Monster Hunter Outlanders Review-In-Progress: Giant-Killing For Free

Platforms: Android (version reviewed), iOS
Genre: Action, Adventure, Role-Playing Game, Monsters

From portable consoles to current-gen machines, Capcom’s Monster Hunter series has been on everything. At least the mothership titles with the core monster-killing, co-op, and crafting gameplay. This one-to-one recreation hasn’t been done on mobile devices like your iPhones or Android Samsung/Honor/what-have-you smartphones, most likely due to the tech and scope the titles demand (not to mention current availability). You can’t have a cheap-looking Monster Hunter running on fumes if you want it as authentic as the console versions.

Enter Monster Hunter Outlanders, a mobile free-to-play hunting action role-playing game proudly displaying its Capcom-licensed gameplay and monsters loud and proud. Today’s smartphones allow companies like TiMi Studio Group and Garena go hog-wild with mobile game fidelity and gameplay thanks to powerful and portable chipsets in iOS and Android smartphones. So it’s safe to say the game looks and runs well; just one glance at its 15-minute intro does the experience justice. But does it capture the spirit of a Monster Hunter title? In some ways, yes.

Sunborne

In Monster Hunter Outlanders, you play as a new adventurer who ends up working for a guild to help tame the wilds of Lapua and Aurora; a guild filled with beautiful-looking Adventurers. There, you find rogue monsters, hunt them in a group, and carve their hides for treasure and materials once defeated. Rinse and repeat, with variations like traversal and doing sidequests helping out a random NPC or two, usually a stray felynes surrounded by lesser monsters.

Whether it’s the hot-as-heck Searing Plains or the decaying Rotfall Abyss, you’ll find a lot of staple Monster Hunter monsters like the beginner-level Great Jagras to the iconic Rathalos and Diablos who will give your team a run for their giant-killing money. Each of these monsters have their set patterns and tells when attacking, and usually have new moves to waylay you when they’re enraged and at half health. Fortunately, Monster Hunter Outlanders’ learning curve is pretty low during its campaign, easing in newbies like myself into the world of prep and building constructs for easier traversal and camping, all leading up to the hunt.

My 10 hours into the game so far had me going through Giantwood Locale, Searing Plains, and Rotfall Abyss dealing with the rogue wildlife, while also exploring the bits of the Grand Archipelago. Well, parts of it anyway, since this is an F2P game that dishes out new content time after time. What I get to play through in the game’s launch phase is substantial enough. I get my choices of weaponry from the classic Long Sword and Great Sword to the unique entries like Heavy Bowgun and Charge Blade, each with their own hunting styles and weaknesses.

The bows are great for ranged attacks, but have not-so-hot damage and eat up stamina compared to melee weapons. The Great Sword is slow, but hits like a truck and lets you dodge mid-attack and charge. My favourite is the Charge Blade; it’s fast enough for quick hits, has decent range, and lets me use a Burst mode that deals slow multi-hitting attacks via its Switch Axe mode I can pull off at the fly.

In addition to the campaign that takes you through a world tour with boss hunts, you also have quick and limited time hunts, each progressively difficult but offer great rewards. The latter hunts amp up the damage the titular monsters do, so it’s more in tune with classic Monster Hunter gameplay to the point where you may want to switch to Classic controls for more options and flexibility. At the start, you can either use the mobile phone “Adventure Mode” controls or “Classic Mode” controls.

This being a streamlined version of the original titles, I opted for the “Adventure Mode” while dabbling back and forth with “Classic Mode”. In the end, this game is a different beast that feels like it’s tailored after current mobile game archetypes, so Adventure Mode controls it is for my entirety of my playthrough.

If you want quick hunts with the series’ finest, you have to head to the Gameplay Handbook/Daily Hunts page where all your F2P progression resource quests and level up materials are. Need to level up your Adventurer’s keepsakes to an optimal level? Start playing through Daily Hunts and Weekly Challenges to start farming from the plethora of unlocked monsters. Need to bump up the challenge and level cap? Play through the Ecological Rank Ascension quests to open up that gate for further forward-moving. Lacking many options to move forward in the campaign and overall game? Level up that Proof of Mastery badge by doing all the basic and required quests and activities in the game’s progression loop, working through the usual routine along the way.

Monster Hunter Outlanders let you recruit different sorts of buddies and party member adventurers to help you in your solo ventures. Yes, you can still team up with other online players like in the previous entries, but in terms of solo and single-player campaign, you can spend the game’s virtual currency (which can also be purchased with real money) to roll for random adventurers. These new additions follow the tropes set by the current trends of free-to-play gaming, from your showboating bow user Luka coded in blue and using the Lightning elemental, to big guy Rhodes with his hammer playstyle and Ice elemental.

You do need to build a colour-coded team to tackle the different monsters, each with their own weaknesses and immunities to certain elements. So yes, the game does give you enough free currency for the decently-ranked adventurers. For the top-tier ones like current banner character Midori? Better hope you’re lucky lest you’ll be spending more real money than you should. Monster Hunter Outlanders’ longevity will depend on its slew of Adventurers and monster hunts in future updates, but so far, the base game is meaty enough and flashier still to keep your interests.

TiMi Studio Group and Garena  have done the Capcom series proud with its free-to-play iteration of the long-running monster-killing title. Monster Hunter Outlanders is the perfect representation of a long-running  hunting action role-playing game taking the obvious route: cater to the rest of the world (and China) and tweak its hardcore mechanics so that it plays in line with current contemporaries spearheaded by other action RPGs in the market circa 2020.

That isn’t a bad thing, as porting a game like Monster Hunter one-to-one is insane and may turn a lot of people off due to its in-depth nature and fidelity. Thankfully, this version of Monster Hunter runs really well and looks damn good doing it, capturing the essence and feel of past games but tailor-make it for touchscreen phone controls. While I can’t give a full score yet since 10 hours isn’t enough for a title like this,I will say that TiMi Studio Group’s venture into Monster Hunter territory is a fine one indeed.  

Monster Hunter Outlanders is out now for Android and iOS devices.