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Monster Hunter Wilds’ Street Fighter collaboration is all about Akuma

by admin May 23, 2025

Capcom has officially announced that, yes, in case all the teasers weren’t clear enough, the first Monster Hunter Wilds collaboration event will be with none other than Street Fighter. Collaboration events provide an opportunity for Capcom to bring elements and characters from other games into Wilds.

The Monster Hunter series certainly isn’t a stranger to that sort of thing, and this one appears to be following in the same footsteps.

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First things first, the Monster Hunter Wild x Street Fighter event kicks off next week, on Wednesday, May 28. It’s going to arrive alongside a free patch, version 1.011 – though Capcom didn’t say what else we can expect from the update itself.

As for the Street Fighter event, it’s going to introduce Akuma to Wilds. The update will add a new side mission, completing which earns you materials that allow you to craft gear from the collaboration event.

The side mission will be available at Hunter Rank 21 and beyond, so it’s pretty accessible to most players. You’ll be able to pick it up from Quinn at the Oilwell Basin Base Camp. There are three sets of rewards you can expect to craft as part of this collaboration.

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There’s the Akuma full armor set and lawyered equipment, as well as a Blanka-Chan full armor set and layered equipment for your Palico. There’s also a hunter profile background, nameplate, pose and titles – all sporting new designs.

The mission itself will also unlock two new Arena Quests: Demonic Strength and True Strength, which will offer more ways for you to earn the materials required to craft all that gear. It wouldn’t be a collab without some paid cosmetics, of course, and so you can look forward to some new DLC in the store.

It’s all Street Fighter 6-themed, and includes two outfits for Alma that change her look to that of Chun-Li or Cammy, three gestures – Hadoken, Shoryuken, Tatsumaki Senpu-kyaku – a sticker set, and a Blanka-Chan Doll pendant.

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May 23, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Monster Train 2 Review – Engine Ingenuity

by admin May 22, 2025

“No two runs are the same” is an oft-spoken line in reference to roguelikes, and it has perhaps never been more true than with Monster Train 2. With five new Clans, new card types, and a side mode of dimensional challenges, every run is distinct, but combat never becomes less satisfying. Despite some cutscenes that leave much to be desired, Shiny Shoe has crafted one of my favorite roguelikes of the year so far, improving on the previous title in every way.

In Monster Train 2, you lead various armies of Hell in a war against the Titans, an old, powerful faction that threatens the existence of your world. To stand up against such an imposing threat, you have control of multiple Clans, unique societies of magical creatures that each have their own playstyles. The angelic Banished Clan focuses on the Valor buff, granting additional armor and damage, while the draconic Pyreborn Clan hoards gold and inflicts pyregel, a debuff that causes enemies to take more damage. Each Clan also has two champions, powerful units you build your runs around, to choose from. When a run starts, you pick a primary Clan and a secondary Clan, and with five to unlock (plus a load of secret ones), the sheer number of combinations is staggering.

Combat takes place aboard the titular locomotive, which has four tiers of train cars – three for your units to battle, and a fourth to hold the Pyre, the train’s lifeblood. If it takes too much damage, it explodes and your run ends, so it’s in your best interest to eliminate enemies as soon as possible. The end result is part deckbuilder, part roguelike, and part tower defense, as you draw cards to place units on each floor and defend the train from waves of attackers.

Most cards cast spells, dealing damage, healing, inflicting status conditions, and more, but Monster Train 2 introduces two new types of cards: equipment and room cards. Equipment is played on a friendly unit to give them better stats and abilities, while rooms add a modifier to an entire car, like boosting spell potency or granting money when units die. The game also adds unlockable Pyres, which have active or passive abilities to make your runs even more interesting. Each feature brings something new and exciting to the table, entering the gameplay so seamlessly that I often forgot they were absent from the last game.

