Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate
Nintendo 3DS
The monsters you’ll be hunting here are a menagerie of beasts, ranging from small herbivores to enormous fire-breathing behemoths that you have to team up with several other players to stand a chance at taking on. Monster Hunter is massive in Japan, where handheld games are already big business. But in order to appeal to territories where portable consoles are less popular, this version lets you team up online as well as over a local network, broadening your options for teammates and opening the multiplayer game. Other than that, and the addition of Palicos - giant talking cats that follow you around - this outing is similar to previous ones, in that you accept missions before heading out into hinterlands separated into discrete areas populated with different animals to slay. Staying alive means beefing up your weapons and armour, as well as frequent barbecues, roasting freshly slaughtered monster steaks on your portable grill before moving on to the next fight. Enduring entertainment for lovers of incremental upgrades.
NICK GILLETT
Nintendo, £29.97-£39.99
Evolve
PS4, Xbox One & PC
Evolve casts you as either a monster, or part of the team of four hunters who are trying to track down and kill it. Playing as the beast, your job is to run away, killing and eating snack-sized animals to power yourself up through three stages of evolution, at the end of which the hunters start to look small and puny. You can then begin smashing up whatever building the human team is fighting to protect. Playing as a hunter, you have more specialist roles to perform: assault soldiers inflict damage on the monster; trappers use their pets to sniff it out before fencing it in with a force field; medics heal fellow hunters and can tranquillise the monster; and support troops give temporary shields to teammates and call in air strikes. It’s an interesting departure for a first-person shooter, and the thrill of the chase delivers a hit of adrenaline whether you’re hunter or prey. Yet Evolve’s few game modes, and unlockable extras that take a serious investment of time or real money to access, mean that it’s not long before the tension gives way to tedium. ng
2K Games, £26.25-£33
Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy+
Nintendo 3DS
Watching Top Gun might make being a fighter pilot look pretty wild, but capturing that thrill in a game has proved elusive. Video game fighter sims all too often degenerate into endless circling around enemies, with an occasional break to launch or evade a Sidewinder missile. Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy+ tries to get round this with quick-time events: arrows flash onscreen that you match by pushing the joystick in the same direction to ensure your plane avoids incoming missiles. There’s also an energy bar that when full lets you press a button to tuck in automatically behind an enemy. It’s a system that substitutes a frequent source of stalemates for a nuance-free mini-game, speeding things up, while not demanding much in the way of skill - but then Ace Combat has never been about flight simulation so much as making fighter planes feel fast and glamorous. It’s a fluffy, insubstantial joyride, simplified further to make it work on the handheld 3DS. ng
Namco Bandai, £27.77-£29.99
