Monster Hunter Wilds Review - Capcom's Smoothest Ride Yet, But Where's the Challenge?

Monster Hunter Wilds is the smoothest, most accessible entry in the series so far. Capcom has taken everything it learned from Monster Hunter: World and Monster Hunter Rise and made a game that looks and feels incredible. But in the process, they also removed much of what used to give the series its challenge and grit. So, for longtime fans, Wilds might feel like a step sideways—more polished, yes, but maybe too polished.

The game opens strong with Capcom’s best character creator yet. You’re dropped into the Forbidden Lands, an unexplored region where you and the Hunter’s Guild are investigating strange disruptions in the ecosystem. The story focuses on a boy named Nata from an isolated tribe called the Keepers. The people in this area used to live in balance with monsters, but something has changed, and it’s your job to figure out why. Compared to earlier games, Wilds puts more effort into story and cutscenes. Characters like your handler, Alma, engineer Gemma, biologist Erik, and guild veteran Fabius help bring the journey to life. While they occasionally vibrate awkwardly due to animation bugs, they’re still more interesting than most of the past supporting cast.

The campaign is short—about 15 hours if you focus on the main missions. You don’t even need to fight monsters more than once to get the materials you need. I never got stuck or even fainted more than twice across dozens of hunts. Compared to the 40 hours it took to finish the story in World, Wilds is fast and easy. Thus, for newcomers, it might be perfect. For veterans, though, it’s a bit of a letdown. No monster ever forced me to rethink my build, and I never needed to farm gear to move forward.

After the story, there’s still more to do. Post-game hunts include tempered monsters, which are tougher and more aggressive. The new monster types also come with more health and damage. But even those didn’t require much grinding or strategy. The hunt for the best armor ended quickly because rare materials show up more often now. You can even track down certain rewards on the map and repeat those missions multiple times to farm rare drops. That’s convenient, sure, but it also makes the loot chase feel shallow.

One of the biggest changes in Wilds is how seamless everything feels. There’s no need to return to town between every hunt. You can cook, craft, upgrade gear, and manage inventory all out in the field. Your Seikret mount can fly you across zones instantly, and all areas connect smoothly. You can gather herbs and bugs without even getting off your mount. Supplies are delivered automatically over time. It’s all designed to keep you in the action, which is great—until you realize there’s not much reason to slow down or interact with the environment anymore.

The maps are beautiful. Every area has a dynamic weather cycle that rotates between three states. For example, the desert can shift from dry heat to raging sandstorms with lightning, then into a fertile and green period. And the forest can go from calm to drenched in heavy rain. These changes can affect which monsters appear, though they don’t change much about how hunts play out. There’s great detail in the world, like birds getting eaten by plants or creatures fishing in shallow pools, but the game doesn’t give you much reason to stop and enjoy these touches. You’re always racing to the next objective.

Combat in Wilds feels amazing. The new Focus Mode lets you aim attacks at specific monster parts. When you damage a part enough, you create a Wound, which opens a weak spot that deals more damage. If you hit that Wound with a Focus Strike, it breaks, causing a stagger. Managing these Wounds becomes a mini-game within each fight. It’s satisfying, especially with fast weapons like dual blades that can rip through monsters in seconds. But since monsters aren’t very tough, it ends up feeling a bit mindless. Even harder monsters rarely survive past the 10-minute mark. Some take longer because they run between zones too much, not because they’re actually challenging.

Weapons are the best they’ve ever been. I used the Insect Glaive, which now has an aiming system that tells you what essence color you’ll get depending on where you target the monster. Charging the Kinsect with Triangle lets it pierce through the monster and gather multiple essences at once. It’s so much easier to keep buffs active that I didn’t even need the Power Prolonger skill anymore. But the control scheme is crowded now—I had to hold L2 for Focus Mode, Circle for a red essence charge attack, and Triangle for combos, all while moving, dodging, jumping, and adjusting the camera. It’s fun, but it makes me wish I had more fingers.

The other weapons feel just as sharp. I also tried the lance,great sword, and hammer, and each one felt better than ever. The lance, in particular, has been rebuilt from the ground up, focusing on using defense to fuel offense. Guarding at the right time leads to counterattacks, gap closers, and powerful combos. 

Gear building has changed. Now, most offensive skills are tied to weapons, while armor provides more utility and defense. Decorations are also tied to specific gear types, which limits your flexibility but helps define each weapon more clearly. High Rank gear feels a little underwhelming, and the skill ceiling is lower than in World or Rise. Still, it’s easy to make a good build. Charm crafting is back and straightforward. Some quests let you guarantee rare drops, cutting down on randomness.

You can now bring two weapons into a hunt and switch between them by riding your Seikret. But this feature feels underused. Most of the time, I stuck with one weapon per hunt. The swapping process isn’t smooth, and unless you’re trying to set up special strategies, it’s easier to just focus on what you’re using. Maybe this system will get more use in multiplayer, but it felt unnecessary during solo play.

Something has to be said about online play; it’s excellent. You can party up with friends or strangers, cross-play works great, and you can move freely between hunts without regrouping. You also get Support Hunters—AI teammates that join your party if no one else shows up online, and they’re surprisingly useful. There's even an “Online Single-Player” mode that lets you pause the game while still being connected and able to fire off SOS flares. This is a welcome change that most other co-op games should take note of.

The UI is highly customizable. You can move and resize elements, change what shows up, tweak your Seikret, adjust your radial wheels, and even style your fast-travel tents. There are tons of accessibility settings, too. The game gives you control over almost every part of your experience. It's incredibly flexible and thoughtful.

The game’s performance is great, but far from perfect. On the PS5 Pro’s Balanced mode, a couple of late-game zones had texture pop-in issues. On PC, the game ran well, though lowering the texture quality to medium made it look rough. There were a few weird bugs—NPCs vibrated in scenes, the map sometimes lagged, and monster intros would occasionally replay even after I’d already seen them. Some monsters spawn far from camps, making you run for over a minute just to reach them. Mantles with temporary buffs don’t reset cooldowns between hunts either, which can be annoying.

Despite those hiccups, Wilds is still a great action RPG. It's packed with some of the best monster fights and weapon feels in the entire series. But the difficulty has been turned down too far. I soloed the campaign and all post-game content in about 60 hours. At no point did I feel truly tested. There’s no sense of struggle, no moment where I had to stop and think. And that’s what I miss most: The thrill of taking down something that beat me the first time.

Capcom has announced that only one new monster is coming in the spring update, and one more in summer. That’s a much slower rollout than Rise had, which added six monsters just a month after launch. Without a meaty expansion like Iceborne or Sunbreak in the near future, it’s hard to know when or if the game will grow into the challenge many fans are looking for.

Still, I’ll be playing Monster Hunter Wilds for hundreds of hours. Combat is exciting, weapons are fun, and the world looks incredible. But it’s also the easiest and safest Monster Hunter yet. The systems that made past games so addictive—the grind, the struggle, the reward—are still here, just dulled. Capcom built something beautiful, but it may take a future expansion to put some bite back into the beast.