It holds up on its own. If you never played any other MH game you’ll absolutely love it. It’s a great one for beginners.

However it’s really annoying if you’ve played them before, there’s a lot of handholding. And I mean A LOT. Constantly when you’re out and about you’re led by “scoutflies” which are glittering paths leading you right to your target. It takes away the satisfaction of feeling like you’ve actually tracked the monsters. You can even see them on your map all the time which takes away half the fun.

The music is nice at times but gets lost outside the villages. It’s all fanfare most of the time. But then again nothing's ever as good as the Pokke Farm theme. I still wish there were more non-orchestral pieces.

The story is easy enough to ignore. It doesn’t have many striking or engaging main cast members really. There are some interesting ones later one once you get past the first two environments.
It doesn’t read like a MH game in the way it’s so in your face; on top of that the writing is mediocre. In the older ones the story was in the quest descriptions so it was more a background deal. Writing really isn’t a strong point for these games.

The environments are visually pleasing, the variance between locations is massive. When they say World they really mean it.

The new monsters have a lot of character and are unique. Very pleasing aesthetically and don’t seem out of place in the MH universe.

While they have a lot of variance and creativity in their attacks, the combat still feels the same between all of them. It’s extremely easy to find materials for armor and weapon upgrades so the difficulty margin doesn’t feel like it increases from one monster to the next. All of them feel very at level if not slightly below.

The three times I’ve fainted in combat didn’t feel like I’d deserved it. They were all a result of unavoidable attacks and waiting on the recovery frames.

Overall great for beginners to MH, but the excitement for those that have experienced Freedom Unite/Generations will ultimately be a bit dissatisfied with the combat. Definitely worth playing even then, I’ve still enjoyed it to some extent.

Honestly I can see myself going back to Generations after a while. I’ll give MHW:
4/10 Music
4/10 Story
7/10 Character design
9/10 Environments
10/10 Monster Design
6/10 Combat and gameplay

If you haven’t played MHFU or Generations, grab yourself a 3DS and get to it.