Monster Hunter Wilds Review: A series newcomer's perspective
A bug stick beginner's guide to Capcom's exuberantly emergent sequel
Monster Hunter is a series that has eluded me for no good reason, so when the opportunity arose to review Monster Hunter Wilds, one of this year’s most anticipated games, I figured there was no better time to throw myself into the deep end.
Some 50 hours later, I can now jolt my head from the water to tell you that, surprise, surprise, it rocks. Baka mitai, and all that. It’s what I’ve always wanted Dark Souls multiplayer to be: rip-roaring, tempestuous cooperative duels with meticulously designed and demanding creatures.
I applaud Elden Ring: Nightreign for its attempts to challenge this hegemony, but Capcom’s developmental muscle memory provides a comforting edge to this moreish adventure, where the allure of ‘one more hunt’ is typically omnipresent. Yet the other defining thing I’ve learned about Monster Hunter is that it is complicated by design and by no means intuitive if you’re unfamiliar with the formula.
Trial by Wyvern Fire
There’s a lot going on here, from pods to pouches and partbreaking, and I still don’t understand all of it, even after besting its greatest challenges. Maybe that’s the point. But like, why can’t I lock my Item Pouch to a specific loadout, so that it doesn’t fill with useless crap once I’ve used all my traps and tranquilisers, forcing me to do a bunch of inventory busywork? If you’re an enthusiastic series lifer, I’m sure we could still come to an agreement that the interface is awkward in places, and the game tends to get in its own way sometimes — not that it ever entirely stops the fun, but it certainly glaciates the pace at times, leaving you trapped in cycles of frustrating deliberation.
Though, even if you can’t tell your Palicos from your Poogies, I’d say Monster Hunter Wilds is worth investigating — this is some of the most refined and rewarding gameplay I’ve experienced in recent years, up there with levelling towards 60 in World of Warcraft Classic. You just have to give yourself away to it, and learn by doing — I was pessimistic for the opening hours until I hit a definitive stride, and began to understand why I was struggling with some of its pithier systems.
Let’s start with a framework, shall we? Here’s the basic gameplay loop of Monster Hunter Wilds:
You post or join a specific quest from Base Camp, or track a wandering monster in the open world and initiate by attacking it.
The quest starts, other players can join, and within a time limit, you have to slay or capture the monster. Your efficiency is improved by focusing on vulnerable parts, executing specialised weapon combos and wielding bombs, pods, status effects and traps. You can faint three times before the quest fails.
During a quest, emergence abounds, as inclement weather and other monsters can interrupt the fight at random. You can also utilise the surrounding environment to your benefit in battle, by activating hazards or chowing on endemic wildlife.
When you trap or fell a monster, the quest ends, and if you slayed the monster, you can carve up its carcass for parts. You’ll earn specific parts for honing in on anatomical targets, such as severing a monster’s tail within the scope of a fight.
Completing a quest allows you to increase your Hunter Rank and, for a while, progress through the story. You take your quest resources back to base camp, and use them to craft new weapons, armour and talismans to bring to your next quest.
Sound fun? Good. But my favourite thing about Monster Hunter Wilds is how it thrives in the gaps between these bullet points. Depending on your choices, it can manifest as a relaxing podcast game (Quinn Slobodian on Doomscroll, if you’re wondering) or the most intense 12 minutes of your life. Monsters you’re hunting can simply leave the area if you’re not locked in. Or maybe you’re left with one life, but the target starts to frenzy, unlocking an entirely new moveset that unmoors your existing approach — when that happens, is it time to take the money and run? And how does your focus shift when a monster boasting wishlisted parts invades an existing investigation?
These are crucibles you will consistently enter without a guaranteed exit, and frankly, the emergent gameplay is so dynamic that it completely overshadows the narrative. It tries its best, but I really didn’t care for the lost-boy-come-forgotten-civilization story in Monster Hunter Wilds, beyond its ability to conjure the odd unforgettable setpiece. I wish it was focused more squarely on forcing you to engage with the less-travelled combat items (some of which I still don’t understand) to entice players, especially newcomers, into a deeper conversation with the game’s mechanics beyond what is good enough to get by. I wanted more brick walls than I got, to be honest — though the High Rank portion of the game (after the credits roll) is proudly full of them.
While you were partying, I studied the Glaive
Until the very end of Monster Hunter Wilds, you can’t reasonably approach a hunt knowing that you’ve got the right loadout and understanding of how any given monster works. And even then, there’s still plenty of room for luscious chaos, like a cancelled animation that sends you flat on your arse. So back to the drawing board you tend to go. It’s an honest approach to difficulty, but one that isn’t completely standoffish towards beginners. Initially, you’ll follow the defence ratings to don the armour that will allow you to survive, until the game subtly nudges you to hone in on specific Group Skills (activated by wearing multiple parts of a set) that meaningfully alter gameplay.
