Dauntless

What Dauntless lacks in layered complexity it makes up for with tightly crafted combat and rewarding progression, proving you don't need to cram every possible feature into a game for it to be great.

A fantastic multiplayer experience and vibrant art direction help make Dauntless stand out, despite feeling a little empty at times.

Though this Switch port mightily struggles from a performance perspective, it’s still enjoyable on a consistent enough basis that such issues can be mostly overlooked. It literally costs you nothing more than time to give Dauntless a try, and we’d highly recommend you give it a shot.

Dauntless is great and addictive, offering many hours of hunting while exquisitely balancing action and RPG. With fun battles and a satisfying progression, I highly recommend the download, as this is the best free title I've played on the Switch - as well as being one of the best online experiences on the console. Even with flaws, the Slayers game is capable of bringing down any performance problem or monster prestigiously, attacking without ever losing its greatness.

Although hardly original in its premise, Dauntless offers an extremely fun and accessible take on the monster-hunting roleplaying game. It wastes no time in throwing you straight into the action and while easy to pick up there's plenty of depth there for fans of the genre. What's more Dauntless is completely free to play, gracefully sidestepping those annoying monetisation pitfalls we're so used to seeing.

If you're not worried about a major story or a lot of strategy but still want to see what the monster hunting genre is like without shelling out a lot of money, Dauntless is a nice free-to-play game to ease you into things.

For RPGamers new to the hunter sub-genre of RPGs, Dauntless can provide an excellent entry point, especially given its free-to-play model.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the loop of hunting monsters and collecting their parts to craft better weapons and armor. That being said, its performance issues in the open-world hub and the inability to earn any substantial amount of platinum through regularly playing the game inhibits me from giving further praise. However, with some improvements, this game could be a sleeper hit within the library of free-to-play Nintendo Switch games.

Phoenix Labs has built Dauntless to be the same game for all gamers. That has been their mission from the start and in that they have absolutely succeeded.

Uninteresting and uninspired, Dauntless is certainly impressive in its own right, but as far as actual gameplay goes, what's present fails to engage beyond the surface level. Perhaps that'll be enough for most who download the free title, but between aesthetically resembling Fortnite and aping Monster Hunter's combat wholesale, Phoenix Games has failed to contribute anything truly novel to the experience. Dauntless is as derivative as they come, and while that lack of price tag may be appealing, there are much better games to spend one's time (and even money) on. Go play Monster Hunter instead.