Review: Monster Hunter Wilds
This review is largely focused on the game within the context of the series and its future, written by a long-term MH fan, rather than a review of Wilds purely as a standalone video game.
This review's a bit overdue. It was supposed to come out about a month ago at the latest, but I played a lot of Xenoblade X DE and then got mad at Chapter 13, you know how it is.
Monster Hunter Wilds, while a heavily anticipated game, got backlash during the betas and at launch for running like shit. It’s entirely true: the game runs quite badly on consoles and many people’s PCs, and looks like a muddy mess with entirely too much dithering at the best of times. It’s not an acceptable state for a game to be released in, but that’s all I meaningfully have to say about it, so I’ll be focusing on the rest of the game instead.
As the big new flagship title following up on World’s success, Wilds immediately wants to involve the player into its bombastic new direction for the future of the series: a fully cinematic storyline. As a highly advertised new feature of the game, it certainly starts off strong with some fun on-rails gameplay that serves to establish the player character as a skilled veteran hunter. Long-time fans will be reminded of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, a game which opens with an abridged version of a major boss fight from the previous generation, and one which Wilds makes no secret of referencing. 4U has long been praised as having the best story in an MH game, barebones as it still might have been, so it seemed to me rather promising that the game would be headed in a similar direction. Indeed, the game quickly sends you on your way to hunt an actual monster, and any concerns about pacing quickly faded from my mind. Where 4U faltered a bit in my opinion was the fact that it retained some initial focus on menial gathering quests, something which modern MH has (thankfully, in my opinion) discarded entirely. It seemed to me like this cinematic story focus was really going to go somewhere, really convince me that the thing I’ve wanted from MH for a while was actually going to be an enrichment to the experience.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t really done that yet. The opening of the game was an outlier, a sort of frontloaded gimmick to pull you into the game. Any other cinematic story beats boil down to just cutscenes, or more egregiously, long drawn out sequences of forced walking and talking that pad out the time to get to the next monster. At best, it feels completely unimaginative, as if the game is unable to conceive of ways to involve its lengthy boss fights into the storytelling. The few instances where the characters do interact with each other mid-fight makes all the times that they don’t stand out all the more. The limitation of the cinematic story to Low Rank is a decision I personally think works out well, since any repetition in the monsters fought would have left an even worse impression.
The narrative itself is actually not too bad. I enjoyed its focus on the humans of the MH world that aren’t involved with the Guild at all, a piece of worldbuilding which I found sorely lacking in the series up until this point. Nata is a strong character, a young boy struggling with traumatic events and finding his own perspective on how humans should relate to monsters, who I ended up finding quite compelling. The game generally isn’t afraid to include characters that make mistakes without completely writing off their individual worldviews as irredeemable, something which feels surprisingly nuanced for a game like this.
Ultimately, though, the story does kind of run up against the inherent limitation of a Monster Hunter narrative: it must always justify hunting the monster in the end. MH is a very gameplay-heavy series, and even the most involved narrative is ultimately going to be a side attraction. A monster that is not a boss you can get gear from goes against the entire 'point' of the game (see: the backlash the game received for initially not allowing the final boss fight to be farmed for gear) and as a result, I think it’s doubtful the series will ever evolve far beyond slightly more involved ways to justify killing the monsters. If you take this as a sort of necessary compromise, then I believe Wilds is compelling enough, though I personally feel that it will always be thematically stifled by this.
The moment-to-moment gameplay of Wilds is by and large another big and positive step forward for the series. While the similarities to World can be felt, the exclusion of the horrid Clutch Claw in favor of the far more dynamic wounding system makes Wilds a satisfying experience at the base level. Hitting the same part repeatedly is rewarded strongly, which I do personally believe is more fun for the player overall; it particularly makes breaking tough parts not as much of am uphill slog as it might be in other MH titles. That being said, I do believe that some weapons have a bit too easy of a time creating them compared to others. Coupled with the amount of staggering and tripping that monsters do as a result of these wounds being popped, it can cause some fights to heavily snowball in the player’s favor in a way that feels unrewarding. I particularly felt this with the Gunlance, which on top of hitting rather hard also creates wounds everywhere due to its modus operandi of vomiting explosions all over the monster.
