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My first experience with Monster Hunter Wilds was at last year’s Tokyo Game Show. While short, the mission I tried (which turns out was the first mission of the game), was fun and awesome enough that it had me looking forward to the full game’s release.
Nearly half a year later, the game’s finally out.
Does it live up to the potential I saw in it when I first played it? Is Monster Hunter Wilds a worthy successor to Monster Hunter World?
Read on and be enlightened!
What is Monster Hunter Wilds?
Monster Hunter Wilds is the sequel to Monster Hunter Worlds. Developed and published by CAPCOM, the game is now available on the PC, Playstation and Xbox consoles.
Our review copy was provided by CAPCOM! Thanks so much!
If this is your first Monster Hunter game, no worries. You’ll get the hang of it super quick. I’ve played a couple of entries in the series and this is by far, the one that’s the most beginner friendly yet. You don’t need to know the lore of the series, nor do you need to know the characters.
All you need to know is that you’re a Hunter and your job is to hunt monsters using a variety of weapons, and then use their parts to make better weapons and armor. Why? So you can hunt even more monsters, of course! It’s a never ending circle of hunting and scavenging!
In Monster Hunter Wilds, you’re part of an expedition team sent to find the Keepers, so that you can reunite Nala (one of the kids from the Keepers) with his own kind. That’s only half the plot, so don’t worry if it’s a bit straightforward sounding.
Capcom’s done wonders for its plot presentation here. Instead of choosing missions from a Mission Board, story missions are now organically weaved into the narrative. The base camps in are all integrated into the world, so there’s zero need for loads ala Monster Hunter World.
All you need to do to trigger story missions is to just talk to whoever is meant to kick off the mission. There’s a marker to show who they are, so there’s really no need to panic. Once you talk to them, you start the mission. Simple and easy.
Story plays a much bigger part than any previous Monster Hunter games. Your Hunter can now talk, and there are a ton of cutscenes. They play before story missions, during story missions and even after story missions now. If you’ve wanted a more cohesive plot to the hunting, Monster Hunter Wilds finally delivers.
Of course, as any Monster Hunter veteran can tell you, it’s when the credits roll that the game really comes to life. High Rank quests, more weapons and armor are unlocked only after you finish the game’s plot and head on to its epilogue.
I love that you can now recruit AI Hunters to help out with any of your hunts. Launching an SOS flare (you can specify it to allow human players or AI or only either) opens you up to matchmaking. I don’t bother playing with other players, so the AI Hunters are very much welcome.
It’s always the same three AI Hunters (Alessa, Olivia and Rosso…who are NPCs in the game when they’re not helping you in battles) though, so it does get a bit boring. I can’t fault them though, because they fight well, can take care of themselves (and you) and don’t hold you back. AI Hunters cannot resuscitate you if you faint though they’ll continue fighting while you respawn and make your way back to the action.
That’s the part that CAPCOM’s refined in Monster Hunter Wilds to an artform.
You hunt in the muck. You hunt in the pouring rain. You hunt during sandstorms. You hunt during thunderstorms. The game isn’t shy in making you hunt during the most adverse conditions you can think of. It’s a refreshing change of pace from Monster Hunter World (and by extent, Iceborne) when the world map’s pretty much static for each area.
The locales you fight the monsters in are awesome, varying from the dessert, to underground magma caverns to humid jungles. There’s a wider variety of biomes in Monster Hunter Wilds than there was in Monster Hunter World.
A ton of familiar monsters return too, including my favourite Rathalos. There’s a new wounding mechanic, where you can cause a wound (marked by a glowing red spot) to appear when you continuously attack a location on a monster. Keep hitting its head, and it’ll get wounded there. Same as its legs or whereever.
Wounds are only visible in Focus mode, another new addition to the series. Focus mode brings up a reticule on-screen, so you can aim at a part to attack. This allows you to fine tune your targeting, so you keep hitting a monster part to break it off or cause wounds to appear. It‘s also an invaluable mechanic for those who use slow weapons (like the Greatsword) because it allows you to pivot on the go.
Missing swings when you’re in range is massively reduced when you master Focus mode. As a Greatsword wielder, I can’t state how much this has made my life easier. I can finally enjoy smacking and smashing monsters, instead of thinking if my positioning is good enough to hit.
Focus mode also allows you to take advantage of wounds by unleashing a special attack (called a Focus Strike) that does massive damage, stuns the monster but removes the wound. I love this mechanic because it allows devastating blows (which look super cool to boot) and makes fights flow better.
There’s also another new attack type called Offset attacks. These are integrated into existing weapon moves. For example, on the Greatsword, offset attacks are the vertical slices you can do via Y + B. What makes these attacks special is that they’re essential counter attacks. If you execute them right before you get hit by a monster attack, you deflect the blow, stun the monster and automatically rush in for a powerful blow.
The timing is super tricky (especially for a slow weapon like the Greatsword), but it’s oh so satisfying to repel and counter! It’s another component that works really well with the other new additions.
If I have a major complaint for the fights its that mounting monsters has unfortunately taking a backseat. It’s now a random mechanic that has a change to trigger whenever you hit a monster with an airborne attack.
I’m actually quite saddened to see it fall from grace after being a core mechanic in Monster Hunter World. Mounting is still super worth it when you can trigger it, but it being a random mechanic means it’s no longer a reliable way to take down a monster sadly.
In streamlining itself, I can’t help but feel that Monster Hunter Rise has lost a bit of what made Monster Hunter special. The biggest handhold is that you no longer need to bother tracking down a monster now. Its position is immediately known. You can hop on your Seikret mount, and by pushing the Up button on the d-pad, it’ll even autopilot itself to it.
