Monster Hunter Wilds
I don’t really like Monster Hunter. I check back in with it every once in a while. I view it as sort of the grandfather of the animation driven combat model that we’re now calling “soulslikes but it’s just never quite clicked with me. I’ve developed a reasonable amount of longsword / lance skill throughout the years but something about the game has never really clicked with me.
The monsters are just animals…. They’re super super super well animated animals, but they’re just animals, and you hack them up to make clothes out of them…
The level of complexity in the weapons is really incredible, each weapon is like a small character action game in and of itself. The fact that the games animation abort model is so passive (you just cant cancel stuff), and it’s in attack rotations are so restrictive and different between weapons, means that the weapons all feel honestly differentiated from one another even without talking about their specific weapon system mechanics and loops.
The open world is rad and a big improvement but I bounced off this maybe 15 hours or so in the way I always do. None of my friends or family are really monster hunters and therefore I guess neither am I.
Sifu
I bought Sifu for the third time to play on the Steam Deck. I’ve been firing this up on the couch now and then because I’m sort of sick of Lies of P 🙁 I really enjoy the art style on this thing, I liked absolver as well.
This is a fantastic modern brawler. Impacts feel good, environmental interactions feel really grounded, I think it really feels good and provides a strong kit to fight enemies with. I enjoy their fighting game esq buffer system.
I don’t love the boss fights in this game. It’s really about memorizing attacks strings and then responding to those with directional dodges. This ends up with a sort of locked in place turn based choreography that can sometimes feel really lame when compared to the multi opponent combat in most of the levels.