Learning to holster your weapon, run away a bit, then look for a perfect opportunity to strike is key to survival in Monster Hunter Tri, although you'll find the dash button an absolute godsend when you've got your weapon primed and you need to evade the oncoming jaws of a charging Rathian or a rock-skinned Barroth.

Speaking of which, the Barroth is the first monster we embark upon dispatching in the game's splitscreen Team Takedown, wherein the simple objective is to co-operate with a buddy in toppling an individual creature of varying ferocity. The Barroth is tough though, and bests us on several occasions.

Monster Hunter Tri supports the new Wii Classic Controller Pro, which still doesn't make getting to grips with the awkward control system any easier. While the controls might be comfortably familiar to die-hard Monster Hunter fans, they're a muddled nightmare to a newcomer, throwing logic out of the window completely, mapping simple actions like attacking, reloading or sheathing your weapon to buttons that just don't seem to make sense.

After an hour or so of extensive play however, we managed to reprogramme the logic centre of our brain to wrap our head around the controls, which is when the game really came into it's own and the first signs of compulsion set in. And that's when we noticed how stunning Monster Hunter Tri looks for a Wii game (a necessary suffix), with it's lush majestic landscapes and lovingly rendered encyclopaedia of wonderful animals that inhabit the world.

In Team Takedown, hacking a monster is a long, drawn out battle of attrition that requires precise management of your resources, such as traps, explosives and health potions to succeed. And our next hands-on with a four-player co-op network game is no different, especially as we opted to tackle one of the game's toughest monsters and cover star, the Lagiacrus. In a series first, the battle leads us underwater, where movement is every bit as fluid as it is on land, making the fight surprisingly easy to play, though no less challenging.

Our four-strong team really tears into the Lagiacrus, inflicting scratches to the scales on its underbelly, before we sever it's tail, reducing its ability to swim (incidentally, more visual feedback like this on the other creatures would have been welcome). The monster surfaces, taking the battle to land, where Lagiacrus thrashes around violently, decimating our team and expending the group's shared continues. Game over. Monster Hunter Tri might be fun, but boy, is it hard.

Still, there are plenty of other multiplayer adventures awaiting in the online Loc Lac hub, where players can gather and chat using Wii-Speak or text. Clearly, longevity won't be an issue for Monster Hunter Tri, with fully featured single-player, online and local multiplayer components all offering long-term challenges.

But whether Monster Hunter Tri can offer enough to attract a broader audience outside of its established and fervently passionate fanbase, remains to be seen. Based upon what we've seen and played thus far, the game looks and plays brilliantly once you put the time in to learn the basics, which should win the game plaudits. Question is, will you want to put the effort in? If you do, there's a lot of potential fun to be had in cutting up monsters.

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