Monster Hunter Wilds Review - A Strong Foundation

In recent years we’ve seen each new Monster Hunter release turn into a full blown event with gamers everywhere eager to jump in and turn some monsters into a new pair of boots, all while sharing stories of their best hunts and unique builds. A once niche franchise that went several years with a relatively small, but dedicated fanbase now a heavy hitter in the space, moving millions of copies in mere days. It’s been an absolute treat watching a franchise I’ve loved from nearly the beginning turn into such an industry powerhouse, with Wilds breaking Capcoms sales records and proving to be one of their strongest IP’s. But veterans of the franchise will tell you, it’s always been an event for us, with each new title not only featuring unique mechanics and new monsters to hunt, but an opportunity to reconnect with your old hunting party of friends, sharing the good times well into the night as you hunt just one more Rathalos hoping for that ruby.

From it’s roots Monster Hunter has felt like a game that simply aims to celebrate the medium, wearing it’s entire identity on it’s sleeve while taking absolutely no shame in any of it. Sure you can summarize the whole of it’s gameplay in a single sentence, it’s also that laser focus that helps it achieve so much from a simple concept, executed with such expertise that it’s elevated into something much more. From it’s deceptively simple combat sandbox that houses a staggering amount of different play styles within each of it’s weapon types, to it’s deep gear and skill progression systems that allows for some of the best player expression in the genre. What’s perhaps most impressive is just how much of this has been there from the beginning, with each new entry only needing to sand off some of the rougher edges while refining the solid foundation Capcom initially laid all those years ago.

Wilds is no different building upon the already excellent Monster Hunter World in almost every way, from the better monster variety, tweaks to the combat system and the now fully realized ecosystems boasting unique complex biomes filled with wildlife that cycles not only from day to night, but also different seasons that alters spawns and monster behavior. True to the franchise, Wilds feels like an improvement over the previous installment while also remaining nearly the exact same game we all fell in love with. Sure there’s been changes to pretty much every system, but nothing is so drastic that it changes the very fundamentals of the franchise. While this may sound like a bad thing to some, I see it as an incredible feat very few IP’s can claim, Capcom just got it right the first time around, they’ve since been tuning and refining that vision into it’s full potential. That’s what I believe to be the games greatest strength, we’re close to finally seeing the full vision of what Capcom dreamed up 20 years ago. It’s certainly not without it’s own set of issues, like performance optimization, an awful story, taking accessibility perhaps a step too far and a light end game launch state, but that doesn’t take away from what it achieves. Monster Hunter Wilds has finally given us a real foundation to build on with a beautiful world that feels more alive than ever and I for one cannot wait to see what each new update brings, not to mention the inevitable expansion or two.

So with Wilds being out for two weeks already, it’s no secret that it’s poorly optimized on PC and considering it’s visual quality, generally could run better on consoles. While it is certainly not an ugly game, it performs as if it was a visually cutting edge title which is unfortunate and Capcom really needs to work on improving the performance across the board. I first played the game on a decade old PC with a gtx 1080 and while it was a playable 30-45 fps on the absolute potato settings, it was very ugly and frankly I wouldn’t recommend the game on PC unless you at least meet the recommended requirements. I’ve since upgraded my rig the weekend of release and have been playing on an i7 265kf and rtx 4060, at first I was concerned it would still run pretty bad given some of the complaints I heard, but after experimenting I found a solid middle ground of performance and quality that I’ve been happy with. So here’s my settings on screen, but the gist of it is mostly set to medium with DLSS 4 set to quality and frame rate capped to 60 in 2k resolution with frame generation on. I am running a few performance mods like the removal of some post processing effects which provides much better visual clarity and the direct storage update to help with stuttering. With all that in mind the game runs pretty well for me, I could squeeze out some higher settings if I dropped down to 1080 and I definitely lose some frames when recording or streaming, but that’s not something most of you will have to worry about. While I am personally happy with how the game looks and runs on my hardware, everyone has a right to be and should be upset with the state the game launched in and there’s simply no excuse for such performance issues, so if you’re particularly sensitive to this stuff then I can tell you right now to just hold off and wait for some patches to improve the situation.