On one hand, I absolutely love the feature. The autopilot allows you to gather items while the AI mount heads to the target location. It’s like killing two birds with one stone! However, taking away the tracking aspect (which featured so prominently in Monster Hunter World), takes out a lot of the exploration aspects.
Learning the maps was much faster in Monster Hunter World because you spent so much of your time on foot, scouring for clues on your prey. In Monster Hunter Wilds, I still found myself wandering around the maps even after repeated forays because I didn’t need to learn the geography to hunt. It’s the same thing when you’re scrambling after an escaping monster too. No more guesswork on which way it went. The AI mounts automatically follow it like a bloodhound. There’s an in-game reason why they can do that (the mounts have very strong sense of smell) but it does cutdown on the guesswork.
Old school hunters will probably hate this dilution of the core gameplay a ton.
Running around from gathering point to gathering point is pretty much a thing of the past now too. You can just shoot your grapple to quickly grab resources in range. Apart from mineral nodes and a few other spots, everything’s fair game for the grapple.
You can even nab them while you’re riding on the mount!
The locations in the game are much more expansive than even in Monster Hunter Worlds. The maps usually double back on themselves and are much more vertical now. Thankfully, there’s no fall damage when you’re on the Seikret mount, so you can just jump from the highest point of the map down with no issue.
It’s a double edged sword though.
The huge maps also mean they’re very convoluted, with crisscrossing paths that make traversing them a headache. The in-game maps are no help too! The maps are so dense with shortcuts and verticality its hard enough to make out where you can and can’t go. You’re better off fast travelling to base camps (especially the first one) instead of trying to make your way there.
CAPCOM needs to figure out a better in-game mapping UI because the current one definitely can’t keep up.
Speaking of not being able to keep up, Monster Hunter Wilds requires a beast of a rig to run.
Even our current gaming reviews rig struggled to maintain a stable 60FPS on 4K. Forget about using the High Res Textures unless you have a super GPU. CAPCOM says the game needs one with at least 16GB VRAM and they’re not joking.
I tried using the pack with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (which has 12GB VRAM) and it killed the framerate. Unless you’re running a high end NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4000 or 5000 series (or AMD equivalent), forget about it. It’s just not worth it.
Even with without that, I still had issues with slowdown.
In towns and during hectic battles especially, it was hard to get a stable 4K60 with most settings on High or Highest (with Ray Tracing set to High, and Shadow Distance set to Medium). This is with DLSS set to Balanced.
The framerate usually hovers on the high 40s, to low 50s. Sometimes it’d hit the low 40s, even high 30s in the bigger, wide open areas or when there’s lots of visual effects going on. If you’re really hard up and need a stable frame rate, you’re going to need a super beefy GPU to run this game. That or you turn off most of the bells and whistles (such as Ray Tracing).
I’d advise against it though, because Ray Tracing does make a difference in Monster Hunter Wilds. The lighting (particularly during the storms or in the lava sections) makes a HUGE difference.
Needless to say, ray tracing is not an option if you want a decent portable experience. I found that 1080p was fine on the ROG Ally X (on the 30W or 25W setting) on High settings with upscaling at 0.50, with frame generation and AMD FSR 3 enabled.
The game doesn’t look that good, and neither is the framerate stable…but it’s playable.
The framerate hovers around the mid-30s to the low-20s, but if you were played any of the older Monster Hunter games (especially the portable versions), it should be a familiar experience.
On the audio side of things, things are pretty rosy.
The English voices are decent, and the music appropriate. Neither will win game of the year awards but for the game, they more than suffice. I only have issues with the Japanese voices, but only when you’re using English subtitles.
They’re clearly speaking of different things at times and the words being spoken are sometimes wildly different than what the subtitles say. If you understand Japanese a fair bit (like me), it’s going to really bug you a lot.
The Bottom Line.
Monster Hunter Wilds is a lean beast. It’s a streamlined, lean Monster Hunter. It cuts off the extraneous bits of Monster Hunter and only focuses on what it thinks the series needs.
For the most part, it works beautifully. The new additions like the AI support hunters, Focus mode, wounding mechanic and the offset attacks adds a welcome level of depth to the fighting. They make tangling with the monsters fun and exciting, and gives you a boatload of control on how you engage and when.
Still, it’s not all fun and games. CAPCOM has made mistakes too. Grappling is gone and mounting is horrendously executed now. The maps are too densely packed and convoluted, which makes learning them a challenge. Speaking of challenge, the thrill of tracking down a monster’s gone too, which will no doubt infuriate those who were weaned on the older games.
However, when you compare the good and the bad, it’s clear the positives outweigh the negatives. Not by a substantial margin, but good enough to say that Monster Hunter Wilds is a worthy successor to Monster Hunter World.
A bit too streamlined perhaps, but still great.
TLDR:
Simplified but still super fun monster hunting.
The Good:
- AI Hunters means you don’t need to ever play with humans.
- Focus modes, wounding and Offset strikes are awesome.
- Story is more fleshed out and nuanced compared to past games.
- Atmospheric fights in awesome locations.
The Bad:
- Grappling mechanic is gone.
- Mounting is random now.
- No more tracking down monsters.
- Need powerful hardware for good performance, especially on 4K.
- Japanese voices don’t match English subtitles.
Salehuddin Husin, EIC
Sal's been in the industry since the early 2000s. He's written for a ton of gaming and tech publications including Playworks, Hardwarezone, HWM and GameAxis. Recently, Sal served as a juror for the Indie Game Awards at Taipei Game Show 2020. A geek and hardcore gamer, Sal will play everything, on any platform.
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