Each run uses one of two clans, each with two champions and associated starting cards, meaning that if you exclude the game’s secret clans (which increase the total exponentially), there are 80 ways to start a run. While I haven’t played each permutation, every combo I’ve started with so far has been surprisingly exciting, as each cleverly designed Clan synergizes with another in a unique way. It isn’t randomness for the sake of big numbers – each run I’ve played has felt as fun as the one before it, and it’s an impressive feat.

Monster Train 2 also includes a collection of 21 Dimensional Challenges, restricting you to a preset combination of Clans and adding fun mutators to alter the game. For example, “Weapons Make the Warrior” reduces all cards’ upgrade slots to 1, but makes equipment cards twice as powerful and cost less to play. “Twofer” doubles all money earned, status effects inflicted, and makes it so each time you add a card to your deck, you get a copy of it. In contrast to the standard, ultimately customizable base game, it’s a collection of carefully curated rulesets and modifiers. I appreciate that these challenges adjust your strategies and the game’s difficulty beyond simply making it harder. Many roguelikes include unlockable settings or difficulty modes limiting your abilities, but sometimes I want to be challenged in different ways, and Monster Train 2 understands that.

My main issue with the game lies in its story, which is, thankfully, infrequent and easily ignored. Upon completing runs, you’re greeted by cutscenes of conversations between the Clans’ various Champions as they try to figure out what to do next in their battle against the Titans. It feels half-baked, with reused battle models standing against plain backgrounds and turning left or right to indicate which character they’re speaking to. The dialogue is mostly exposition disguised as conversation, and most characters are reduced to their Clans’ most basic traits – dragons are greedy and like gold, while the Lazarus League obsesses over science and experiments. Monster Train 2’s gameplay is inspired and expertly crafted, but its cutscenes are cliché and forgettable.

Still, I didn’t come to Monster Train 2 for an engaging story. I came for tense, strategic combat, hours of upgrading and optimizing spells and units, and that uniquely roguelike power fantasy of starting with scraps and blazing your way to the top. The realm of indie roguelikes is competitive and crowded, but despite years of tough competition, Monster Train 2 has strongly reasserted its series as one of the leaders of the pack. In other words, many games are good; few are as good as Hell.

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May 22, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Monster Hunter Wilds nabs Street Fighter 6’s Akuma, Chun-Li and more for a Capcom centric collab

by admin May 22, 2025

The unthinkable has happened, folks: Monster Hunter Wilds, from the one and only Capcom, is collaborating with Street Fighter 6, also from the one and only Capcom. This won’t be much of a surprise for many of you given that 1. Capcom own both titles and can arrange collabs like this pretty easily I assume and B. it’s been teasing it for days now. That isn’t to say the trailer showing off the crossover didn’t have anything concrete, as it did confirm that you’ll be able dress up as Street Fighter baddie Akuma.

The full armour set/ full layered armour set goes a bit further than just aesthetics too, as “equipping either set allows you to use Akuma’s unique item and gestures to perform his fighting moves.” Using the Assisted Combo: Akuma item command lets you a range of his combos like Gou Hadoken and Gou Shoryuken.

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Whatever weapon you have equipped will change how much attack power Akuma’s moves will have too. Capcom also shared that Street Fighter 6’s Drive Impact system has been recreated for this free update. Oh, your Palico will be able to dress up like Blanka-Chan too, which might be my favourite addition to the action game this update. In order to get all of these items, you’ll need to complete the side mission that comes along with it, Ultimate Strength.

On top of all of this, there’s a paid DLC pack on the way as well where you can dress up Alma in either a Chun-Li or Cammy outfit. The DLC also comes with a Blanka-Chan Doll pendant, Street Fighter 6 stickers, and gestures. These include classic moves like Hadoken and Shoryuken, which all have attack properties too!

Both the update and the DLC are due out next week, May 28th.

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May 22, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Monster Hunter Wilds x Street Fighter 6 collaboration announced

by admin May 22, 2025

After a few playful teases earlier in the week, the Monster Hunter Wilds team has officially announced its Street Fighter 6 collaboration.

