Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Creature collection with a base-automation layer underneath it. The difficulty sliders are unusually honest about the fact that the grind is the game.

Two games glued together, and the management half is where a run is actually lost — a starving flock undoes a perfectly good dungeon.

The build carries the game. A netrunner or a sandevistan trivialises fights that a scattered stat spread makes unwinnable, and the difficulty setting only changes the numbers underneath that.

Real-time pressure with an ATB gauge underneath it. Bosses are staggered checklists, and the materia loadout decides whether a fight is a wall or a formality.

Machines have components you are meant to shoot off with the right element. A player who ignores that fights the same Thunderjaw for ten minutes with the wrong arrows.

Wider than Hades and more demanding with it: two escape routes, a resource economy on the surface, and bosses that punish the sprint-attack habit the first game rewarded.

A build with no points where it matters hits walls it can neither talk nor shoot past. Hardcore mode adds logistics, and the Deathclaws north of Goodsprings teach direction before the game does.

Hazard 5 with four dwarves is a coordination problem. Solo with Bosco is a slower, different game that the hazard tiers do not really account for.

Generous dodges and plug-in chips that can automate half the combat, so the demand is low until Very Hard, where one hit ends you and the chip build becomes the game.

The friendliest the series has been — focus strikes, a mount that finds the monster for you — and the tempered fights at the end still ask for the matchup knowledge Monster Hunter always did.