There is something slightly surreal about playing Monster Hunter on a phone. Sure, its early heyday was on the PSP and a screen that’s now far smaller than most modern phones, but I’ve become far too used to sitting in front of a television, picking up a controller and preparing for what could be a very long evening of hunting, crafting and repeatedly getting flattened by something considerably larger than you.
Monster Hunter Outlanders wants to take that entire experience and put it back in your pocket.
I’m actually rather impressed by how close it feels to the real thing. Monster Hunter Outlanders is being developed by TiMi Studio Group in partnership with Capcom, and rather than creating a heavily simplified mobile spin-off, the team appears to have tried to bring the fundamentals of Monster Hunter across to mobile. There are the familiar weapons, large monsters, exploration, gathering, crafting and multiplayer hunting, alongside a new cast of characters and a brand-new world.
The biggest challenge is obviously going to be the controls. Monster Hunter isn’t exactly known for having the simplest combat systems in gaming. There are different weapon types, combos, positioning, dodging, guarding and an assortment of other things to keep track of, so trying to squeeze all of that onto a touchscreen could easily have been a disaster.
Thankfully, Outlanders gives you options. I was able to try two different control schemes during my demo, including a more accessible Adventure Mode designed specifically for newcomers. This strips the controls down considerably, giving you essentially three buttons to worry about. Given how intimidating Monster Hunter can be at the best of times, introducing new players to the fundamentals without immediately throwing a dozen virtual buttons at them makes sense. For more experienced hunters, there is a standard control scheme that gives you much more direct control, and this was the one I preferred.
Once I had settled into it, the combat felt surprisingly natural. I could control my character, manage my weapon and use its abilities without feeling like the game was fighting against the touchscreen. That’s probably the biggest compliment I can give Outlanders.
The game also takes an interesting approach to its playable characters. Rather than creating a single hunter and then swapping equipment around, Outlanders gives you different Adventurers, each with their own weapon, abilities and Ultimate, and they are then the baseline for your further customisation.
Adventurers can also be accompanied by other characters who fight alongside you, and those companions have their own Ultimate abilities as well. This gives Outlanders a slightly different flavour to the traditional Monster Hunter formula, where your Palico is normally the only adorable little murder machine keeping you company. Here, you’re building a small team.
The idea is particularly interesting when you consider how much Monster Hunter’s combat is based around understanding your weapon and exploiting a monster’s weaknesses. Having several Adventurers with different abilities could add another layer of strategy to hunts, particularly when playing cooperatively – Naturally Monster Hunter Outlanders supports co-op with up to four-player hunting, so you can team up with friends and take on the larger monsters together.
While there’s a lot of the hallmarks of the Monster Hunter visual style – the oversized weapons, gigantic monsters, the gathering and exploration of colourful environments – Outlanders has a distinct Chinese influence in its presentation, which gives the world its own character. It still unmistakably looks like Monster Hunter, but there’s a different flavour to the environments, characters and overall world design.
That world provides a new setting for the series rather than recreating locations from previous Monster Hunter games. You’ll be able to explore large areas, gather resources, build facilities and encounter monsters specifically created for Outlanders, including a brand new Elder Dragon.
Ruger Aidal is the game’s flagship monster and the first original Elder Dragon created specifically for Monster Hunter Outlanders. It has an enormous, almost otherworldly appearance, with wings that give off a radiant light and attacks capable of scorching the surrounding landscape. Rather pleasingly, I was one of only three people previewing the game at Gamescom who managed to actually defeat it – yes, I’m going to milk that one.
The developers certainly seemed happy about it when I eventually brought the beast down, and considering how quickly some of the other monsters had been making me question my life choices, I’ll happily take the victory.
More importantly, Ruger Aidal is a good demonstration of how Outlanders is looking to establish its own identity. Rather than simply recycling or augmenting monsters we’ve already fought dozens of times, the game is introducing creatures specifically designed for this new world. Ruger Aidal certainly looks the part of an Elder Dragon, and defeating it gave me a proper taste of the kind of challenge I want from a Monster Hunter game.
Of course, there is one elephant in the room whenever we talk about a free-to-play mobile game: Money.
Monster Hunter Outlanders is free-to-play, and there will be in-app purchases. The precise monetisation model wasn’t something I was able to get a clear picture of during my hands-on session, so I wouldn’t want to pretend otherwise, but what I was shown was was that the entire game can be played for free.
Whether Outlanders manages to make its monetisation around that feel fair will ultimately be one of the biggest factors in determining how well this works as a long-term Monster Hunter experience. Mobile games have a habit of finding increasingly creative ways of asking you for money, and Monster Hunter is a series where progression and equipment are such an important part of the experience that this is something I’ll be keeping a close eye on.
But based purely on what I played, the actual game underneath that business model is surprisingly convincing. The hunts feel like hunts. The weapons feel weighty. The monsters feel appropriately enormous. There are obviously compromises. A touchscreen will never give you the same precision as a physical controller, and I’m still curious to see how the more complicated weapon types hold up once you’re dealing with monsters that demand split-second reactions. That I could choose the more advanced control scheme and feel like I had genuine control over my weapon was a very good start, though the simplified Adventure Mode is also a smart addition to make the game more inviting for an enormous new audience.
If you’ve never played Monster Hunter, the prospect of being able to download it for free and start hunting monsters on your phone is a pretty compelling proposition. And if you’re a veteran? Well there’s the rather terrifying possibility that, with launch on 29th October, I can soon spend my lunch break getting repeatedly beaten to death by a giant monster.