“A demon begins his HUNT,” reads the blurb on Capcom’s collaboration trailer, which you can check out for yourself below. Cap-come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough (or something like that).

Monster Hunter Wilds x Street Fighter 6 – Special Collaboration Trailer. Watch on YouTube

So, what exactly does this Capcom collab – which is slated to arrive in Monster Hunter Wilds on 28th May – include? Well, players will soon be able to get their hands on the free Akuma hunter layered armour, which comes with some special fist-focused actions, as well as a Blanka-chan Palico layered armour which doesn’t look at all strange, no sir-y.

To get hold of these Street Fighter inspired goodies, players will need to complete a new side mission known as Ultimate Strength. This is only available for those at Hunter Rank 21 or higher. Don’t fret if you aren’t quite there yet, though. Once the collaboration arrives later this month, it’ll be a permanent addition to the game.

In order to get the ball rolling with this new mission, players will need to have a chat with Quinn at the Oilwell Basin Base Camp.

Image credit: Capcom

Along with these freebies, the studio is also releasing separate cosmetic collaboration DLC, but these will need to be purchased. “Please note: these paid DLC items are sold separately and are not available as a pack,” Capcom emphasised.

This DLC will include a Chun-Li outfit and a Cammy outfit for Alma, as well as a Blanka-Chan Doll pendant, new gestures and more.

You can find further information on Capcom’s dedicated Monster Hunter Wilds x Street Fighter 6 collaboration blog post here.

Image credit: Capcom

Elsewhere in Capcom-related news, earlier today we got word that Jason Momoa and WWE wrestler Roman Reigns are currently in talks to star in Legendary’s live-action Street Fighter movie.

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May 22, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Monster Train 2 review | Rock Paper Shotgun

by admin May 21, 2025

Monster Train 2 review

A juicy and reasonably inventive roguelike card-battling sequel that will devour all the commutes you throw at it.

Developer: Shiny Shoe
Publisher: Big Fan Games
Release: May 21st 2025
On: Windows
From: Steam
Price: $25/£21/€20
Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7 12700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060, Windows 11

The roguelike deckbuilder is a remorseless evil that strives to colonise every dream ever dreamt by the human brain. It is a sparkling, shuffling plague, germinated by Slay The Spire, that threatens to absorb every other mortal pastime, from space travel through poker to carpentry. We must find a way to neutralise the entity before it assimilates us all. But in the words of the oldest proverb: just one more go. Just one more go, before I dissipate raging into that goodnight. Just one more run, before I play all those shortform avant garde releases in my Itch.io wallet.

If Monster Train 2 were the last roguelike deckbuilder I ever played, I would consider myself fairly pleased, and also very relieved. While not a huge departure from the game that plunged Matt Cox (RPS in peace) into unholy raptures, it’s a great pick if you’re fond of numbers going up and realising it’s 1.30am and that you are now too addled by card synergies to sleep. You do not have to like or understand trains, but it’s a plus.

As with Monster Train, Monster Train 2 is about riding a demon locomotive through an alternating series of battles and upgrade or customisation opportunities. In the first game, you were trying to oust the angelic hosts from the heart of hell. In this one, the angels and devils have bandied together to chase off the Titans, who’ve taken possession of Heaven.

There’s a certain amount of plot lodged in the crevices of the lobby town. This worried me at first – character development? In my progression system? – but it mostly consists of gentle sitcom sketches in which dragons complain about their husbands. Rest assured that none of it will keep you from your precious synergies. While embarked on your celestial commute, you will also bumble into random storylets that sometimes offer boons plucked from other roguelike deckbuilders, such as Balatro. The roguebuilding decklike singularity is nigh.

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The game’s big draw versus those other turn-based card battlers is that it’s actually three card battles in parallel, each feeding into the next like cunningly enfolded lanes in a tower defence game. During each skirmish, you pop unit cards on the lower three floors of your train to protect the all-important pyre on your fourth floor. The pyre is the source of points you’ll spend to play cards each turn. If it gets smashed to bits, your run is over.

