Monster Hunter: Wilds

By now there are very few people in the gaming world who aren't familiar, even if only in broad strokes, with the Monster Hunter series. This wasn't always the case, for while it's always been an excellent selling title for Capcom in Japan, it gained little notoriety in the West until we travelled to the New World with Monster Hunter: World. Suddenly the franchise, focused on offering a very precise and demanding combat system, eased the pressure by preying on a lot of new players, and now opens up even more options to offer the most accessible and friendly Monster Hunter for newcomers, and at the same time the most demanding for veterans.

Such a balance doesn't happen overnight (hence the seven years of development between World and Wilds), but the essence is the same. If you need a quick first summary, Monster Hunter Wilds is a "more and better". But since Wilds looks further ahead than any other Monster Hunter in terms of players (new and veteran), I'm going to try to answer both types of hunter. The vast Forbidden Lands await us.

If this is your first time playing a Monster Hunter game, you're going to find out very quickly that this is a very different game to any action title you've ever encountered. Sure, you can draw parallels to FromSoftware's Soulslike, in that these are big battles against very strong enemies where hitting and dodging becomes a choreography in which the riskiest moves are also the most satisfying. You may remember hunting big beasts in Guerrilla's Horizon franchise, but that's totally different. This is a big game, much more technical than Aloy's adventure, and it's not as punishing as the kills in Souls, but it's not as relaxing either. Monster Hunter should only be compared to Monster Hunter, because none of the other attempts to replicate its formula have had anywhere near the same effect.

To give context, Monster Hunter puts you in the shoes of a hunter from the Guild, an organisation that is in charge of exploration and research in a huge and not fully explored world. The Guild is a multi-disciplinary team, where researchers, craftsmen and traders work together. This world is populated by hundreds of different creatures. Some small, a few tame, but many others gigantic and very dangerous. That's where you come into the equation as a hunter. Exceptional individuals who, using gigantic weapons and a lot of willpower, hunt or capture the biggest monsters. In Monster Hunter: Wilds, the plot is based on exploring the Forbidden Lands, an inhospitable region that has been forbidden for over a thousand years, and which, as fate would have it, we must enter to help a young boy named Nata return home.

In broad strokes, this would be the story, with a theme so simple and flat that it is seemingly only there to embellish a game system. It's very simple, a little short for my taste, and still doesn't quite measure up to other games like, for example, the aforementioned Horizon, but Capcom has made an effort this time around to try and give the plot and the characters it includes a special weight. A feature that began to move in World, and that here has deepened a little more, although it is still by no means memorable. Part of that charm is that the switch from the previous MT Frameworks game engine to the current RE Engine allows for much more expressive NPC faces (interestingly, the least animated face in the game is that of your own protagonist) and better animations in the scenes. Funny, but where I noticed it the most was in a moment when our fellow researcher Alma gets emotional and breaks down in silent tears. The new game engine also affects the monsters, which are more beautiful and alive than ever. There's a lot of variety in Wilds, and the vast majority of them are brand new to the franchise, so there's not much to complain about in that respect. You can feel the scales, fur and drooling fangs as you approach the beast in question, and that alone serves to make you believe that the hunt is real and physical.

The monsters feel as real as their world is real. Monster Hunter: Wilds also strives, even more than World, for coherence in its fantasy world. It takes care that each of the different zones forms a more or less structured ecosystem, where the food chain between plants, small monsters and herbivores, and large predators works. Not that it's a point that tends to attract a lot of attention when you're on the hunt, but I've used the interludes in the main campaign to explore a bit, finding specific resource gathering areas and identifying the territorial limits of certain monsters like the Lala Barina, or taking advantage of the specific weather to stalk the Uth Duna. The weather plays a new role in the hunt, either by bringing new materials to the surface for hunting with the sling, or by creating floods or thunderstorms, which can affect you, but also the monsters you chase on the back of your Seikret.

The Seikret is the big new differential that will change the gameplay experience for veterans in Monster Hunter: Wilds. Aside from the obvious mobility of riding a land-based wyvern (a good movie description would say "it looks like a six-foot turkey"), it also allows you to have a portable item cache without having to visit a base or temporary camp, chase a zone-changing monster by sharpening your weapon, traverse otherwise inaccessible paths and, be warned, carry a secondary weapon.

I'm going to stop here because I know this is important for hunting rare and high-level monsters in the postgame. For the first time in 20 years of the franchise you can carry two weapons at once, which you can alternate when riding the Seikret, because the second one goes in its saddlebags. That means carrying two different playstyles at all times, having to keep your equipment upgraded from two weapon types (at least) and, ultimately, more options for flexible monster hunting. Wilds doesn't add more variety to the series' classic set of 14 weapon types, but switching between one or the other on the fly in combat is a big step that doesn't break the balance.

The same 14 weapon types that hardened hunters are familiar with, and 14 different gameplay experiences for newcomers. 99% of the moves, tempo and combos are repeated, but the animations when chaining blows together feel much more natural, like a dance. I've been playing with a longsword since Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate on Nintendo 3DS and never dared to switch until now. Maybe because for this occasion I usually carry a heavy Crossbow to attack while on the mount, to speed up time or target wounds with precise strikes.

Precision strikes are the other big addition to monster combat. The core of the Monster Hunter experience is to hunt, gather materials, forge better weapons and armour, and come back for more. But now you can speed up what used to be a lengthy (and artificially unfair, because of the drop ratio) process of getting certain monster parts by paying attention and targeting the same part of the monster's body over and over again. You will cause wounds (which also cause more damage) and when you finish off that area it will automatically offer a monster part. Again, some drops are only obtained from certain parts of the monster, which requires some mastery beyond just knocking the creature down or capturing it.

I talked about the truth of monsters at the beginning of this review, but not their moves. Even though the gleaning has been greatly cut back, hunting each monster can be even more challenging. The monsters of the Forbidden Lands are far more agile and have far more attack sets than the now almost clunky-looking monsters of Monster Hunter World's New World. Now the action is in the fighting itself and not in the approach to the creature, which we no longer have to track across the region. Instead, we have far more environmental and terrain resources to use to our advantage.

I haven't mentioned multiplayer yet, because right now there are only a handful of us hunters roaming the game's servers, but recent betas have shown that hunting monsters (especially if you do it with friends, with a microphone and headset to discuss strategy or give directions) is still rabidly fun.

Ultimately, Monster Hunter: Wilds once again adapts its formula to allow more new players to try the experience, and offers enough changes to make veterans feel like they're in for a new and exciting challenge. Sure, there are still times when the camera doesn't quite fit, when the visual options with HDR and brightness spoil what would be great views and could be made much simpler for those of us who aren't so interested in fine-tuning every setting to the extreme. But that's part of the charm of such a unique series. I can only recommend that you give Monster Hunter: Wilds a try, it will give you a very enjoyable action adventure on your own, and a game of enormous scope to continue playing for many, many more hours after the credits roll. Happy hunting!