some more powerful monsters known as “The Three Lords”. New and returning monsters are included in this expansion. Just like the main games, the creature designs are unique and each monster has their own unique mechanics. Unlike the main game quests, all the new DLC quests are offered through the game’s gathering hub, which makes them all available for co-op play. Each weapon in the game has new abilities (silkbind attacks and switch skills). You can also gain the ability to fully customize your Palico and Palamute partners. This helps to reduce their overall RNG during battles. There are also two new areas to explore.

As mentioned above, this is my first experience with Monster Hunter Rise, so I’ll talk a bit about it. After a rather deep (around Dark Souls type of deep) character creation, you’re let loose to start taking missions to fight monsters. The beginning tutorials, cutscenes and overall help missions of the game took me around an hour to get through. It’s understandable since this game has a LOT to keep in mind while questing. The game was a bit overwhelming in terms of controls and overall menus from the start, but I started to get adjusted to it (for the most part) within about five hours into the game.

The game starts out with small quests, but quickly gets into quests where you’ll face off against big monsters. Monsters in the game have tons of HP and they all have unique attacks and weaknesses to watch for. If you weaken a monster enough, you get the ability to ride on the monster and control it for attacking other enemies. You can lead monsters into each other to make them fight and gain an advantage as they fight. Each monster hunt has other big monsters out on the feel besides just the objective.

Your character has access to a variety of weapons that you can choose from at the start of a hunt. You can also bring along items from a supply crate at the start of each battle. Along with single player missions, the game offers co-op missions where you can join with up to four other players to fight off a big monster. A Palico and a Palamute join up with each player to help out in attacking and overall navigation. Players can ride on their Palamute for quicker navigation and can also attack monsters while riding. The Palico is more of a support character.

The game overall has a very interesting world to explore. It’s very colorful and the animations are all quite smooth. The PC release runs buttery smooth. The sound is impressive as well. The opening singing really got me in the mood to play right from the start. The battles are quite intense and have a lot of eye candy with all the different enemy attacks. Monsters in this game range from car size to house size and even larger later on.

I greatly enjoyed my time with Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak. It’s not really the type of game you can simply jump into. It does have a bit of a learning curve from the beginning, but once you get over that, it’s a lot of fun to go questing about. The new additions with the Sunbreak add-on give a lot more options to a game that already has a lot to do. Overall, if you like Monster Hunter Rise, you’ll enjoy Sunbreak just as much. Capcom seems to be adding more to the game with extra updates as time goes by as well!

The Good:
+ New areas, new monsters, new Palico and Palumute customizations and more extra content!
+ A very addicting game
+ PC version runs silky smooth

The Bad:
- The controls can be hard to learn and remember all the button combinations for attacks and other commands when starting out

Reviewed on PC - a review code was provided by the game's publisher