Faisal Ghaffar 
Overview
Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak sees your enterprising hunter depart Kamura Village for the outpost of Elgado across the sea. It almost feels like a new game, with a new HUB and cast of characters, new locations to discover, beasts to fight, and weapons and armor to craft from their parts. Sunbreak, on the other hand, offers little that is truly novel or shocking. More Monster Hunter is never a bad thing, and Sunbreak is an outstanding expansion with some clever inclusions that strengthen just how good Rise is already, but its formulaic nature makes it difficult not to feel a little displeased.
New Follower Quests
New Follower Quests allow you to go on hunts with various non-player characters, allowing their personas to shine through more than the series normally allows. These are single-player quests, but the complexities of your allies’ machine learning make them nearly indiscernible from multiplayer hunts. Your companions fight like other players, laying traps, drawing the monster’s attention for long periods of time, and sometimes disappearing before reappearing on the back of some other unwilling beast.
You’ll notice people when they’re actively assisting you, and they’re wise enough not to annoy you and do something stupid. These quests are voluntary, but each one prizes you with unique items and makes grinding for monsters much more enjoyable.
Visiting Locales
While you’ll return to each of the Rise locations throughout Sunbreak’s campaign, the expansion does introduce two new biomes: Jungle and Citadel. If you’ve played Monster Hunter 2, you’ll recognise the tropical island of Jungle, complete with palm trees and sandy beaches. It’s been expertly recreated here, taking advantage of Rise’s smooth maps and enhanced verticality to bring the 16-year-old location up to date. Citadel, on the other side, is new, offering a diverse variety of areas for you to explore in a single hunt. You can fight in a murky, poisoned swamp before finishing the job on an iced mountain peak, all while surrounded by a crumbling castle. Both locations are more densely populated than those in the base game.
Meals
Bunny Dango, the pre-fight meal you scorf off the before embarking on a quest, now allows you to change the order in which you select each Dango ability, adding some intentional choice to the process. Traversal has also been achieved by eliminating the requirement to conduct a Wiredash before being able to wall run, which somewhat makes trying to navigate each map much faster, but also makes utilising their verticality much easier. There are also new weapon and armour sets, Master Rank layered armour, and decorations that can be socketed into your gear to initiate various buffs. You can maximal your hunter as much as you want.
Final Comments
Monster Hunter Rise is the series at its best, and Sunbreak’s subtle improvements meaningfully improve on its convincing gameplay loop, even if they aren’t apparent until a few hours in. The lack of new ideas is unfortunate, and it feels more like the difficult endgame Rise was missing at first than a completely new experience. The new and returning monsters, as well as the two new locations, are fantastic, and it’s still relatively easy to get lost in Monster Hunter Rise’s thrilling world. Sunbreak may not be as significant as some of the franchise’s programs support, such as Iceborne for Monster Hunter World, but it builds on Rise’s foundations with another exciting set of hunts. It’s just a pity that the majority of them aren’t.
