Monster Hunter: Wilds Review

Monster Hunter is a series that has had an incredibly interesting life. Slowly rising from the grips of being a niche title with a cult following, with its level of success increasing with each entry and generation. The last few entries (third and fourth-gen games as well as Generations/Generations Ultimate) totalled over at least 8 million units, with the third-generation games going as high as 10 million units. Obviously, the success of the series changed with the release of Monster Hunter: World, with it and its subsequent Iceborne expansion amassing a total of over 43 million units sold. With that explosion in popularity, we find ourselves with the release of Monster Hunter: Wilds, the latest entry into the longstanding franchise which perfectly nails how the act of hunting monsters feels, but largely forgets the depth and nuances that held the series up as well as it once did. Instead, it trades a lot of those smaller systems in service of trying to ease new players into the series, while also providing an onboarding experience that ranges from incredibly effective to downright confusing depending on the needs of the player.

Departing from the New World in which the previous mainline entry [MH World] was set in, Monster Hunter: Wilds takes place in an unexplored region of the Old World known as the Forbidden Lands. The Guild is led there after a former hunter by the name of Fabius (who many in the community believe to be the Ace Lancer from Monster Hunter 4) finds a young boy by the name of Nata who claims to be from that region. Prior to this, it was believed that this area of the Old World was uninhabited. Nata also claims that his village was attacked by the “White Wraith”. You assume the role of the Hunter (shocking, I know) and you are part of the expedition into the Forbidden Lands.

Keeping with the trend that started with Monster Hunter: World, Wilds has a larger focus on its story and world than any previous entry. However, rather than it just be some poorly paced, asinine story like that of base MH World, the game shifts its focus more to the characters you’ll be spending a lot of your time with. You have Alma, a kind and gentle soul who acts as your handler for this entry, Gemma, the hard as nails but lovable smithy, and your Palico, who is the cutest little thing in the world and I would die for them. These are the main three excluding Nata who, spoilers excluded, can only be described as a timid young boy who wants nothing more than to get home and figure out what the White Wraith actually is.

I’m not going to pretend just because the story writing and storytelling of Monster Hunter: Wilds is vastly improved to its predecessors that it is some beacon of impressive storytelling. Is it better? Yes. Is it a masterpiece of writing? Not particularly. However, the thing they nailed with the story this time around is how they implement some more of the extended Monster Hunter lore into the story, and how the extra focus on world building and characters doesn’t detract from the core reason why people play these games – the monsters. The introduction for each monster is presented incredibly well, and it is by far one of the strongest points of this game.

Moving onto the monsters themselves, out of all the Monster Hunter games that I have played, I haven’t felt this positive about a roster before. With the exception of the Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate roster, because that is just an unfair comparison, I could only point to one monster that I wasn’t particularly fond of, that being the Doshaguma. Every other monster I had a blast hunting. Whether it was the new monsters like the Rey Dau and Lala Barina, or returning monsters like Gypceros and Nerscylla, every hunt was just as fun as the last, and old favourites like the aforementioned Nerscylla look fantastic in the high-resolution textures that Monster Hunter Wilds provides.

The perfect accompaniment to the fantastic roster of Monster Hunter: Wilds is the game’s combat, which is the best the series has ever seen. Each weapon feels incredibly satisfying to use and while we did lose some of the incredibly cool movesets that we had in Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak, we did gain some great functionality while removing the terrible Clutch Claw that outright ruined the post-launch hunts of Monster Hunter World: Iceborne. Many of the weapons have movesets that either take functionality from the Monster Hunter MMO, Monster Hunter Frontier, or at least lend inspiration from it. A personal favourite of mine is the Switch Axe, whose revised moveset and addition of the counter slash in Sword Mode makes it far more viable to maintain aggression.

One of the best improvements to the combat are the small systems called Offset Attacks and Power Clashes that affect a variety of weapons. Offset Attacks are simple to describe. They’re effectively a parry but rather than the parry that Monster Hunter players are used to, an Offset Attack will interrupt a monster and leave them open for a follow-up. On the opposite end are Power Clashes, which occur when you block enough physical attacks from a monster. You’ll interrupt whatever the monster was doing, and a cinematic clash between an unstoppable force and an immovable object will ensue. You will raise whatever implement you use for blocking and hold back the monster as it tries to get at you. These small systems make each weapon feel incredibly satisfying, and it aids in making this the best combat the series has ever seen.

The new flagship feature of the game is the Wounding/Focus Mode mechanic. Born from the ashes of the tenderise mechanic from Monster Hunter World: Iceborne, wounding is not a mechanic you have to go out of your way to engage with. Instead, it is something that will naturally occur. In a way, you could almost look at it as an extension of the part-breaking system that Monster Hunter has employed since the beginning. The wounding is only one piece of the puzzle. Focus Mode is a method of aiming that can be enabled and disabled. You’ll be able to tell if it is on by the presence, or lack thereof, of a crosshair. If you see a crosshair, then you are in Focus Mode. While in this mode, you can see what wounds are available for exploitation, and you can use an attack known as a Focus Strike to deal large amounts of damage. Some weapons rely more on these Focus Strikes than others, and some weapons are also better at capitalising on wounds. For instance, if you aren’t comfortable going for Perfect Guard blocks with the Charge Blade to activate its Savage Axe form, then you can use a Focus Strike to achieve the same thing. The Switch Axe is a weapon that does exceptionally well when taking advantage of Focus Strikes, as its follow-up attacks are incredibly effective at dishing out a lot of damage.

