Today, I’m trying to convince you of something. I am going to try to convince you that the newest release in the Monster Hunter franchise is lying to you. I imagine this game to be presenting itself as a whole cake, with brand new monsters to hunt, an “Open world” atmosphere, beautiful immersive environments, and a natural wonder of a game. I’ve played 70 hours of this game since launch, and this is my honest review.
In a metaphorical sense, it is about six tiny cupcakes, all separated, that on their own still taste good, but the problem is, you’ve had cupcakes before. Monster Hunter: World was a massive cake-like experience; it was freshly baked. This game is more like smaller cupcakes but with sprinkles and some fancy icing. Wilds is an improvement in the places that matter; combat, graphics, gear appearance, and weapon specialization. However, it takes a massive step back in the areas that never mattered to Monster Hunter as a franchise but may matter to the gaming experience. Innovation has taken a back seat, with hand-waved improvements that don’t do enough to push this game to new or interesting heights.
So we really get a bunch of cupcakes pretending to be a delicious cake filled to the brim with dopamine-giving sugar but lacking that new experience. The cupcakes are filled with what we already loved, but the effort to tie them all together into a decorated and quality-driven full product is absent, replaced by flimsy strings holding them together. So what I mean by this is that the marketing promised a cake, what they gave us was a bunch of cupcakes tied together with string. It’s still good to eat, but you know something is not quite right while you play it.
The story in Monster Hunter games always makes a secret deal with the player, that deal being, “You’re not here for the story, right?” The story here is much the same, making some serviceable human characters (with one standout design in Gemma), applying the environments to the monsters, and making them feel much more legendary. The story for this game sort of boils down to a constant loop of “nature is going haywire, go hunt the monster wrecking havoc due to the natural changes,” giving you the time and tested murder excuse of “they got out of the bed on the wrong side this morning.”
Without going into spoilers, this story is a mess. Generally, they just fulfill the basic requirements 80% of the time. And the other 20% of the time is traumatising a local child into changing his viewpoints. Your character is portrayed like a rabid dog, just waiting for the chance to start killing monsters on his handler’s orders, which is honestly funny since I made mine sound like a chipmunk (you can change voice pitches). While the game tries to show that the guild you work for is careful about the environment and really wants the ecosystem to thrive, your character is just salivating at the thought of turning Balaharas into shish kabobs. It’s a welcome difference from the attempts to pretend you’re a nature-loving hunter who only kills for the greater good. Finally, there is a real insincerity in the dialogue and character motivations. Nobody seems to have any depth to them. Their motivations are unexplored, and the story seems to want to fit around the gameplay, regardless of how disharmonious the end result may be for the narrative.
There is another gimmick to monsters in this game, and I won’t spoil it here. But it’s probably the most interesting lore I’ve seen from these games for a specialized group of monsters. It requires a lot of buildup and the payoff is good for a while until it becomes apparent that these special monsters are indistinguishable from their counterparts aside from a few gameplay differences. A basic palette swap the story pretends is significant.
Story score: 5/10
This is the main meat of the game, and I’m going to separate this into two parts for the sake of clarity.
This is by far the reason you should play. Combat in Wilds is unique, intuitive, and filled with depth for all 14 weapon types, and it does not get boring easily. Monsters are strong and smart enough to challenge you and your friends at every skill level, with environments filled with strategic opportunities. You have every chance to fulfill the roles you want, as a supporter, a hammer-bonking enthusiast, as a ranged bow user, or even embrace your new identity as a dual blade-wielding blender.
The slinger is far more balanced here; in the last game, MH: Rise, the main complaint was that the wirebug made things too easy. Now, any advantage the slinger gives is gained from foresight, being alert to when a monster may drop strong slinger ammo after a wound break, and can be used for fun mobility options such as swinging from a stick bug on the ceiling to avoid a ground attack. Mounting a monster can still result in a collision for massive damage, but only in a strategic moment.