Now right up front I must admit I am a huge fan of this franchise, it’s one of those day one buy titles for me regardless of any personal doubts or what I may be hearing. Every title I’ve owned has provided me with hundreds of hours of content and a unique gameplay loop I just haven’t been able to find anywhere else. A new Monster Hunter always feels like an event, from reconnecting with friends or just simply being apart of the community as we all figure new shit out together, it’s always a good time. So needlessly to say I am a bit biased, but as someone that’s spent thousands of hours in the franchise, I’m also going to look at certain features and design decisions more critically than others may. Not to mention given my history with the previous installments, I very much looked forward to reviewing this game. I say all this because there’s a lot here that I really tried to look at as objectively as possible, from some quality of life changes to the many sweeping tweaks they’ve made to the formula and try as I might, I do not think they’re all positive. So first let’s get through the basics so we can start talking about the changes.

You start your journey in a solid character creator, those patient enough will certainly be able to create some pleasing models. I myself like to jump straight into the game and put the time into creation later, but this time around Capcom locked character edits behind a microtransaction, which seriously fuck right off with that. If you’re on PC then just go download the mod to bypass this bullshit and if you’re not on PC, don’t give them any fucking money for this, they don’t need the encouragement. Either way, as is tradition for all my hunters I create the same female character Scylla and her companion Charybdis before jumping into the action. I should probably quickly mention that through the RE Framework mod I’ve bumped up my FoV about 5 points or so, which makes some of the cutscenes look pretty funny.

So the story starts with our party arriving in new lands to investigate and I’ll come right out and say that it is absolutely terrible. Now I’ve known for awhile that as more people were picking these games up there was a growing demand for stronger narrative, we saw that in world and even more recently in rise, but me personally I really don’t care what the story is. A small settlement being terrorized by beasts prompting the hunting guild to send some gigachad to rescue them is far more than enough, but hey none of them have been outright bad, hell I thought rise actually flowed nicely, carrying well through endgame and into Sunbreak. I don’t even know where to begin with wilds story, I was so thoroughly disinterested in it that I’ve almost completely forgotten it already. You rescue some kid and help out the indigenous people of the lands, fending off the typical monster attacks along the way. Eventually learning that the kid is actually part of some ancient tribe that manufactured their own monsters to guard this powerful wyvern cum or something that’s the life source for everything in the land. Absolutely fucking ridiculous and not in a fun way, it doesn’t help that now our hunter talks and never has anything meaningful to say, just your standard cookie cutter uplifting zingers as we take this fragile kid and helpless handler out into the world with us while we fight, for some reason.

It’s just taking itself so seriously, with long drawn out walking simulator sections meant to showcase the environments, but absolutely assaulting you with terrible dialog the entire time. This series has always been about reveling in the absurdity, being goofy and downright silly. Wilds seems to have stripped nearly all of that away from the narrative, it does occasionally have it’s fun moments, but they’re so few and far between that it barely resembles a Monster Hunter title at times. The only thing that kept me from skipping everything was the few cool cutscenes that introduced the monsters, very reminiscent of monster hunter 4, only it was handled much better there. Seriously I never skip story content, I paid for the damn game after all, I want to experience it, but after just a couple of hours this shit is begging to be ignored.

The good news is when you’re not stuck in a drawn out walking section or listening to chat gpt pump out atrocious dialog, the missions themselves play out quite well as they slowly introduce the games mechanics to the player. You’ll be tasked with exploring one of the 5 seamless open maps, scouting for locations to drop down a campsite you can fast travel to while your chocobo horse bird controls worse than a drunk roach from Witcher 3. Of course every issue comes down to a monster causing some sort of trouble and it’s up to you to find it and turn it into a fashionable headpiece before reporting back to the mouth breathing NPCs and starting the process all over again. You’ll basically rinse and repeat this loop right up until the credits roll. But the pacing of new monsters and the slow introduction to mechanics is all handled well, with plenty of opportunities to stop and practice hunting or upgrading your gear before progressing further. All this easily makes it the most accessible monster hunter to date, something I think we’ve been saying with literally every new title at this point, but strictly from a gameplay perspective I do think this is the best onboarding experience yet. Between your guild handler following you around constantly giving you advice, all the added on screen tutorials and the many fights where AI support hunters assist you, the story does a great job preparing newcomers for the journey ahead.

As painful as the story is, it doesn’t actually detract from the real gameplay. It’s always worked so well over the years because at it’s core monster hunter is very engaging and wilds is no different, with detail rich environments dense with resources to discover and collect. There’s a very satisfying foraging loop at play here since just about everything you take from the land has it’s purpose in your kit, from crafting your standard medical supplies to turning bug juice into a flashbang, it all has it’s place, so time spent out in search of resources is never wasted. Then there’s the monsters from the large predators to much further down the food chain, all providing their own unique materials once you’ve slain or captured them, unlocking even more crafting options like your weapons and armor. You very quickly feel like you’re really living off the land, further elevated by Wilds immersive dynamic ecosystems full of a variety of life all behaving independently of one another with different routines throughout the day/night and weather cycles. Although world got close to achieving this complete ecosystem feeling, I think wilds stuck the landing, just wandering around and observing all the animals throughout the different environments is entertaining.