Following a deployment phase, waves of enemies appear at the bottom (mostly) and travel upwards through the train, fighting a single round of combat per floor. This continues until the final assault from the local boss, which dispenses with the single-round-per-floor parameter – the boss must clear each floor of defenders before moving on. While units do battle automatically at the end of each turn, generally targeting the first enemy in the opposing line-up, you can intervene manually using spell cards that, for example, coat critters in Pyrogel to multiply damage received, or dazzle them with stardust so that they miss a turn.

It may seem a rickety, unintuitive format on paper. In practice, it’s wonderful. The overall challenge is to divide your cards and points scientifically between floors. An obvious gambit is to stock the bottom floor with your tankiest, most damaging cards to bollard the onslaught and saddle enemies with debuffs early on – there are plenty of attackers that power-up as they fight or climb. But the one-round-per-floor setup ensures that you can’t rely on any single floor. Besides, if that over-fortified foundation crumbles, the other, under-crewed layers will probably fall as well.

Enemy waves also form deviously alternating combinations of unit types, which thwart efforts to optimise any particular floor. Your heavies in Second Class might excel at melting juggernauts, but they’ll struggle against the hordes of fungus making their way back from the cafeteria.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Big Fan Games

Monster Train 2 retains all this curious, rattling magic, but fills out the gaps with a bunch of new card categories and interactables, probably derived from careful observation of the first game’s players. There’s now a choice of starting pyres, with varying stats and modifiers. Some unit cards have or may acquire abilities, which essentially give you a free move: these include conjuring back the last spell you cast, and body-slamming targets into the rearguard.

New equipment cards can be clapped on friend and foe alike to, for example, harm assailants based on the wearer’s max health, or chip-damage a unit when they shift between floors. I’ve found that last one especially useful in the case of more agile bosses, who roam around like disgruntled ticket collectors before committing to the push.

Room cards, meanwhile, help you specialise floors. Turn one into a fighting arena and you can farm the small fry for easy pyre points to spend on expensive cards elsewhere. Introduce a planetarium and you’ll amplify any magic you weave within. I have never been brave enough to play the burning room that does 50 points of damage to units inside, but there’s probably a way to hack the card chemistry so that the incendiary conditions actually benefit your defenders.

All of these ins and outs are shaped by the five factions, each a reworking and elaboration of elements from the original game. You pick two as your primary and secondary clan for each run, which dictates your starting champion card – a named unit with a choice of upgrade paths – and the kinds of cards you’ll acquire at rest stops between battles.

The factions are a treat, each a verdant entanglement of playstyles. I will spoil the workings of just two. The strength of the Lunar Coven waxes and wanes with the phases of the moon. As such, victory often comes from delicately timing your most powerful cards, but the hitch is that some cards are more potent when the moon is full, others when it’s in shadow.

The dragons of Pyreborn, meanwhile, are all about gold – grabbing fat stacks early in the run, melting it down into lobbable slag (“Make It Rain”), or jealously hoarding it for buffs. The first time I beat Monster Train 2 it was thanks to the Pyreborn’s Greed Dragons, who accrue health and attack points based on how many dragon eggs you’ve acquired. You can hatch those eggs for artifacts, which may be sensible when you’re trundling up to the last boss, but I consider that a poor return for sacrificing a train’s worth of Smaughs.

Buffs! Buffs? Buffs. As with many a Spirelike, much of Monster Train 2’s enchantment comes from “breaking” the combat, which is to say, violently skewing the starting card capacities in ways doubtless envisaged by the designers using an artful compound of hallucinogens and spreadsheets. A case study: here is how you transform Ekka, High Witch of the Coven with a proud total of five attack and health points, into a titan slayer. First, you’ll want to pick either the Celestial Spellweaver or Silver Empress upgrade paths, each of which steadily accrues magical power, or Conduit. The Spellweaver gains it for every spell you cast on the same floor, while the Empress gets a massive boost while the moon is full.

