Monster Hunter Rise review – fantastic beasts and how to bind them

Nintendo Switch; Capcom
Flush with flash new tricks, simpler action and a bulging roster of hostile creatures, the latest instalment of the enduring series is an absurd delight

After you've felled a hard-scaled, fire-breathing dragon in Monster Hunter Rise, you can pose for a photo with your loyal cat and dog (taken by an owl, no less) as its corpse lies in a contorted rictus of agony in the background. Nothing better sums up the Monster Hunter experience than cutesy poses offset against a once-proud giant lizard, broken and humiliated, waiting to be carved up into tomorrow's armour. That sense of achievement and joviality after brutal and bloody violence is the loop of tension and release that's kept this series in the charts for 17 years.

Monster Hunter Rise deviates from the uncomfortably colonialist new-world casings of Monster Hunter World and leverages the newfound global popularity of the series to tone things down, take things a bit slower and bring you back to a more rural, communal setting: Kamura Village. But this idyllic slice of sylvan Japanese-inspired life is uneasy; the recurrent calamity of the Rampage", an apocalyptic event where the local fauna all turn blood-crazed at once, is in the back of the locals' minds at all times.