Tempered monsters provide a stat upgrade to your regular monsters to make previous hunts more dangerous and challenging, but with better rewards. This keeps the base game fresh for quite a long while after you have finished the main campaign. However, outside of this, I rarely saw any changes to move-set aside from a couple of late-game additions that seemingly hit differing combo strings. Still, the increased stats and damage were enough to justify a hunt…, or fifteen.
This game is fun, both solo and co-op; there’s something for almost everyone.
Gameplay score: 9.5/10
This is where they’ve taken a step backward. The Seikret mechanic allows you to place a waypoint and automatically arrive at your destination, whether a monster or material. It’s one of those quality-of-life additions that is too helpful to ignore. But at the same time, it removes the need to explore. Your slinger can grab materials while you auto-move towards your chosen monster target, meaning you never take the time to appreciate anything, but at the same time, material gathering becomes more efficient. I can see this being a massive improvement for a lot of players. Imagine being able to answer a text on your way to your monster, that’s undeniably a good thing. But it’s an improvement with unintended drawbacks. You can’t exactly “hunt” a monster if you know where it is at all times, and so does your dinosaur pal. You can’t feel accomplished for your efforts with an automatic system. In the game’s quest to become more convenient, it’s removed from its own exploration fantasy.
This game’s most marketed new feature, “Herds,” is relegated to only a few monsters, those not integral to the story or special armour sets. While these would be fun and interesting to hunt down and come across in the wild, the reality of it is that herds are sparse, rare, and inconsequential in almost every instance.
Getting materials is mechanical and uninteresting. Everything is marked on your map, and you can auto-move straight to it. It all just feels like the only thing between you and your required shiny object is either a monster fight or a dice roll, making the task of finding rare and hard-to-get materials trivial and monotonous. There is no finding secrets in this game that you aren’t encouraged to explore. Everything is provided, everything is there from the start. You don’t earn anything from exploring; you’re just handed everything. It honestly doesn’t add to the feeling of gathering together materials to prepare for a hunt; you just do the extra steps the game wants to waste a little bit of extra time. And with the base game providing only 5 open zones that show every “Secret” on the map from the start… exploration may as well not exist.
Exploration: 3/10
The music in Wilds is filled with ambiance and the feeling of being surrounded by nature; every monster seems to have its own unique theme and feel to fight it. One minute, you’re in a quiet desert, the next, the monster you’re hunting is filling up the environment with crackles, loud trumpets, and intimidating aura. You’re not gonna go wrong with the music in this game; every fight is made to feel like a unique experience, and with yourself as a combatant against something typically much stronger than yourself. But you are a hunter, and you’re going to surpass this beast.
Music: 9/10
Graphics in this game are on par with any new release, beautiful and absolutely astounding, but the one thing about Wilds I found weird is that everything has a sort of weird sheen over it, like a dull gloss that makes you feel like you’re in a place that isn’t fantastical but more realistic. It’s actually not really very much of a problem, but it irked me a little.
Graphics: 8/10
All in all, Monster Hunter Wilds is a game where the effort goes into all the parts that matter to the player: combat, music, mechanics, and the spectacle of their creations. The gameplay is sublime; however, in the pursuit of this, Capcom took elements of the game it felt were surplus and downgraded them to the quality of an auto-play mobile title. The game knows you want to be in the fight, but I would have preferred they took the story and made it something worth playing. As it was, the first 20 hours of the game felt like a chore every time a story forced me into it.
I mentioned that Monster Hunter is a game that cuts off its tail, but when it’s attached to an immense juggernaut, I guess it doesn’t feel that much. But I would still prefer to see it with the entire package. It’s a good game, and you will have fun while you’re playing. But everything else is below standard. Hence, I likened it to a bunch of cupcakes because a full cake has everything; a bunch of cupcakes aren’t brought together in the same vision, and some of them may be squashed, made in a hurry or just from a batch that didn’t see any love or care. Just a few choice decisions leaves the rest of the cohesion behind.
