In many ways the Nintendo Switch Shop appears like a step back into an earlier age. Even rather old games like Diablo III are being sold for €60 full price. And there is an old idea that you don't see as often any more on other platforms: Demo versions of games. So I downloaded Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate Demo, and gave it a try. I had never tried any Monster Hunter game, and know that it is a big franchise, so I thought it might be worth having a look.

First of all it turned out that Capcom apparently didn't have me in mind when they designed the demo; but rather somebody who had already played other games in the series on other platforms, and wanted to see how the Switch version looked. So something I assumed to be obvious, that a demo version gives you some tutorial on what you are supposed to do and how the controls work, turned out to be completely missing. Fortunately there are only so many buttons on a gamepad, so at least the controls I figured out. I'm still not sure whether I completely understood what to do. The demo version offers you three different hunts, but even on the easiest one I never managed to kill the monster I was after. Even with a fast weapon my attacks appeared to be extremely slow, and the controls cumbersome, so my hits rarely connected. And when they did, it didn't appear to have any effect on the monster, even after hitting it for 5 minutes straight.

In the end I decided that this wasn't the game for me. I'm not a big fan of action combat even when the controls are good. In this game the controls were clearly not for me. I'm sure some people completely master them and will tell me that hunting a monster is easy. But for somebody who has never played a Monster Hunter game before it clearly isn't, and the demo version completely failed to teach me.

Having said that, I very much appreciate that there *is a demo version. I really would have hated spending €60 on this and then finding out it isn't the game for me. And while I am more used to world of PC games, with a Steam library full of cheap but unplayed games, I can see the attraction of buying fewer games for more money, after having carefully selected and tested them.