What could be considered as a Western take on the Monster Hunter genre has just entered into open beta for PC. Dauntless is a diversity-driven hack-and-slash game that sees a group of hunters (controlled by players) set about to take down the growing infestation of mammoth-sized monsters. The beta is available for download from the official website.

Before you can hop into the game you’ll need to grab a 56MB client, which is a quick and painless download. However, once the client is complete you’ll need to download the full game, which will require a bit more space the setup wizard.

The plot is about as in-depth as Earth Defense Force: A bunch of giant monsters are growing more and more hungry, and it’s up to players to band together, craft some weapons, and go meat-hunting.

Once you kill some monsters and level up your equipment, it’s time to advance your character and move to more dangerous territory. You can get a glimpse of the gameplay and an overview of the story with the open beta trailer below.

Developer Phoenix Labs decided to design Dauntless around a rock, paper, scissors style mechanic where different monsters across different biomes have different weaknesses. Your job, as a hunter, is to search them out, understand their fighting pattern, kill them up real good, and scavenge their body parts for your crafting needs, just like Monster Hunter.

And speaking of body parts… the game rewards players for stringing together combos and using power attacks on specific parts of the monsters in order to destroy those parts, not unlike Monster Hunter World.

The combat isn’t quite as expansive as Capcom’s party-based hack-and-slash title, though. You have a far more limited amount of weapons at your disposal, but Dauntless is free-to-play, so I guess it all balances out.

You can grab the free client of Dauntless right now from the official website.