Monster Hunter Wilds had some pretty big shoes to fill for me. Despite looking pretty incredible in initial trailers, I’d daresay its predecessor, Monster Hunter Rise, may very well be the best in the series and one of my all-time favourite games on the Switch, so I was curious as to how much would carry over from the last mainline entry.
When I started playing Monster Hunter Wilds, it kind of felt like a game that was conceived during the late 2000s–early 2010s and just sat on until now. In a few ways, it felt like the kind of Monster Hunter that would have been an Xbox 360 exclusive, with a washed-out, brownish colour palette, big push to an open world, grandiose attempts at being “cinematic,” and the fact it’s one major combat innovation is aiming your sword like a gun—I’ll explain later.
However, the more I played it, the more everything started to open up, and it really sunk its teeth into me. Despite a few annoyances, Monster Hunter Wilds takes the best elements from both its direct predecessors and builds on them in a way that is fresh and deeply engaging.
“Despite a few annoyances, Monster Hunter Wilds takes the best elements from both its direct predecessors and builds on them in a way that is fresh and deeply engaging.”
The story in Monster Hunter Wilds is about what you’ve come to expect from the series. There’s an ancient Monster, long since believed to be extinct, who has begun wreaking havoc upon the land. It’s up to the player and their rag-tag group of Hunters, Researchers and Handlers to put a stop to it once and for all.
Obviously, I’m being glib for the sake of humour, but that’s really the core structure of the almost every game in this series’ story. However, Monster Hunter Wilds does deliver a deeper and much more engaging story as one of the main characters—a child named Nata—was separated from his tribe—an ancient race who lived in relative secrecy known as The Keepers—by the main antagonist, Monster. What forms the basis for the plot is the player’s attempts to discover this new Monster and reconnect Nata with his people.
But what really separates Monster Hunter Wilds’ story from its predecessors is how it’s told. Unlike previous games that usually had some dialogue forming the plot between hunts and the occasional cutscene for major events, Monster Hunter Wilds goes for a much more grandiose and “cinematic” form of storytelling. In a lot of ways, it feels a lot more like a proper RPG than a traditional Monster Hunter game, and while I really like that it’s going for a bigger and more bombastic story, it also kind of annoys me.
Almost every mission begins with either a cinematic cutscene or watching your character and their group walk through an area—or sometimes both—for a solid 10 minutes. And unlike games like Grand Theft Auto, which usually uses the driving mechanics as a way to parse dialogue with gameplay, here you can’t even control your character, and even when you can, you’re scolded for going too far off the guided trail.
Honestly, I’m not against Monster Hunter having an expanded narrative, and the story itself is really good and can be quite fun. While I appreciate the game’s attempt to weave more narrative into the proceedings, it makes the game incredibly boring since so much time is spent not playing it. The problem with trying to make your game more “cinematic” is that video games and cinema are two very different mediums, and if you take too much from one, you risk spoiling the other. When it’s trying to be Final Fantasy it’s a little dull, but when it starts being Monster Hunter…holy moly!
As I mentioned before, Monster Hunter Wilds takes a lot of the Quality of Life and gameplay improvements implemented in Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise and builds on them for a bigger and much more freeform experience. At its core, it still feels really familiar—every main quest introduces a new Monster, and then you can take on quests to hunt them in order to gather materials for new weapons and armour—but the way it builds on and reconfigures some of the elements from previous games makes it feel unlike any Monster Hunter that’s come before it.
Firstly, what separates Monster Hunter Wilds from its predecessors is the sense of freedom it gives the player in the world itself. Rather than give players multiple smaller areas to hunt in, Monster Hunter Wilds has several massive areas that feel like they would comprise two or three areas from previous games. Sprawling desert plains connect to massive sand dunes, that connect to interconnected crystalline caves it’s genuinely impressive.
And unlike previous games where players would need to select an area from a menu and travel there, complete whatever task they needed to and return to the hub area; players can seamlessly move between areas through connected paths—so they can travel from the desert plains to dense jungle, to natural oil caves with incredible ease. What’s more, adding to the narrative element of the game, every new area has a new local village for players to set up a main base in, so there’s a genuine feeling of discovery and connection with the inhabitants of this new land.
However, one criticism I do have with the environments in Monster Hunter Wilds is that, despite their incredible sense of diversity, they do feel a bit flat—lacking the verticality and dynamism of their predecessors. It’s not really a serious detriment since this is a much more grounded kind of game, but if you’re coming to it directly from Monster Hunter Rise it may feel like a bit of a step down.
“Visually, Monster Hunter Wilds maintains the high level of fidelity that was established in Monster Hunter World, but quickly brightens up and becomes so full of colour and life it’s astounding.”
The second innovation Monster Hunter Wilds brings to the table is the reinvention of Monster Hunter Rise’s Palimutes—now taking the form of large rideable bird creatures called Seikrets. Seikrets effectively act as mobility and a portable item box as well as giving players a secondary weapon to bring to battle. Unlike Palimutes however, they don’t get involved with combat and can’t be given skills or armour.
