Monster Hunter Wilds Review

The third-person action franchise Monster Hunter has enjoyed some steady success over the past few decades. It started off on PS2 in the mid-2000s and became quite a hit in Japan, and since then has been steadily producing new entries and spinoffs. For the most part, the series enjoyed its biggest fanbase in Asia, and was also mostly releasing titles on Nintendo platforms. But in 2018, publisher Capcom decided to take the series wider, and launched Monster Hunter: World on all major home consoles along with a marketing push outside of Asia. This entry helped elevate the franchise out of its somewhat niche status, including expanding to a global audience, and even getting a movie. While 2021 saw the release of Monster Hunter Rise, it was considered to be a smaller spinoff, so it is with the recently released Monster Hunter Wilds that fans get a true sequel. The newest entry is a solid follow up to that breakout success for Capcom, but it's also a game that plays things very safe and streamlines a bit too much to its own detriment.

After creating your own very customizable character, players once again become a hunter, a skilled warrior who specializes in taking down great beasts. As part of the Hunter's Guild, the story follows your team's arrival to the uninhabited Forbidden Lands, where you rescue a young boy. This boy tells the story of a great beast deep within the lands, and that his village may be in grave danger. The Guild makes a decision to send an Expedition Team to setup a base of operations, and begin exploring these various biomes, searching for the boy's home and also gathering data on the monsters of the region. As the team pushes deeper into the territory, they will encounter more villages and different peoples, as well as plenty of monsters that threaten their existence.

While many seasoned Monster Hunter fans may argue that the narrative is not a main draw of the series, it's nonetheless a central component that everyone has to get through in order to unlock all regions of the world map. And unfortunately, Wilds' story is a disappointing slog at best. There is really not that much insightful dialogue, and yet lengthy cutscenes permeate the runtime. It also suffers from being extremely repetitive in overall structure – the group enters a new map/biome, discovers a local village that needs help, you help them, and move on to the next biome. Even within each map, the missions are entirely repetitive – you watch a cutscene or listen to some dialogue, you venture out to hunt a monster, and you return to report your progress. The game fails to provide any structured missions that are anything different, and even the side quests are more of the same. Sure, you eventually get quests to capture beasts instead of just defeating them, or to follow a few basic clues to find the target, but the game withholds such variations until 10+ hours into the adventure. It culminates in the very lazy design in the final chapter, where you are simply told to go level up your Hunter Rank for a while before getting your next story mission.

Similar to World, Wilds is also not able to live up to its expectations of epic scale, in terms of the world and story. The game is once again broken up into a variety of individual maps/biomes, so it's still not quite a traditional open world. Sure, you can now take a path that will transition you between different maps, but it's not exactly a great way to hide that it's still a series of individual, often small, maps. The biomes feature a familiar range of styles – deserts, jungles, underground ice and lava caves, and so on. The maps do not feel like a particular improvement over those in World, and while they have tons of elevation changes and a few paths, the truth is that they are quite limited in space, as evidenced by the minimap. At least they do have a few weather variations, as well as a day/night cycle. When the story talks of having to find hidden villages and other mystery locales, the in-game reality is that you get to a new destination in under a minute from your base. The grand scale that the narrative tries to impress upon the players about the size of this world constantly falls flat.

Perhaps one of the big reasons for the maps feeling as small as they do is the introduction of the Seikret, your personal mount. In typical video game fashion, it can be called upon at any time, and it's extremely helpful in just following the objective marker and getting you from one point to the next with great efficiency. This makes traversal trivial, which is a good thing for newcomers and for the later sections of the campaign where there is no reason to walk anywhere and you keep revisiting the same small maps over and over. But it also means Wilds has absolutely no sense of exploration, as you simply hop on at the base and ride to the destination. Thanks to your Hook Slinger, anything you want to collect in the environment (such as raw materials and ingredients) are easily grabbed on the way, without stopping or getting off the mount. It's a feature that will feel divisive depending on the kind of player you are – and while you can of course still choose to walk on foot to get a better sense of immersion, it will feel slow and inconvenient. It also renders the customizable camps that you can place around the maps a bit redundant, as they barely save any traversal time.

The Seikret remains useful in combat, as you can call upon it and ride away, to help keep distance from the beasts, recover some health, and sharpen your blades. It's also your way to switch between two primary weapons that you are allowed to bring on missions. The weapon selection remains the same from World, which means a variety of huge swords, hammers, lances, daggers, and some ranged options as well. Some may be a bit disappointed at the lack of new inventory, but the variety of gameplay feel is still probably enough as it stands. Each weapon has a different feel and combat pattern, and since there is no experience point system, you can swap between all weapons at any time during the campaign to find what you enjoy most.

When you arrive at a quest destination, there's almost always going to be a monster fight, the core of the franchise experience. Here as always, there is no direct lock-on for your target, no enemy health bar, and the camera often goes haywire during the chaos of battle with beasts five times your size, so there will be a lot of swings and misses. It takes time to get used to, but it does eventually become somewhat satisfying as you hack away at limbs and tails of the creatures to do more damage than to their armored parts. There is a basic combo system for melee weapons, but for the most part the game is accessible enough to just spam attacks in a controlled fashion.

