This Hunt Is Authorised.
‘Monster Hunter Wilds’ is the latest addition to Capcom’s long running franchise. A action/adventure series that pits a band of up to four hunters against ravenous monsters. Legendary for its multiplayer, end game grind and long game support cycles. With seven years since the last mainline entry ‘Monster Hunter World’ its needless to say the excitement is palpable. So after some time deliberating what to “Main”, lets hunt!
Starting ‘Wilds’ after an introductory cutscene we launch into the character creation tool. Those who want to create the perfect hunter will have plenty of sliders to adjust. Myself I’m not overwhelmingly keen on recreating my face and body. I am much more pick a preset and adjust the hair to my liking. Even for my level of creation I spent a while combing through the brilliant selection of haircuts. Regardless if you’re like me or want to edit “Brow Width’ to replicate yourself in game. It should be noted if you fancy editing your hunter later in game prepare to pay micro transactions. I had really hoped that this series would have dropped paid character editing vouchers and was extremely disappointed to see them return. Maybe I would stick around longer making a character if it could change at will without emptying my real life wallet.
With our hunter fully realised we launch into a scripted chase scene. We are introduced to ‘Wilds’ mount the “Seikret”. After surviving the desert chase we find ourselves in a small desert oasis camp. This area is essentially the tutorial where you can test out different weapons in a peaceful surrounding. I can’t applaud this section enough. For new players to the series it’s such a brilliant self driven onboarding system. For experienced players you can pick your main weapon and skip it entirely. I chose the sword and shield as my weapon then went on my way to the first hunt.
Hunts are the main bread and butter that ‘Wilds’ has to offer. Like previous games in the series, you are sent out to track and hunt a monster. You will be spending most of your time in hunts. So its a great job that everything about them is brilliant and will keep you coming back for one more hunt.
The environments you track your prey through are more expansive than ever. The areas you traverse are as close to open worlds as ‘Monster Hunter’ could get while retaining that ‘Monster Hunter’ feel. Sprawling pathways and verticality to a level this series has not previously achieved. Areas in the map are still numbered like the older games which is great bit of nostalgia, despite not being needed now SSD’s have mostly taken away loading screens. Plotting a route to a monster while grabbing items you want feels less like a memory test now. With gathering spots and other items appearing on the map screen. Which is a quality of life update I’ve been wanting for ages. From a design point each map is drastically different from each other. That being said I feel like many veterans will able to guess the biomes we go hunting in.
Upon finding your hunt it’s time to pull out your weapon of choice and engage in combat. I couldn’t be happier with the combat in ‘Wilds’, it is by far the best it’s ever been. To the uninitiated you could be forgiven for thinking combat in ‘Monster Hunter’ is clunky. Veterans like myself will tell you it about precision. ‘Wilds’ adds a focus mode which will have new and old players rejoicing. While in focus mode it allows you to aim attacks of any weapon. This gives a level of control to every attack not before seen in ‘Monster Hunter’. Being able to adjust heavy great sword attacks or aim ranged weapons sounds like an incredibly basic thing to be excited for. However, control isn’t the only benefit of attacking in focus mode, it can allow you to take advantage of the new wound system. Various parts of the monster can glow red while focusing, these are wounds. Aiming and attacking the wounds repeatedly will cause big damage as well as loot upon breaking. When managing to wound your prey multiple times it feels incredibly satisfying combat wise, while also massively rewarding loot wise.
After completing a hunt you will be crafting yourself some new gear, using the hide of the slain beast. ‘Wilds’ is significantly less stingy with materials having decent quest rewards and abundant loop drops from exploiting monsters wounds. After a single hunt you more than likely will able to craft something of some description. The weapons and armours for you to craft are drop dead gorgeous. I found myself halting my progression at many points just to grind out some of the desirable armour sets. The fantastic designs do lead to a bit of a issue at the end game though especially in the weapon department. The meta weapons (Currently) are the newly introduced “Artisian” weapons that can be crafted to have proprieties of your choice. While this is a great idea for getting your ideal weapon, they only have one design. Some people will really like them, I did not as much. They felt like they lacked flavour and character of other weapons that don’t cut the mustard in comparison. I am praying that a future update brings some kind of transmog system because of this.
Narratively ‘Wilds’ is stronger than other ‘Monster Hunter’ games, however I wouldn’t say its anything particularly original. Anyone who may have flirted with this series in the past could probably guess how the story will go. It is slightly reductive of me but it boils down to hunters find a place, hunt some monsters, local citizens are scared of a certain monster, you go after said monster. Saying that some of the characters on your journey are absolutely brilliant. ‘Alma’, ‘Gemma’ and ‘Olivia’ are total standouts for me. All three of these characters have great narrative moments and are integral to systems in the game, reappearing long after you have blitzed the story. Every time ‘Alma’ tells me “I have authorised this hunt” I get a rush of dopamine that no game has given me this year.
Sadly ‘Wilds’ has one glaring achilles heel, its performance. ‘Wilds’ in its current state feels so poorly optimised. Even higher end machines are struggling to run this beast of a game. I found myself multiple times messing with my settings to try and squeeze a bit more stability out of the frame rate. Even after several compromises in graphical quality I got to a point where I felt I was playing a stable game. Parts of ‘Wilds’ are incredible beautiful such as the equipment and monsters, however, the game doesn’t graphically look like it should take the toll it does on systems. I only experienced two crashes in my play-through but my band of hunters that I tackled the game with had a significantly worse time than I. The hardest monster to fight should not be running the game itself.
Overall despite its some times crippling poor performance ‘Monster Hunter Wilds’ is a brilliant game. It’s hard to recommend fully in this state for some players though. After some stability patches it has the potential to be the game of a generation. For people like me who a willing to ignore a few flaws will experience second to none gameplay. If ‘Capcom’ support ‘Wilds’ for anywhere near the length they supported ‘Worlds’, I can see myself in this game for many years to come. Anyway a sense of relief has lifted after publishing this review as I’m itching to carry on hunting.
Farewell Hunters.
Review code was provided by Capcom.
This review is featured on OpenCritic
