World II: Hunting Boss

From the image of this game on the digital store you could be forgiven for thinking this is Monster Hunter: World lite. But it’s not. Far from it.

At the start of the game, you pick one of three characters and off you go on a monster killing ‘adventure.’

The gameplay is simple. You run around hitting the X button to attack the monsters and using special abilities with cooldowns to inflict more damage. You also have a pointless stamina bar which serves no other purpose than to annoy you. As mentioned, the special attacks have cooldown so having a stamina bar doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially as there appears to be no way to manage your stamina to keep attacking for longer. There is also an XP based levelling up system which serves a purpose but again, just serves as being annoying because when a mission gets hard to point of being unable to complete it, your only option is to replay the missions you’ve already completed to level up – which is boring as sin.

There isn’t a story either unless you count the weird one-liners that go at the start of every fight. The fights themselves appear to be against 1 of either 4 monsters or a team of three humans who are exactly like you.

You fight through 5 missions as just your normal character before being joined by the other two characters you could have started the game with for the remainder of the game. They are next to useless when they are at a lower level but will kill everything themselves once you’ve levelled up a bit so they are completely unbalanced.

In terms of looks, it’s massively cartoony and I encountered a couple of game-breaking glitches where the game forced me to restart. My play time was around four and a half hours so that’s pretty bad in terms of glitch/time ratio.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

In terms of the achievements, a lot of these are hand outs and some are just obnoxious. 15 are gained just for playing through the missions up until Class B Monsters/Humans. Completing 10 of these gets you the ‘hard’ achievement but this can be 10 of the same mission as long as it’s in the B Class area so you only need to be able to win the first one.

Outside of this, the really irritating ones involving having to suck at the game so badly, you actually have to play badly on purpose to get them. You need to fail 10 missions which is easy enough, just stand there and get ganked. The other one requires you to get an A rank in 5 missions. This is actually difficult as the ranks are assessed on the speed you get through the missions. There is no indicator of time so it’s pure guess work to start with and then you need to rely on your AI compatriots not slaying the monster too quickly (assuming you don’t do this in the first 5 missions before they join you).

The worst achievement though, is getting to level 20. Essentially this involves replaying the same mission over and over again to grind out the XP. It’s a small grind but unenjoyable grind in a bad game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

World II: Hunting Boss justifies its £2.50 price by being short and awful. I’m not sure why Square Enix published this but I certainly won’t be playing any more of it.