The Wounding and Focus Strikes mechanics does pose a problem, however. Because exploiting wounds will interrupt a monster’s movements, it makes maintaining aggression with the monsters you are hunting extremely easy, and this causes you to deal significantly higher damage per second than you were comparatively able to in previous entries. I noticed this almost immediately as the first few hunts were fast, even for introductory hunts. Where it became impossible not to notice, however, was with the late game and endgame. I understand that I have a fair amount of familiarity with the series due to me not only playing World and Rise, but also going back to previous generations of Monster Hunter to experience those games too. However, that doesn’t mean that I am some insane speedrunner that effortlessly downs monsters before you can finish heating your bowl of porridge in the microwave. I’m just a person who hits monsters until they stop moving. Hell, in previous entries I was happy with hunt times around 15 minutes, I would even be fine with 20 minutes on some monsters. This is all to say that I’m wonderfully average at Monster Hunter. So if I managed to get all the way through High Rank with Low Rank gear and still maintain hunt times at or below ten minutes, then something is seriously off with the balancing of the monsters in this game, especially due to the ease of maintaining aggression with the monsters. Did they manage to hit me hard due to my low-level armour? Sure. But a Low Rank weapon should not be able to take down the final monster of the game with no issue.

I purposely waited for Title Update 1 [TU1] to be released, as this was where the developers promised they would be bringing the challenge into the game. Now that TU1 is out for everyone, the monsters Zoh Shia and Mizutsune have proven to fall over just as fast as the rest of the roster. For goodness’ sake, I was doing Tempered Mizutsune in as little as 6 minutes in groups of people that like to be silly with the game. Yeah, Tempered Mizutsune definitely had moments of dealing insane amounts of damage to us, but the damage we received was never the issue. We already had Tempered Gore Magala and Tempered Arkveld who hit pretty hard, but they consistently fell over as if they were made of glass. These new monsters are no different, and I doubt there will be much change until the expansion. I get that the team wanted to make the game more approachable for new fans, but the only thing you accomplish by having a game with monsters as poorly balanced as this is make future hunts that aren’t elementary feel insurmountable for players that who have been conditioned to expect easy wins. Monster Hunter: World faced a similar issue to this with its Alatreon update, as this was one of the hardest hunts in the game, but people were given access to it so fast that it was possible to skip the endgame’s difficulty and incremental gear progression, and instead go into a monster hunt that had huge requirements of its players. Unless this game can slowly introduce newer, conditioned players into harder and harder fights, the game is either destined to be easy or destined to upset the people it originally catered for.

The streamlining and removal of good friction (read: learning/mastering the game’s systems) extends far beyond monsters dying much too quickly. A lot of the nuance and the depth that the previous games once had has been removed. Various game systems have been gutted or outright removed rather than trying to create a smoother onboarding experience so that newer players can learn the intricacies and depth that the games once offered. The Palicos have been dumbed down to a jack of all trades, instead of giving players the control and freedom to customise how their Palico behaves in hunts. The food systems have been grossly oversimplified, which completely removes the nuance and depth that came from tailoring your pre-hunt meals to exactly what you need. Monster parts no longer drop on the ground and are instead instantly put in your inventory, and rare monster materials can be guaranteed as a reward for a hunt by cycling the hunts available on your map. It honestly feels like they tried to remove all points of friction from this game while failing to understand that friction is an important part of designing a game, and its removal runs the risk of making the experience feel a little hollow.

One of the biggest selling points about this game before its release was that it was the first truly open-world Monster Hunter game. The transition from classic Monster Hunter to Monster Hunter: World was pretty dramatic as levels went from a series of smaller  interconnected zones to one overarching biome with no loading zones. The caveat was that each biome was still separated from each other, so there were still loading screens. Wilds aimed to do away with this, and it both fails and succeeds at this. While you are going through the story, you will actively engage with the open world and the seamless interconnectivity it provides. However, once you are done with the story, you will spend much more time in the game’s clunky menus and loading into each hunt. In an effort to set itself apart from its predecessors, it ends up making sacrifices to its performance and optimisation while achieving a near identical experience.

I’m not kidding when I say that sacrifices were made to its performance and optimisation, either. Monster Hunter: Wilds has achieved the incredible feat of completely upending the good will Capcom had earned with its support for Monster Hunter: World on PC, and the PC port of Monster Hunter: Rise – games whose PC ports are both quite excellent, especially the former’s after a lot of cleaning up. Monster Hunter: Wilds’ PC port is inexcusable garbage. From being a resource hog, to having visuals and framerates that do not seem to justify the cost, to the reliance on Band-Aid solutions like DLSS and Frame Generation, and even the needless inclusion of Denuvo whose existence only serves to punish the people who buy the game and not the people who pirate it. The game runs so poorly that, in some circumstances and areas, I could barely stay above 60 frames per second despite my PC easily exceeding the recommended specifications for 1080p ultrawide and medium-high settings. This PC port is truly a dumpster fire, and while the latest update has made some improvements, they aren’t enough for me to feel comfortable recommending this game to people who don’t have overspecced PCs, unless they are willing to tolerate the game looking awful while running terribly.

In saying all that, the game can still look good, it’s more that consistently achieving a playable framerate while making the game look good is incredibly difficult. The art direction is gorgeous, the monsters look incredible, and the effects are better than ever. Thankfully, the art direction for weapons didn’t regress to the disappointingly basic designs that Monster Hunter: World was guilty of and instead, the available weapons are unique and fantastic. The beautiful art direction extends to the armour too, with this being some of the strongest fashion available at launch for a Monster Hunter game in recent memory.