What's that coming over the hill?
What is it about?Monster Hunter Tri is a Wii exclusive action-rpg in which you step into the boots of a fearless hunter to partake in quests across Moga Island to gather resources, hunt wild beasts and search for hidden treasure.
Moga village acts as the main hub where you'll find the likes of a canteen, an armoury, weapon smith and general stores where you can buy and forge supplies from collected ores, treasures and monster parts that will aid you on your beast slaying quests.
The action begins when the son of the village chief and other traders send you out into the woods to gather resources and hunt small beasts and with your success comes Resource points that allow you to grow in strength and power and help rebuild the village. As soon as the Hunter’s Guild is impressed enough with your slaying and collecting skills it gets in touch and wants to utilise your newly foudn skills. From this point forth you're sent out on a variety of quests across Moga Island where you’ll face a variety of weird and wonderful creatures in your battle to ultimately bring down the sea-dwelling Lagiacrus that has been causing the village fishing fleet to flee in terror.
Essentially, Monster Hunter Tri is about killing monsters in real-time with a variety of weapons, but it's also about working out their specific strengths and weaknesses to be able to do so effectively. Running alongside the largely combat-focused gameplay is the need to explore and collect items, from monster parts to ores, that allow you to make money to buy items or forge the necessary weapons and armour to take down some ferocious bosses.
Alongside a campaign mode, which is reported to take over 50 hours to complete, is an multiplayer component and online and offline co-op modes allowing you to group and communicate together to tackle a wide range of beasties across the open-ended landscape of Moga Island.
Monster Hunter Tri is designed to be played with the Classic Controller Pro, so if you haven't got one you'd be wise to pick up the Monster Tri Classic Controller bundle pack! No Wii Remote waggling necessary - it makes a pleasant change.
Gameplay Impressions overleaf..