You’ll probably want to deploy Ekka alongside a Lunar Priestess, who performs a ritual each turn that slops yet more spelljuice over friendly units. Now, hand the High Witch a Moonlit Glaive that confers a “mageblade” multiplier based on all that pent-up sorcery. The result should be a champion who looks like an ailing fortune teller yet can somehow dish out 300+ damage a turn, mulching the chewiest of chthonic crusaders in a single hit – and that’s before you exploit the ludicrous multipliers for your spells on Ekka’s floor, afforded by her conduit level.

True, she still has a glass jaw, and true, if she cops it, your wizardly arsenal will be proportionately punier. But you can head off those risks by wedging her behind a Silent Sentinel that absorbs damage while making foes even more susceptible to spells.

I gaze upon my willowy Wiccan wrecking ball with boundless, aching pride and satisfaction. And then I start to feel like Bilbo Baggins regaining his senses after beating a large woodlouse to death in Mirkwood. The appeal of the roguelite deckbuilder is the joy of expressing your wit and invention through alchemical mastery of maths. At best, it is like improvising a tune in response to haphazard melodies, dancing your own composition into the cadences of enemies and bosses.

At worst, it is like doing times-tables with fancier graphics – not that much fancier, in the case of Monster Train 2, which is readable and digestible, but badly needs a more interesting colour scheme and some more creative character designs. And even at its best, there’s a necessary hollowness to it, as anybody who’s ever yielded 100 hours of day and night to such games will know. The randomisation element sinks its blood-crusted hook, even as the glittery card effects make no bones of the genre’s adjacency to casino slot machines. Run gives way to run gives way to run.

Still, that’s more of a wider, philosophical objection to the genre than a criticism of Monster Train 2 in particular. If you have no such hoity-toity qualms, this is as bountiful an experience as you could ask for. Each victorious raid on heaven produces a shower of unlockable cards and items that you can put immediately to the test. If you’re weary of raiding the main campaign for cards, there are bespoke puzzle-campaigns via dimensional portal back at the starting depot, where you can test out various overarching modifiers. Or, if you really trust the hand you’ve amassed, you can segue your victory directly into Endless mode and extend this roguelike railway unto infinity. Heaven is only a fleeting fiction, next to the protean immensity of the deck.

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May 21, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Monster Train 2 stays on track with a safe, but tough sequel

by admin May 21, 2025

Monster Train 2 is the opposite of the Ship of Theseus.

Its predecessor Monster Train is a polished card-based roguelike where you fight monsters on three levels of a train, defending your pyre at the top across a series of levels and storming Hell to fight evil angels. Monster Train 2 is the same but in reverse: angels and devils taking Heaven back together from the corrupting Titans. Both games break up their seven or so battles with stores and random events. The art styles are the same, the gameplay is the same. Small, subtly-introduced differences make the second one technically different from the first. But if you squint you see almost exactly the same game, five years later.

How few things can you change and still have a game that feels like it’s progressed? That’s the question I approached Monster Train 2 with. The first game punched above the weight of its art style and barely-there story, but the sequel’s art is sharper and more colorful now. However, the environments of Heaven are much less distinct than the levels of Hell. None of that really matters because you spend most of your time in the four chambers of the train, which always looks the same. At a certain point, remembering how to play playing Monster Train 2 is like remembering your walk to the store: you do it so often, it all blends together. And it blends together with its predecessor, too.

There’s a problem with making the same game twice though: the people who already played the first one, who are likely most excited for the sequel, already know how to beat it. The team behind Monster Train 2 knew this, because it’s arranged for people who already played the first one. The story builds on the events of the previous game with only the briefest pause to explain. There are also more complex battle effects. For example, instead of “spikes” (fixed damage to any unit that attacks yours) you have “pyregel” which sticks to the enemy and increases the damage you do to them. This makes the first few levels of the sequel easier than the original. There’s also room cards and equipment cards that (respectively) grant bonuses on a floor and give bonuses to a unit. However, they’ve turned up the difficulty to compensate for your new tools.