Take for example, the ‘Scaling Prowess’ skill, which increases the chance you’ll mount any monster, Shadow of the Colossus-style. I wore three parts of a Rathian set for most of the game (even when it made my defence rubbish) purely for this buff, as it meant I could get a breather from battle, open up three wounds, and then reasonably assert my dominance in the exodus. It so perfectly complemented my abilities with the Insect Glaive, a weapon which has the player sidestep slashing on the ground, then darting through the air and capitalising on momentum to cleave the carapace from a monster’s back with a delicious sequence of slashes.
Having briefly demoed previous Monster Hunter games, I have to highlight Wilds’ Focus Mode here as a massive benefit to the moment-to-moment gameplay, at least as much as the speedy Seikret mount that lets you conquer the playspace quicker. The former mechanic allows you to pull a trigger and assert control in combat, then be rewarded for your accuracy, leading to these awesome moments of death-defying glee when you strike a wound and nip off a quest there and then. My bread-and-butter combo would often leave me falling through the air with a teasing amount of time that could be filled with a satisfying Focused Strike, should I manoeuvre myself delicately near a monster’s haunch or backplate.
Staying with my particular mode of combat, the ‘Insect’ part of the Insect Glaive then asks you to maintain three extracts that imbue your weapon’s abilities, unlocked by shooting a bug at a monster’s head, tail and body and retrieving it in time with your combos. Half marksman, half acrobat — I dare to fathom the complications of preening this weapon to such a level of clarity alongside a dozen others. Yet this feeling of specialisation is so key to the enjoyment of Monster Hunter Wilds that it needs to be this intricate, with slight button deprecations and movement inputs unlocking whole new attacks. This would be enough to create a strong feeling of mastery, but this is a game that also understands the importance of modular equipment and meaningful skill criteria.
Please don’t touch my Rath
There’s a startling amount of armour sets in Monster Hunter Wilds, but every single piece is handcrafted by the developers and contextual to its awardee. The Lala Barina (a spider whose bushy caboose blossoms into a poisonous red rose) awards the player with scarlet fishnets and a stained frock that billows in the wind. The capacity for 'Fashion Souls’ type glamours here is really astonishing, and I was often drawn to mix and match armour pieces for the drippy fits they could provide, as well as their unusual statistical increments.
I’m sure a meta will develop post-launch, but what I love about Wilds is that the buffs you receive from your equipment aren’t ever so broken that you’re disincentivised from experimentation. In a test run of ‘looking cool’, I would find aspects of armour skills that were surprisingly helpful to my build, even if the equipment was scattered between monster types. Instrumental play will inevitably rule in the hardcore player base, but the fact you can (and should) resist it is admirable, conjuring a unique progression system that isn’t a race to the bottom — a firebrand in the current live service climate.
Elsewhere, it’s table stakes that the Monster Hunter series will provide enthralling enemies to deal with (kind of in the name!) but it still bears mentioning just how magnificently weird the designs are in Wilds. Beyond farting monkeys and lickitoads, my favourite, the Rompopolo, is an undulating, slack-tongued raven, whose toxic pustules and beesting tail contract and breathe over the course of a fight. Its size pales compared to the emasculating scale of its lategame peers, but Rompy still summons a unique sense of terror up close, requiring costly diving evades to clear its noxious injections.
More freaks, please!
I’d be keen to see Capcom delve further into the absurd here with title updates, as while there are some freaky monsters in the set, I was left wanting for more beasts that evoke nightmarish Miyazakian superbastards like Oceiros, or the Orphan of Kos. Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed the chipper tonal undercurrent in Wilds’ supporting cast and creature companions, as it trades nicely with the depraved, coagulated nests and embryonic dens you spend most of your time in. It led me to daydream, like an edgelord, about a Monster Hunter game further tinged with the influence of psychological horror. Monster Hunter After Dark, or whatever, but I’m still rocking a ludicrously cute outfit. Make it happen guys.
Monster Hunter Wilds is a stupendously deep game, and it’s a struggle to get to the heart of all of its systems in, god forbid, 2000 words. Yet I’d be foolish not to round this out without reflecting on the unexpected multiplayer community I’ve found, even in the review period. I run a 20-player-deep squad called, er, Postmode, and the lion’s share of my playtime has involved helping other reviewers tackle bosses, and, in some cases, saving their bacon in lieu of a bacon exchange of my own in the near future, which always tends to come back around. The material rewards are a nice consolation for my efforts, of course, but I’m still so keen to just embark on quest for the joy of helping out, rather than for any instrumental benefit.
It helps that it’s consistently rewarding to demonstrate my mastery to other players and riposte with awe when they demonstrate theirs. Yet there’s still so much opportunity space that I haven’t explored with regards to collaborative strategies, leveraging bombs and traps and other handy items to quicken the demise or get more out of a particular beast. I may have seen everything there is to see in Monster Hunter Wilds, but I still feel like I’m scratching the surface on a mechanical level. And I might not be compelled to start all over again with a new weapon in tow, but I will be ready and waiting, Insect Glaive in hand, when the next big baddie drops onto this beautiful, evolving continent to test my newcomer mettle.