Each environment has a main camp with your standard merchant, traders, crafter and quest givers, though these all feel much smaller than in previous entries with the glaring omissions of player housing and a dedicated gathering hub, but they all function the same regardless. In camp you’ll want to keep an eye out for rotating sales in the shop, check to see if your traders returned with requested items, accept any side missions and of course craft or upgrade your gear from the only part of the game with a nice plot. Once you’ve gotten yourself all stocked up it’s time to head out into the world and thanks to the seamless maps theres less friction than ever between you and nature. As always you can speak to your handler to embark on quests offered up from the hunting guild, but you can also run out into the world and go searching for trouble. With every monster marked on your map from the beginning, you can set a waypoint at any given time which allows your mount to auto pilot you to wherever you need to be.

Whether your mark is set to a monster or a resource, your scent flies will guide you straight to it right from the start of the game and although the auto pilot mount does need some patching as it likes to get stuck on objects or run in circles, it will eventually take you to your destination without much input from the player. Combined with the lack of loading screens, this all significantly speeds the game up, enabling you to hunt monsters back to back in record time. The maps themselves are also loaded with useful resources pertaining to the area you’re in, like conveniently placed hot or cold drink buffs, dung bombs, screamer pods and other useful supplies for any monsters you’ll encounter within them. Throw in the pop up campsites scattered around the maps which gives you access to your equipment, item box, quest board or cooking and you really can essentially live directly off the land with little reason to ensure you’re properly prepared in a settlement before departing.

Finally it’s time to hunt us some monsters, to start you can of course select a quest from the quest board or handler, answer an SoS flare for multiplayer hunts, create a quest from an active monster on your map or just run up to one and start beating the hell out of it until a quest automatically starts up. This time around any guild supplies get amazon prime’d directly to your mount, so you’ll have easy access throughout any fight further ensuring that you’re always prepared. You also have access to a secondary weapon from your mounts saddle bag, granting even more options in a fight, particularly useful in multi hunts where you could bring along both of the appropriate damage types.

It goes without saying, but combat itself has always been where Monster Hunter excels, weapons are varied each with their own unique combos and functions while the attacks themselves are weighty and deliberate. You feel the power behind each button you press thanks to the excellent visual and audio feedback, with your hunters animations really capturing the strength required to swing such absurd objects around. A lot of attacks also lock you into their animations, forcing you to learn when it’s safe to commit or reposition yourself for a better approach. The same goes for items and tools, learning the appropriate timing and use cases for each one is it’s own process that changes with each monster. All of this would mean nothing if we didn’t have a solid opponent, luckily the monsters themselves are formidable challenges, each having their own unique attack patterns, strengths and weaknesses. It goes far beyond that though, these monsters feel like much more than a typical video game boss, they truly feel like a creature fighting for it’s life. They’ll reposition themselves, prioritize targets, become enraged, clash with other monsters, get exhausted and even flee to eat or sleep. Every fight feels like a battle of attrition as you’re locked in this tug of war, trying to maintain the upper hand while weaving in and out of combat, learning your targets attack patterns and how to read their visual or audio cues.

Each monster also has their own weak points that can be broken like horns or severed like a tail. These areas will be your priority targets for a number of reasons like specific material rewards, a chance to stun or knock them down and of course better damage. This all combines into one of the most satisfying combat systems I’ve ever played, there’s so much incentive to learn the ins and outs of your own kit as well as the complex individual monster behavior that keeps fights feeling dynamic and fresh, even after your 100th rathalos fight. Sure after thousands of hours I definitely see behind the curtain, but truly the monster AI is the best in this space. I’ll never forget that first time I booted up monster hunter freedom unite and was absolutely blown away with how real the creatures felt and to this day don’t think any other game comes close, it’s truly something special.

