If you haven’t jumped on the Monster Hunter train by now, you’re certainly aware of its incredible rise to status and fame in the West over the series’ past several releases. Capcom’s continued bid to make the Monster Hunter franchise more approachable and playable to more people, while constantly refining the grand formula has resulted in what is probably the most tightly balanced version of Monster Hunter yet. I would go as far to say that it’s the best Monster Hunter ever, if it wasn’t constantly getting in its own way. Instead, it’s a baffling mix of incredible fun and handwringing boredom that eventually reaches its potential after a whole lot of stumbles.
I’ll cut right to the chase; the gameplay in Monster Hunter Wilds is fantastic. It’s the most fun I’ve head in any of the Monster Hunter games to date, and it feels like everything in terms of combat is dialed in perfectly. And yet, Wilds also has made some truly confounding decisions around its campaign structure and its technical execution that make it feel like it’s constantly tripping over itself as it tries to guide you to the fun. Wilds is a bizarre duality of a game that I both love and mildly resent for its continued insistence and guarding the best parts of the experience behind arbitrary gates and some very frustrating technical problems. But let’s back up a bit.
At its core, Monster Hunter is a game about hitting really big monsters over and over again while they try to hit you back (because they were just minding their business until you showed up), and whoever falls over first loses. I don’t make the rules, Capcom does. Is this an overly reductive take? Sure, *but am I wrong*? The important thing here is it’s not just beating the monsters up and winning that’s fun; the fun lives in every aspect of the fight itself leading up til the point when Mr. Rathian has to step away to take a nap because you made him so very tired with your impossibly large sword.
Fights in Monster Hunter are long, like boss fight long, and they can be full of exciting dynamic and exciting twists and changes as your quarry moves to different locations, other monsters try to get in on the action, and each of you becomes more reckless in your desperation to topple one other. The push and pull of making progress against a monster’s insurmountable health pool as you also get thrashed around within an inch of your life, constantly reminded of how small and frail you are.
Time and practice with your chosen weapon and understanding how to use it against a monster’s behavior will give you an edge, as will intentional usage of items and pre-hunt meals to boost your effectiveness. There is careful thought and preparation before every challenging hunt to give yourself the best chance of survival possible. The thrill of victory you experience when you land the finishing blow and watch your worthy opponent fall to the ground is unlike anything else I have experienced in any game, and it is that way nearly every single time.
Monster Hunter Wilds sports perhaps the best mix of all of the combat elements in any entry in the series to date, such that fights remain engaging and exciting no matter how long they go on. Every decision is consequential, every swing and jab (or doot) has weight behind it, every connected blow feeling earned. The skill ceiling is lofty by design to give you plenty of opportunity to grow and improve; well-honed skills are essential to success in Monster Hunter’s endgame, and reaching those highs will only add to that feeling of accomplishment when you’re taking on the hardest enemies the game has to offer and winning.
So yeah, hunts in Wilds feel incredible, and fun, and fluid, and with friends they’re even better as you can pile onto Lala Barinas and Arkvelds and Rey Daus and together to your heart’s content. Which is all the more reason why it’s so inconceivable that they’d choose to force you through a 12-20 hour campaign with a story that’s pretty uninteresting even by video game standards that you can technically co-op your way through but is probably more trouble than its worth as you spend way more of your time riding your Seikret around and listening to NPCs talk than you do beating up big scary lizards.
It’s all the more frustrating because the pacing and rhythm of fights against story segments feels way off; the hunts are fun from the very beginning, and every time you finish one up and are then forced through a whole bunch of exposition while you wait for the next fight feels like a sick joke. It’s clear that the creative team both wanted more of a story to ground things against, and to use that campaign as a way to help more newcomers ease into the game. I am willing to bet that for new players, it’s probably moderately successful at least. For anybody coming in with experience in previous games, though, it’s a massive hurdle to clear before you get to the part of the game you actually care about.
To be fair, as soon as you get into High Rank, things open up in a huge way, and cooperative play becomes significantly better and more enjoyable. High Rank/endgame play is where you are meant to spend most of your time, and it’s pretty easy to clear 20 hours in endgame before you realize the campaign is a distant memory behind you, but asking people to get through so much up front to get to the “real” game isn’t a great proposition. Not that you ever really need to make a new character in Monster Hunter, as you can reset your “progress” by picking up and learning a new weapon (and thereby instantly reverting to newbie status), but I cannot imagine a reason I would deliberately choose to use another character slot and willingly subject myself to another long run through the campaign.
The larger, longer lived issue with Monster Hunter Wilds remains its technical problems. Capcom’s in-house RE Engine is pretty good at making nice looking environments and characters, though as we saw last year with Dragon’s Dogma 2, it struggles to scale up well, especially when there’s a lot of simulation going on. While Wilds is far and away the best looking Monster Hunter game ever, it’s got a host of performance problems on every platform, and once again we’re left asking questions about why a game that looks good but not necessarily incredible is so resource hungry.
Even after the first major title update, I am using a host of mods to overcome the various issues the game has; namely, constant frame pacing issues, bizarre stuttering problems, and average frame rates much lower than what you would expect. With some tinkering, these problems can all be minimized enough that the experience is smoother and more enjoyable, but the idea that so much work is required on the part of the player to get the game there is pretty frustrating. Maybe Capcom will fix these problems at some point before the inevitable expansion comes out! I sure hope so.
My PC Specs:
– Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
– CPU: Intel Core i9 12900K
– GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
– RAM: 32GB DDR5
– Storage: WD_BLACK SN850X M.2 (2 TB) nvme SSD
– WD_BLACK SN850X M.2 (4 TB)
– Alienware AW3423DWF 34″ OLED (21:9 Ultrawide @ 3440×1440)
I am still playing Monster Hunter Wilds, and still mostly enjoying it a lot. I expect that will continue to be the case for a few more months. I will still hastily recommend it to people as an excellent entry point into the series (with some important caveats), and sing its praises loudly. Wilds is a damn fun game and well deserving of praise for a lot of its choices. It’s a shame that every time I pick it up, I’m reminded of the compromises I’m making to get it to run as well as it ought to on its own.
The upshot is that there’s still plenty of room for Wilds to improve as more monsters are added to the lineup and more content is put into the base game. For all of my grousing, Capcom is great at supporting Monster Hunter games after launch with additional things to do, and Wilds is no exception. I’m looking forward to going after every new monster they add in my never-ending quest of self-improvement, if I can ever nail the timing on my counters with the Switch Axe, maybe I’ll even try learning another weapon soon.
Monster Hunter Wilds is great. I love it. It’s a great deal of fun and it feels awesome to play. It’s a really damn good Monster Hunter, and it has some issues. The ship has sailed on the mandatory slog through the campaign to get to the good stuff, but if Capcom can fix the performance issues before we come back around for an expansion, it might in fact be the best one.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
