Monster Hunter Now has what it takes to unseat Pokemon Go as your favourite mobile game

A touch-based game that deals with dodging with split-second reflexes, precisely aiming for delicate weak spots, and pulling off complex combos with many button presses, Monster Hunter shouldn’t work on mobile. It just shouldn’t; there’s too much to break down, minimize, and make comprehensible with swipes, taps, and presses. Somehow, though, Monster Hunter Now pulls it off. It is nothing short of magic.

Pokémon on (or in) your phone made sense: explore, collect them, enjoy quick encounters of 10 seconds or less, and team up with your friends to catch them all! Monster Hunter, while also a very social game, at its core, feels much more like a console. But scaled down and presented on your iPhone or Android… it fits so well, it’s just amazing something like this hasn’t happened before.

The core loop (hunt, carve, upgrade, repeat) is intact, wholesale. Find a monster, kill it, hammer its body parts into your team, and return to the field. Break its horns or cut off its tail and get better drops, level up faster. Monster Hunter Now does not interfere with the formula that sold 22 million games. Good.

But how you do that, how you make your hunter slide, roll, jump, slice and carve, that’s what’s impressive here. Just like spinning and throwing your PokeBall, it’s all done with your index finger: swipe left or right to dodge, swipe up or down to move forward or back, tap to attack, hold to charge or block. And you can manually tilt your phone to aim your bow or ranged weapon, if that’s your thing (but I really can’t stand motion controls). Simple! So simple that even non-Monster Hunter players in my session were dancing around and interrupting monster attacks like they had been playing since Monster Hunter Tri when we had to return the phones.

I’ve been a loyal sword and shield user for years, so parrying an advanced Kula-Ya-Ku, seeing it stagger, and then unleashing a barrage of slashing and smashing attacks in response was great. It’s not quite as good as it does on Switch, for example, but it’s still pretty exciting nonetheless. Teaming up with an ally (you can get up to four people in a fight and the game will automatically detect who’s around you – no awkward menu fights here) opens up your options; Are you going to flip the Pukei-Pukei’s tail around and chop it off while the hammer user hits it on the head, or are you going to work on the front legs and hope the claw breaks?

The choice is yours! You have 75 seconds to kill something; since the main Monster Hunter games often take around 30 minutes, you’d think it would be too short. Too level with the surface. But it’s not: condensing everything into a rock-paper-scissors game of dodge, block and attack is intuitive and understandable, fun and compelling. You put one monster to bed and itch for another.

If you’re on the go, you’re in the gym, and you see a Rathalos, but you still can’t fight it, you can paint it and save it for later so you can fight it at home. If there are other players at home (maybe you’ve got your partner in on this), you can choose to fight together, so you can roam the town in your matching shoulder pads. nerds

Like Pokémon Go, your hometown is transformed into a featureless map with a couple of points of interest. But unlike Pokémon Go, this map is divided into biomes, and these are renewed from time to time. So if you live in the city, don’t worry; you are just as likely to get snow maps, desert maps, or jungle maps as someone who lives in the countryside. These biomes have specific resources that you can collect, such as minerals or mushrooms, and are populated by beasts that you must destroy.

The monsters seemed to respawn quite often, but who knows if that cadence will be in the final game. There are challenges that stack up into bigger battles against tougher monsters that come with their own unique animations, and there are even Palicos that run around and grab resources for you. This is a monster hunter game, a real monster hunter game.

And everything is taken from Monster Hunter World: the animations, the character models, the weapons, everything. So if you’re a serious, grumpy big gamer, you can justify playing a mobile game by telling yourself it’s Monster Hunter World 2.0 (at least until we get the real thing). There’s a lot of potential for expansion – more monsters, more weapons, more biomes – and the developers told me they’re already looking into doing things like Community Days or Pokémon Go-style real-world celebrations. Watch this space.

Niantic, while a bit unpopular with the Pokémon Go playerbase at the moment, has proven time and time again that it has the magic touch when it comes to harnessing the intricacies and intimacies that make an IP special and making them work in the small screen The success of Pokémon Go could have been a fluke; a global phenomenon that bottled up that ‘right place, right time’ lightning bolt. But Monster Hunter Now proves that it wasn’t, that Niantic is a developer with as much talent, creativity, and business acumen as any Capcom, Bethesda, or, and I mean it, even Nintendo.

This IP may not be that big, and the game may have a hard time finding an audience outside of Japan that Pokemon didn’t, but Monster Hunter Now has a loyal player in me for sure. I went from thinking this was a weird little experiment to waiting for the release and signing up for the beta within 10 minutes of picking it up, the same thing I and millions of others did with Pokemon Go. Even if Monster Hunter isn’t your thing, you should give this one a try – you might just have a new favorite game to play on your phone.