Focus Mode addresses an issue that I felt in modern MH titles due to more complicated map geography and ‘looser’ movement: attacks are much more likely to whiff purely through weird jank. Some will argue that it disincentivizes good positioning and de-emphasizes commitment, but I personally feel that these qualities were already diminished by the core game design of World and Rise to begin with. Wilds’ more complex movesets of all sorts make the ability to actually aim all these attacks much appreciated, and I see it as a pure improvement on the gameplay. With an increasing amount of mechanics that already require aiming already present in recent games, I see no reason why this isn’t the logical next step.
That said, the balancing does leave a little bit to be desired. This is a sensitive topic, so let me be clear: by no means do I think Wilds is “too easy”. This is a far too reductive way of thinking about the topic which ignores its subjectivity and the large portion of the playerbase for whom the game is just difficult enough. I just think that the health pools of the monsters are indeed somewhat too small, though I believe it is less for a lack of trying and more for how difficult it really is to finetune it so that it is satisfying for all players. In terms of pure numbers, Wilds’ monsters are already very bulky, with High Rank health pools rivaling those of World’s Master Rank monsters. It just seems that Capcom, in some shape or form, did not properly account for the player’s sheer power level. While I will not speak for others, I had monsters essentially flinch and trip themselves to death with a Gunlance within a few hunts of learning the weapon’s new moveset.
While I believe that a higher power level is in fact directly correlated to the amount of fun a lot of people will have with a game, I do believe MH should be able to express the core tenet of its gameplay, which is the player needing to respond to the monster. I don’t think this has much to do with 'difficulty', as monsters can have low stats and still express that gameplay loop, but the glass bones of Wilds’ monsters often leave them on the back foot entirely compared to the player. I don’t believe the player has to be more punished for mistakes than they are in the current state of the game, nor that hunts necessarily have to be uphill battles, but I do miss the element of actually needing to fight a monster sometimes. It’s a shame, because Wilds is the first game to have an entirely solid roster of enjoyable monsters, but it limits itself in the ones that actually put up much resistance.
I also feel that, at times, Wilds is a little too focused on player convenience. I don’t think it necessarily detracts from the experience to have monster drops rain from wounds like confetti from a piñata, or for quests to be able to guarantee a rare drop, but only a few armor sets seem to have their material requirements increased to match. It makes it feel off, then, that so many things require Hunter Symbols to max out, quest reward-exclusive drops that most strongly remind me of MHGU’s Hyper Tickets. It’s not a bad thing, since Tempered monsters are the endgame anyway, but it comes off a little bit as clumsily gating your progress at the door in lieu of doing a full rebalancing of the monster drop economy. Overall, though, I just find it strange that this game would concern itself with whether it is asking too much from the player. There’s nothing wrong with gating gear behind some effort. It has always been the core gameplay loop of the series that kept it interesting long before any horizontal progression elements were added to the mix. It’s especially strange to see the game do this when its management of resources and items takes such a vastly different direction, purposefully limiting the passive acquisition of them in order to force the player to manually gather. I actually quite enjoy this aspect of the game, but the amount of time asked from the player to spend gathering for basic items in contrast to the amount of time spent hunting seems a little skewed.
At the same time, Artian weapons are so obnoxious to farm for and yet such a meaninglessly small improvement over crafted weapons that it feels like arbitrary padding for number chasers. It has always been a pet peeve of mine regarding these more recent titles that they seem to have a lot less faith in the ability of MH’s core gameplay to keep players engaged with the game. It might be true that the ability of the older games to do this was probably more limited to hardcore fans, but I also believe that the way many modern games try to hog your attention far past the point where they have overstayed their welcome is a generally negative development anyway. Modern MH games have basically never been able to nail their “endgames” in a way that actually feels like a seamless integration into the existing gameplay loop, and Wilds is truly no different in this sense. I’m not trying to ask for less content here, mind you, I’m just asking for more content that actually feels meaningful.
I’m also not entirely satisfied with all balancing changes in the weapons and skill system. My main, the Heavy Bowgun, feels rather middling at best. I believe its moveset changes and the underlying philosophy of making it an actual 'heavy' weapon that has laggy attacks and noticeable recoil are solid enough, though in practice the weapon feels far less varied and more one-note in its gameplay expression. The nerfing of Sticky Ammo is alright on its own, if still controversial, but the complete refusal to add even a single bowgun that can fire all the explosive ammo types completely necks an entire playstyle that was just starting to actually blossom in modern MH games. The heavy recoil on Spread hints at a desire to make its gameplay more deliberate, but in practice just makes the ammo type unplayable. Normal Ammo continues to simply be weaker than Pierce with nothing much to show for it too, it’s really a shame. The new mod system feels pointless, as it essentially gives the player 'pretend choices' just as much as it does in any game not named World. Allowing the player to choose which ammo type to spec into feels entirely superficial when each gun is clearly heavily skewed towards firing a specific ammo type to begin with. I suppose that from a certain perspective, it is still better than it not being there at all, though personally I just think it adds pointless blubber to the stats screen.
The splitting of skills into 'armor' and 'weapon' skills is rather hit-or-miss. Try as they might, Capcom did not manage to de-emphasize certain powerful skills like Critical Boost and Offensive Guard, and as such their existence as weapon skills for some reason is rather annoying. Weapons that have a higher requirement of weapon-specific skills, or 'skill tax', will have less room for powerful offensive boosts in a way that feels kind of stupid. I understand that there must be filler in these slots, but I think the severely nerfed Attack Boost and Critical Eye would have sufficed, really. If Capcom wanted to fix the pains of skill tax, which I do believe they were trying to do with this, they really should have gone all the way. Limit weapon skills to just the weapon specific skills plus the basic weapon parameter changes (Attack Boost/Crit Eye/Handicraft) and it’ll feel a lot better, in my opinion.
Another annoyance of these recent titles for me is that they feel 'unfinished' before their update cycles have concluded. Base World is outright my least favorite MH game of all time, while base Rise is solid enough but still nothing compared to Sunbreak. In the case of Wilds, it almost feels like they simply allowed the game to slip into this state of being just a little too 'easy', just a little too 'convenient', simply because they can rugpull it all for the Master Rank expansion and get all that favor back for free. I am fully expecting a massive nerf to wounds to hit this game when that expansion releases, as well as a nerf to Flash Pods. It feels almost done on purpose, if I look at the history of Flash Pods being similarly broken and then nerfed in World -> Iceborne.
Also, while the update adding the Gathering Hub and its myriad features has already been out for a bit at the time of writing, I purposefully didn’t play it until finishing my review, and it is frankly absurd that all these things were not present on launch.
Overall, Monster Hunter Wilds is another solid entry in the series. Much like World, it takes a lot of bold steps to evolve the gameplay formula, and it has no qualms with discarding conventions both old and new in order to achieve this. That said, it has a lot of growing pains, and it seems content with letting these fester until it gets to become an exceptional MH entry only after tons and tons of updates. The future looks bright for Wilds, but it’s more plain than ever that this future is taking its sweet time.
If I may shift to its merits as a standalone game to cap off this review, it’s evident to me that Wilds is pretty good, but nowhere near the lasting cultural phenomenon that World became. In its current state, it doesn’t stand out enough to compete for long-term acclaim with all the other excellent games releasing this year. It feels like Capcom really is content with riding off the initial hype that the MH brand name is now able to generate. Wilds is a game that is great, but still not as good as it could be, which is its biggest flaw in the end. While it is incentivized to exist in this state by frankly absurd initial sales numbers, I don’t think it’s going to last for the Monster Hunter series in the long term. The game sold far more than Clair Obscur, Blue Prince or The Hundred Line could ever hope to, and will probably continue to outsell many of the 2025 titles still upcoming. And yet, while I don’t attach much value to “Game of the Year” designations, I think it’s telling enough that many would probably choose one of these games long before Wilds.