The haphazard combat is somewhat expanded with the addition of Focus mode, which basically lets you hold a trigger to create a reticule and aim your attacks in a specific direction. It adds a bit of cohesion to the chaos, though it's offset by every hunter's random Seikret running around, as they surprisingly do not despawn. In Focus mode, some areas of the monster can also begin to glow, and attacking these wounds with a special strike delivers an over-the-top combo move animation for some big damage. While accessible at a basic level, trying to utilize everything that the game offers does make for a rather convoluted control scheme, with lots of modifiers on D-PAD and other inputs, whereas in the middle of battle you can accidentally pull out your portable BBQ for an unplanned lunch. And though the game has tons of customization in its characters and settings, one thing that cannot be done is changing your attack buttons, which are bound to triangle and circle. While not atypical for Monster Hunter, this isn't a common action game control scheme, and being unable to change it is rather annoying (unless you do it via the PS5's button remapping functions) .

Still, these beasts are the meat of the experience, and produce some cool moments, especially the first few times you encounter them. They have some overwhelming attacks in both damage and visual effects, and there could be moments where they even clash with another monster that has spawned on the map. They feature some creative designs, from the typical huge dragons, to octopus and spider-inspired creatures, as well as snakes and frogs, among others. Every monster does feel distinct and needs its own strategies, with the ones that are slower and more grounded making for better combat flow. Monsters often follow a familiar attack pattern, and once you've learned it by defeating the creature a few times, the game runs out of novelty a bit. Since this is Monster Hunter, all you'll be doing in story, quests, and post-story exploration is just battling these large creatures over and over. As monster behavior mostly stays the same from encounter to encounter, this kind of repetition and grind for materials will not be for everyone.

Crafting remains at the core of character progression, as you collect materials from the environment and from defeated monsters, in order to create and later upgrade equipment. Weapons of each type are upgraded to increase base damage and also give them a new look, while the many different armor types come with not just increased defense but also buffs or weaknesses to the common elements such as fire, ice, and electricity. You can also craft basic new weapons and armor for your cat-like Palico companion that passively participates in combat and can occasionally heal you or distract the enemy. The game definitely pushes players into maintaining a few sets of armor for different monster encounters – and while this works in post-campaign play, when you know what you are about to face, the story experience can be annoying as you venture out to meet the next unknown beast, and hope it's not a fire-type while your current armor is spec'd towards water.

The spirit of accessibility continues here, and with no difficulty selection, some fans may find that Wilds is an easier game than World. Even as you get into the High Rank play and end-game monsters, you rarely need to use extensive mechanics such as traps for monsters, or targeting their elemental weaknesses. As long as you have a group of hunters that somewhat know what they are doing (and by end-game, they should), the challenge level is not very high. That doesn't mean it makes the battles any shorter – it still takes around 10+ minutes of action to put down a single beast in solo play.

If you are struggling against a particular foe, you can request assistance via the SOS flare. If playing online, this gives the opportunity for up to 3 other players to join you and help out, with everyone getting the spoils from the monster. If nobody joins, or if you play offline, AI hunters will arrive to assist, and they do handle themselves well. Similarly, you can search for SOS flares and jump into missions that other players are doing, which displays the target monster, difficulty, and reward information. Playing online also means you can meet other hunters in the base camps, that act as random multiplayer lobbies.

Joining support calls is the easiest way to play online, because the alternative is an extremely convoluted menu and invite system when trying to play through the story together with a friend. It rarely works and actually getting into the same instance takes patience and careful menu navigation. It's interesting that this aspect has not been improved, despite the gameplay skewing towards accessibility. Elsewhere, the game's tutorials and messaging could also be much improved, as newcomers to the series will find themselves overwhelmed by many informational pop-ups. You'll never be strapped for cash or need to craft any healing potions, unless you dedicate yourself to the end-game and crafting many different armor sets. The UI can be confusing to use, with menus on top of submenus that should have been more streamlined and not multiple levels deep.

But perhaps more disappointing is the quality of presentation. While Wilds features full voice acting for the first time in the series, and while some of the effects and music are okay, the general look of the game is rather dated. From cutscenes to in-game environments, there is an abundance of poor quality textures and basic animations, making the experience look like World, or even older. Lighting is flat and basic, and the color palette is very muted and often monotone. And despite such lackluster presentation, the game's performance also leaves much to be desired. You can select from three visual modes – offering a framerate focus, visual quality focus, or a mix of the two. On the base model PS5, selecting the mixed mode produces disappointing visuals, and yet the game still heavily stutters in certain areas, and cannot keep anywhere close to the desired 60fps. Switching to quality mode introduces even more framerate issues; in performance mode the dips are less frequent, but the visuals take an even bigger dive. It's rather disappointing to see a modern full priced game release in such a state – at least other triple-A games with performance issues have some semblance of technically impressive visuals as an excuse.

Monster Hunter Wilds is an entry that plays things very safe, and tries to streamline and make itself more accessible. It succeeds in those aspirations, even to the detriment of the experience for the returning hardcore fans. The lack of any exploration leads to the game feeling like a boss gauntlet, occasionally interrupted by bland cutscenes and forgettable characters. The core monster hunting aspect is largely the same, if made a bit easier, and so you must be a fan of this gameplay loop to get the most out of Wilds. It still has its share of cool moments, but they go begin to repeat as you battle the beasts over and over just to get some gear materials. The disappointing performance puts a further damper on things, as the visuals fail to impress. While World was the big push to bring Monster Hunter to the masses, Wilds seems like a more careful and controlled follow-up that still has some exciting moments, but feels a bit underwhelming in the end.