TL:DR: Game is good, performance issues aside. CAPCOM should very much continue to hammer them out though, because people without brand new PCs will struggle to play at all. If the performance issues are a point of contention for you, you will probably want to wait for more patches to come out addressing them. If not, I believe you should wholeheartedly play this. See further below for specs and settings.

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Game runs fine-ish for me with no crashes thus far but your mileage will vary based on your own specs. If your CPU is under powered, you will feel it. The polygonal triangle monsters (in this case) ARE real and CAN hurt you. PS5 controller users will also see the rarely used trigger resistance functionality come into play, so don't be scared that your triggers are suddenly locking up on you. You'll see instant zoom in/out on the map via L2/R2 click (this one can be disabled if wanted in the controller options) and other various small things during gameplay. If you're looking for camera and HUD settings in the main menu, you will not find them until you gain control of your character, which is a really stupid design decision in my eyes. This mostly has to do with some accessibility options that aren't modifiable for the most part in their own tab, in my case this was for motion sickness.

I'm only at the beginning of chapter 2 as of writing this, so I'll probably update this as I play through the game more and more. The story is pretty engaging thus far, and I'm much more of a fan of the handler this time around. Character speaking interaction also helps build the immersion a little bit more instead of just being a grunting and yelping hunter who stoically sits in silence.

The addition of the seikret is a very nice QoL for movement and gamechanger in general (especially being able to carry a second weapon into combat). I'm not a seasoned MH player, and I have had some difficulty with at least one monster so far, veterans of the series will probably breeze through low-rank monsters without issue no doubt. The world is very immersive and beautiful to look at, easy to navigate, and also without load screens from as far as I've seen to this point (rather replaced with transition hallways so to speak). I will also mention that I very much love being able to go straight from camp to hunting within seconds too. It helps things move along very fluidly.

Customization is built upon from World, with the ability to customize your chocobo seikret, your pop-up camps, hunter profile, and etc. Character customization is built on from SF6 and DD2 and look amazing when all is said and done, assuming you haven't built an absolute freak of nature.

I don't need to speak on weapons as there's already numerous amounts of information on them from the beta, I myself though have been really enjoying the insect glaive and hunting horn, the latter of which didn't feel good to use for me previously in World.

Edit 3/1/25: I've put in 8 more hours, cleared chapter 2, and it's more of the good stuff. HOWEVER... I am very tired of having my control ripped away when I'm not actively hunting a story monster. There are several points in the game where you're not allowed to do anything but progress the main quest. I also somehow keep swapping weapons while on my seikret, which is really annoying when I have a specific goal in mind when approaching combat.

I am also beginning to encounter much more stuttering during combat, to the point of absurdity. I'm going to see if dropping the render distance to low and texture quality to medium will result in a better experience.

Edit 3/2/25: I've discovered several things. Stutters mostly come from going over 60fps with framegen on. Having framegen on and purposefully tanking my fps resulted in less stutters. You cannot use VSync or framecap the game with framegen on. If you have framegen and Nvidia Reflex off, most of your stutters will go away.

There should be a way to turn off chat without having to go to a private lobby, and this multiplayer system is pretty stupid for trying to play with friends, especially going through low-rank the first time.

I am sitting at the last boss of low rank (initial credits). A reminder to everyone that the experience doesn't end at credits, and there's MUCH more after that. Half of my fights were much harder than they needed to be because I was ill-prepared with the wrong gear (for example, -13 fire resistance against a fire-type monster). Story's good with the exception of one party member who should have been written slightly differently. Every monster has felt fair so far up to this point, my own stupidity with gear aside.

I miss the Palico chefs preparing food, but thankfully I've been told that they're coming in a title update.

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Performance stuff below and PC specs for reference:
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X 8-Core
RTX 3060 12GB
16GB of DDR5
Windows 11
Installed on an SSD

Upscaling is set to FSR3 at balanced w/ frame generation on (it's functioning much better than the beta, much less ghosting overall), rendering distance is set to medium (it's one of the only settings affecting the CPU for impact) with surface and sand/snow quality set to low. Everything else is set to high, maxed out, or turned on with the exception of ray tracing. Running at a resolution of 1080p. With those settings I am hitting 80-90 fps, frame generation makes up for half of that. If 30fps didn't make my head hurt, I'd honestly be fine with capping the framerate to 30.

That being said, however, there are stutters during gameplay which are absolutely annoying to deal with. It happens more frequently during battle, usually after attacks. My thinking is it's related to terrain deformation from monsters' heavy attacks, but that's more rumor than fact. During exploration w/o combat, it happens much less frequently. On the other side of the coin though, I've dealt with enough bad optimization in games to the point where it doesn't bother me really, even if this isn't eurojank or slavjank (terms of endearment really).

As soon as I touched it solo, I beat the game in 1:46:55, which apparently nets an achievement. Albeit it was on Beginner, but I only fell like... five times max at most? And each time because my brain shorted out on me mid jump.

The game isn't hard at all, and a majority of the harder obstacles are in the beginning. I'm guessing the game is a lot harder with more people, but at the same time easier as long as you don't get scammed by desync at all (and the people you're playing with are relatively competent).

If you truly want a game that tests your patience and skill, Getting Over It will always be the best in the genre, or Bennett Foddy's upcoming game, Baby Steps.