While Monster Train was challenging, 2 is more so. Even Covenant Zero, the tutorial difficulty, requires you to build your deck thoughtfully. I felt like I needed to lose quite a few times on Rank 1 to level up my clans, get better cards, and therefore break through the damage walls that arrive at level 5 or so. Some enemy teams made me groan every time I saw them, because it was obvious my current damage level wouldn’t cut it.

But on the other hand, it’s possible for a run to start quite badly and still get a victory. Unlike genre cousin Slay the Spire, there was never a doom spiral where I could tell I would lose several levels before I actually lost. If I could get through a battle, even if my pyre only had a few HP, there was a chance I could beat the next one. I also enjoy Challenge runs, where you have restrictions and pre-applied bonuses at a set Covenant level. These can be hard, but they feel, if not more fair than regular runs, at least more intentionally tough.

Big Fan

And as it often is with these games, if you’re still unlocking artifacts and making progress, it doesn’t feel too bad to lose. It took me about 15 hours to have runs where I wasn’t unlocking at least one thing. At that point, between my unlocked clans and my new cards, an average run was much more varied, and felt much more fun, than one five hours in. In this respect Monster Train 2 has fine-tuned the trickle of content in what I’d consider the early game (the time in which you have your first few runs, and when you get through the story.) So the difficulty might have squashed me, but at least I was having fun while it happened.

Monster Train 2 is made not just for people who liked the first one, but for people who want the magical period of “figuring out” the game– when you understand it, but before you actually win– to last as long as possible. Its similarities to the first one beg that existential question I asked earlier: if you keep almost everything in a game the same, why make a sequel and not, say, a DLC pack? Other related games raise this question too. Slay the Spire 2 and Hades 2, both releasing soon, both rely on their similarity to their predecessors to sell. The job of a sequel is to be the same as its progenitor but also substantially different enough to justify its own existence, either through refining the previous game or through providing a lot more of it.

Monster Train 2 is the latter, a slightly more polished version of the original with more content for fans to plow through. It trades memorability for momentary captivation, and it’s an understandable tradeoff. Just like with the first game, though, the memories of my hours mowing down Titans are already melting away.

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May 21, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

It’s pretty clear Monster Hunter Wilds’ first Capcom collab will be with Street Fighter

by admin May 20, 2025

Capcom dropped a nice and easy-to-parse teaser earlier today for the first collaboration event in Monster Hunter Wilds. We’ve known for a while that the company is working on one such event, and we’ve also known it’s going to be with another Capcom brand.

Naturally, people have been guessing, but today’s teaser makes it pretty clear which other Capcom series the first collaboration will be with.

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Over on Twitter, the official Monster Hunter account shared a single image of a claw mark that has a very distinct Street Fighter art style, which inarguably means the first cross-over event will be with the iconic fighting game series.

The tweet doesn’t contain any other information besides, but it’s pretty clear we’re getting closer to a proper announcement. Street Fighter has, of course, crossed over with Monster Hunter games in the past. Monster Hunter World had its fair share of Capcom collaborations, including with Street Fighter.

Pretty clear. | Image credit: Capcom

This would be Wilds’ first, and judging by how Capcom has been known to run these in the past, the new content will very likely be available as part of a limited-time Event Quest. Though we can only guess, it’ll also likely include various pieces of armour that make your Hunter look like a Street Fighter character – such as Ryu.

Usually, Capcom also likes to release other cosmetics for purchase around the same time, too, for those who want some extra bling. Typically, Event Quests are little more grindy than normal quests, especially if you want to get the entire set.

However, considering how much more player-friendly Wilds has been compared to past games, the game’s iteration of this collaboration might end up being more accessible. We’ll also have to wait and see whether this event will only include costumes, or if there’s going to be a little more to it.

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May 20, 2025 0 comments