It’s a good thing too because the only form of progression is directly through your equipment. You don’t level up in the standard RPG sense, instead you must slay these monsters multiple times in order to craft new armor and weapons, which gives you your flat damage or defense increase as well as a complex free flowing skill system. A really nice touch has always been how the equipment itself represents the monster it’s created from, both visually and in the skills it provides. This makes the relationship between what your hunting and equipping feel a bit more personal than simply buying a set of gear from a vendor or finding it in a chest somewhere. It also leaves a ton of room for player expression and experimentation, not only can you mix and match equipment, but they contain slots that can hold specific skill decorations that compliment your play style further. Maybe you want to increase the fire damage on your switch axe or stack your defense so you’re an immovable object with your lance or buff all your friends with your hunting horn and medical items, it’s really completely up to you. Since the power scale is directly tied to gear, it makes switching between drastically different play styles as simple as selecting a different equipment loadout you’ve saved. It’s by far one of the most versatile skill systems you’ll find in the genre, even with all the streamlining we’ve seen over the years, it’s still impressive.

So that pretty much sums up Monster Hunter as a franchise and I wanted to express my love for it before talking more directly about the changes in Wilds, which is where my positive tone is gonna get quite harsh and a little negative, so let’s back up a bit and start running through what’s been changed here. I already talked about how I felt about the story, but we all know low rank is just a tutorial anyways and frankly while I was actually engaged in combat it was fine. It does force you through it quickly though, while there’s definitely moments to stop and hunt some side monsters, there’s little reason to do so even if you’re a newcomer. It’s very close to being a linear on rails narrative until you finally unlock the open world freedom at the end, which is ironically one of the main selling points of wilds. Even if you wanted to free roam and hunt anything you found, if you haven’t encountered that monster in the story yet, you won’t get the full rewards for hunting it, a very strange decision obviously made to funnel players into high rank as soon as possible. As a veteran I’m okay with this, I typically rush to high rank anyways because that’s where the game begins. Hell I don’t bother crafting or upgrading a thing unless I feel the need to, which I didn’t up until it took me several attempts and 42 minutes to kill jin dahaad in the starting equipment. Still I find it strange that while clearly trying harder to appeal to newcomers, capcom decides to force you into speedrunning the entire roster in low rank before truly setting you loose in the world. It’s a decision that’s at odds with itself.

Which actually brings me to my main complaint towards wilds which is just how much of it’s design decisions are at odds with itself and the franchise as a whole. Monster Hunter has always been a game about being prepared, putting great emphasis on taking the time to properly equip yourself before heading out into it’s dangerous world. Well here you really don’t have to prepare at all to be honest, if you forgot to grab some hot or cold drink don’t worry, there’s plenty of bugs that grant you the buffs on the walls of these areas. Forgot an antidote or deodorant? No worries, the guild somehow delivers the exact items you need several times during a hunt directly to your mount. The maps themselves are littered with more icons than an Ubisoft game, which I get it, the larger maps would mean an obvious increase in resources to gather, but man it’s excessive in some places. I can’t even tell where a monsters tail has been cut off since the minimap is perpetually in icon hell. This all just removes the need to take preparing for any hunt seriously, there’s zero urgency in making it back to camp or the storage box to resupply because the exact item I need will undoubtedly be available to me the moment I need it. Gone are the days of entering the volcano area and bumming a cold beer off one of my friends and that saddens me greatly.

You know what else greatly saddens me? The new cooking system. I absolutely hate it. Why are we cooking our own meals now? Why can we stop mid fight to cook a full meal? What the hell is up with having to farm ingredients for our meal buffs? I’d totally understand if we used the ingredients we literally harvest from the land, that’d actually make fine sense considering the large ecosystems but no, we have to trade for them. Some quests and missions will reward them of course, but this new system absolutely blows and I’m offended to my core that we cannot sit down and have the cats prepare a meal for me and the boys. What the fuck Capcom. But you know, what does it matter anyways? The game isn’t very difficult at all and I’ve yet to even use any of the real food buffs. This is something I’ve been putting some serious thought into, because I keep hearing it repeated from so many different sources. At first I was focusing in on the fact that a lot of us have thousands of hours in this series, so of course they’ve gotten progressively easier both objectively and from our own skills. There’s also the modern landscape of gamers that look up every single fucking guide that instantly breaks the game for you, immediately trivializing it. They’re often the loudest ones screaming about how easy it’s gotten, while they hunt with their palico, support hunters or even group of friends that are all also running the most meta builds available. Look it’s fine if you find that enjoyable, no judgement here, but you cannot then go on these big tirades about how easy the game is when you didn’t even really discover anything on your own.

