Hunter x Hunter: Nen Impact had the potential to be great, but overly simplistic combat, lacklustre content, and janky balance make the game hard to recommend. Unless you’re a truly hardcore fan of Yoshihiro Togashi’s seminal work, I’d wait for a deep sale.
Hunter x Hunter: Nen Impact
Developer: Eighting and Bushiroad
Price: $60
Platforms: PS5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, and PC
MonsterVine was provided with a PS5 code for review.
It’s fair to say that I’m a pretty enormous Hunter x Hunter fan. I’ve loved both the manga and anime since I was a teenager, and I’ve lived through many an iconic “Hiatus x Hiatus” period. As such, I’ve wanted a Hunter x Hunter fighting game for as long as I’ve dug the series, so Hunter x Hunter: Nen Impact certainly had me thrilled. Unfortunately, it’s a fair amount rougher around the edges than I had anticipated.
The core mechanics of Hunter x Hunter: Nen Impact are fairly straightforward – fight using basic and special moves, as well as combos, to take down your foe. It’s a tag fighter, so you make teams of three to battle with. The skeleton of the combat is pleasant, as on a very basic level, it is generally fun to trade short combos with others as your favorite characters, especially locally with friends.
My primary issue is that there are no motion inputs in the game, though there’s an incredibly powerful autocombo system. This sort of simplicity can work in something like Super Smash Bros. or be a welcome variation for newcomers, but when the whole game is this simplistic despite it being a fairly traditional tag fighter, playing just isn’t as fun or exciting as it could and should be.
When playing against AI, it seems capable of exploiting your every opening while leaving none of its own. Some characters are also extremely powerful when compared to others, leading to a particularly unbalanced roster. This could be fixed over time in the future, but it’s quite noticeable right from the get-go. The choices for the roster are also a bit strange in general, with many prevalent Phantom Troupe members missing in place of characters like Genthru and Razor.
“The opening movie looks alright, and the stages are fine, but I wish a bit of extra work had gone into making the game a bit closer to Togashi’s stunning style.“
There’s not a particularly large number of modes in Hunter x Hunter: Nen Impact. Outside of a very quick and screencap-filled Story Mode that only covers the very basics of the narrative, there’s a sort of Time Attack, some straightforward Combo challenges, and Training. The combo challenges are more frequently based around how much damage you do, which makes them pretty easy, while Time Attack is more of a struggle against the wild AI. It’s not an ideal smattering of modes and provides little content outside of Versus.
My experience with online was inconsistent, with the quality going back and forth. It’s not the worst online I’ve played by any means, but it wasn’t as consistently smooth as I’d hoped. I even had difficulty finding matches less than a week into release, which was rather surprising given the popularity of the series it’s based on.
Visually, Hunter x Hunter: Nen Impact is disappointing. Though the characters look accurate to their source material appearances, there’s an overall cheapness to the visual quality and animation that is hard to look past. The opening movie looks alright, and the stages are fine, but I wish a bit of extra work had gone into making the game a bit closer to Togashi’s stunning style.
The Final Word
Hunter x Hunter: Nen Impact is a bit of a mess, despite some fun being present throughout. If there were better visuals, more content, and less exploitable gameplay, it would be a blast to play casually, but what’s present is simply a bit too busted to really get into.
MonsterVine Rating: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre
