This review contains SPOILERS! Click to expand.
If I had one word to describe this game, it would be: Boring.
It is weird because it should be fun. It looks like it should be fun. It is fun, but not for very long.
The main problem that really hurts the game is how long the fights take. They all wear out their welcomes way too fast. Imagine playing Super Mario World, but Bowser takes 100 hits by his mecha-koopas instead of
If I had one word to describe this game, it would be: Boring.
It is weird because it should be fun. It looks like it should be fun. It is fun, but not for very long.
The main problem that really hurts the game is how long the fights take. They all wear out their welcomes way too fast. Imagine playing Super Mario World, but Bowser takes 100 hits by his mecha-koopas instead of 6 and you have Monster Hunter World. While that Bowser fight is fun, it would not be fun for 20-30 minutes of him doing the same thing over and over and over. I should not be thinking of other games I could be playing way before the monster finally keels over, but I do. They just take way way way way way too long.
You also do pretty much the exact same things on every single fight. Imagine Super Mario World again, but replace every single level and every single boss fight with the Bowser fight. Maybe change one or two mechanics slightly. Maybe make him use ice instead of fire. That is Monster Hunter World. There is precious little actual variety between monsters.
They then make you grind the same monster over and over and over and over and over and over for parts it can drop that you can then use to make new weapons and armor. You need these for future battles. Seriously, they should have named it "Monster Grind World". It isn't even fun to watch people play this game. There are mods to put all the monster drops on the vendors. I never downloaded any out of fear of getting banned, but there is a reason they exist.
They do occassionally have crossover missions, such as Witcher and Resident Evil. They somehow even manage to make those boring because the monsters take 13 forevers to kill.
The story is also every single kind of flimsy. It may as well not even be there. You are on a new continent and are basically just killing everything in sight because "it may become a threat". A monster hatches from an egg and at one point and your character's first instinct is to make it dead. No thoughts about whether it could imprint or anything? Really? The monsters eventually start attacking your people, but that's kind of expected when they see you slaughtering everything else in sight. There is some kind of overused justification about "it may affect the ecosystem", but I assure you that ship sailed when you sailed in. I'd rather the NPC's just be straight with me and ask me to go slaughter the big baddie for bragging rights, since that is all you are doing. Even Super Mario World has more justification for you doing what you do than this game does.
Oh, on that note, they really love to introduce new monsters with a video of an old monster getting killed by the new one and then the new one attacks you. It was cool the first two times, but it got way too predictable.
Another complaint was the UI. It was clumsy and over-complicated. Having to cycle through individual items to find the one you wanted was seriously annoying, especially considering you had to do that many many times during each fight.
Lastly, the ingame tutorials were horrible. Seriously, terrible. They do not tell you what you need to know, at all. If you still want to play this game for some reason, go to YouTube and watch some videos that actually explain the stuff you need to know.
TLDR: No variety. As much grinding as classic EverQuest. Story is stupid. UI is clunky. Each monster fight takes 200 forevers. Bad tutorials.