Admittedly after dozens of hours as I approach HR100 I can say yeah, the game is far too easy and it’s because of a number of things. First is the lack of preparedness I mentioned, followed closely by the complete removal of having to actually track and hunt down the monsters. I was upset when I played World and realized the scent flies essentially led you to everywhere you needed to go, but at least there was some sort of tracking in the beginning. Here in Wilds there’s absolutely none, monsters are forever visible on the map and your mount will always auto guide you straight to them. Even without the auto travel, the scout flies are always present, hell they even warn you of big potentially lethal attacks by turning red. It’s not like you can avoid using the mount either because several areas require the stupid thing just to traverse over. I find the entire system completely at odds with the spirit of the franchise and it’s the closest thing to fundamentally changing it’s core features for the worst.

Combat is also far easier thanks to a number of changes, starting with how fluid each weapon feels now, with much better combo linking, positional options and most with the ability to counter or i-frame an attack. Throw in the new focus system that allows you to target specific parts of a monster and not only is combat more responsive, but now there’s less of a need for proper positional awareness since focus mode ensures you’re always facing the correct direction. Through this new focus system Monsters can also now be wounded, adding to the number of breakable areas we can use to stunlock them to death. These changes are actually good on paper, the combat is funner than ever because of it, but the monsters are now at such a severe disadvantage since theres almost zero hunter downtime. Play in a group of people and the poor thing is just stunlocked for 4 minutes straight, with it’s standard parts and wounds popping left and right. It’s strange that their health wasn’t increased to match the much higher uptime we have against them, a lot of fights feel like they’re over before they’ve even begun. Seriously, monsters should have 2 or even 3 times the health pool they currently do, including the end game ones.

I also find myself just kind of button mashing at times because the combat has gotten so aggressive that it facilitates such a play style, there’s very few fights where I feel the need to slow down and play more strategically. Your weapons also never bounce off a thick hide or armored area anymore, so there’s almost no reason to stop and reposition yourself, you’re better off mashing away keeping that throughput up. Blights and other status effects seem severely nerfed and I’m not even sure I’ve seen a bleed yet. It all just removes so much of the rich flavor the combat system has had for over a decade now, there’s very little reason to do much else other than beating the fuck out of the monster like you’re playing a straight up action game. Using bombs, traps or some status ailments just feels like a DPS loss and unnecessary when smashing 2 buttons is always more effective. It’s made me feel like there’s no reason to even bother with experimenting with new builds or optimizing my play style, at least as of it’s current end game which is very light on meaningful content.

It’s all very frustrating because I think monster hunter wilds is both one of the best games in the franchise and also the worst. Combat is so fluid, the world is more alive and beautiful than ever before, the new monsters are welcome additions with a nice variety to them, but then there’s the seemingly constant design decision that goes against everything the series has been. I noticed this trend in world and in a lot of ways I disliked how much it stripped away from the formula, streamlining hunting, gathering, skills and countless other aspects, but I also understand the need to do so. At a certain point even long time players have to ask ourselves, do we really need to spend the extra time sitting through a gathering animation or track the same monster for the thousandth time or is it really a bad thing that gearing up is so easy now? Personally I don’t think all this streamlining is necessarily a bad thing, but Capcom is dangerously close to completely stripping away monster hunters identity. There’s no reason why we couldn’t have it both ways, give me difficulty settings, let me turn off scout flies and auto tracking, remove the abundance of supplies lying around the map and let the monsters instill fear again. Stop putting development time into the horrible narrative and instead focus on delivering more content, stop streamlining what makes your game unique and move that effort into designing a better UI that’s not littered with sub menus.

With all that being said, I still very much enjoy my time with the game, just as I have for every previous title and I think it’s worth picking up on that alone. In a lot of ways I find it to be a much better experience than World ever was, even if I find myself equally disappointed in some of it’s changes. At it’s core Monster Hunter Wilds truly feels like we’re nearing the full evolution of the franchise and seeing the complete vision Capcom initially had, it’s just a shame that in the process they’re trivializing or actively stripping away some of the more unique nuances that have been around since it’s inception. I really do believe this is the best foundation they’ve had to build upon and could see this game getting even better over time with title updates and expansions, but they really need to reassess where their priorities lie when it comes to streamlining the experience. They’re playing with fire on this one, coming dangerously close to alienating their oldest fans while simultaneously giving newcomers a standard action hack and slash. So while I definitely highly recommend this one, it may also be the last game in this franchise I enjoy. Capcom will have to decide if they’re going to lean harder into streamlining everything further or refocus on improving the franchises strengths over the following updates. I’m certainly not the only one feeling this and now we all wait with bated breath.