However, the Seikert adds a nice layer of mobility to traversing the world and hunting Monsters that does fill in the gap somewhat from the removal of the Wirebug. Players can easily call their Seikret using the D-Pad with certain directions providing quick and useful functions like swapping weapons or restocking items. And they can even help players get out of a bad situation in a pinch.
More than once I caught myself trying to execute the Wirebug Recovery after getting knocked down by a mighty Monster blow to no avail, until I realized you can call your Seikret after getting obliterated by a Monster for a speedy retreat. While it’s not as instant or fluid as the Wirebug Recovery, it does go a long way to providing players with some relief to get healed and get back in the fight with relative ease.
And speaking of getting into the fight, Monster Hunter Wilds’ combat may be the crown jewel of the piece. While it returns to a more traditional form of combat similar to Monster Hunter Worlds, even returning to the Slinger in place of the Wirebugs, it manages to maintain a certain sense of speed and fluidity that was present in Monster Hunter Rise. For the most part, weapons feel pretty similar to how they handled in Monster Hunter World, particularly after the Iceborne update. However, there has been a lot of added nuance that makes them feel pretty unique and approachable for this new entry.
If you’re like me and became a big fan of the Long Sword due in large part to Monster Hunter Rise, then I gotta tell you—ya’ll eatin’ good tonight. While the Long Sword’s moveset is more or less the same as it was after Iceborne, what’s been added to Monster Hunter Wilds is how it functions after getting the sword to Red Energy.
Once players reach the maximum Spirit Guage, the standard moveset unleashes a flurry of attacks that make them absolutely formidable against any Monster. Players can also follow up a Helm Splitter with a whirlwind of slashes that can be devastating. Finally, after all my years of playing Monster Hunter, I can finally pretend to be Sephiroth with the Long Sword, and it’s incredible.
But the biggest thing Monster Hunter Wilds adds to the combat is the Wound system. At the top of this review, I joked about aiming your sword like a gun, but this is genuinely where that comes into play. If players hit a Monster in the same spot repeatedly, it can open up a wound. Once this is done, players need to aim for the wound and hit it with a specific lunge attack which triggers a small animation and does massive damage.
And while I found the notion of aiming your sword with a little reticle amusing at first, I genuinely didn’t appreciate how useful this was. It’s not uncommon in Monster Hunter for players to swing at nothing as Monsters move erratically around the battlefield. Here, however, players can very quickly reposition their sword swings by aiming toward the Monster, so fights feel a lot more fluid and focused.
Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention some of the new Monsters that appear in Monster Hunter Wilds. They’re a unique blend of style and design that fits the game’s new setting, running the gamut from fun to truly terrifying. The Quematrice is a combination of dinosaur and giant chicken, using its tail to spread the flammable powder in the area and igniting it at a whim, while the Rey Dau is an intense lightning Wyvern that turns its head into a massive laser cannon.
“Monster Hunter Wilds was definitely a conflicting experience, but it was consistently the only game I wanted to play, even after I finished reviewing it.”
Every new encounter had me genuinely excited about what kind of creature I would be facing and how it would attack and navigate the combat space. A big part of the fun of Monster Hunter is learning each Monster’s unique style and patterns. Not only was it challenging, but it was immensely fun given the game’s improved combat mechanics.
Visually, Monster Hunter Wilds maintains the high level of fidelity that was established in Monster Hunter World. I made a joke at the start about its “washed out, brown colour palette” because at the start of the game, that’s honestly how it looked. But it very quickly brightens up and becomes so full of colour and life its astounding.
Not only that but there are an incredible number of little details on display in this entry that really make it stand out from its predecessors. The way Monster fur moves, or the way Mineral Deposits shatter into little crystals when struck; the dynamism of attack animations both from Hunters and Monsters, and even the way weather can change an entire landscape make this one of the best-looking Monster Hunters to date.
However, if there’s one thing I can’t forgive, it’s the removal of the Mealtime animations that were present in every previous Monster Hunter, but at its best in Monster Hunter World. Since this game is leaning into the Wild aspect, players no longer eat at a Canteen, instead creating meals while out on a hunt. And while the animation for cooking a meal is still quite nice, it doesn’t have the same degree of lighthearted fun, and even just the incredible amount of detail that went into the Grand and Grammeowster Chefs cooking cutscenes. It’s a minor complaint, I know, but it was a real bummer for me.
On the audio side, again while the majority of the game’s music is absolutely incredible, it’s also a bit of a mixed bag. While several of the new Monster battle themes are incredibly well composed and appropriately bombastic, quite a few of them lean a bit too serious for my taste—creating an atmosphere that feels more like horror rather than action. This, again, may just be my Monster Hunter Rise bias, since so many of the Monster themes in that game had a faster, more intense vibe that made fights feel much more explosive and exciting.
Monster Hunter Wilds was definitely a conflicting experience. Despite a few minor annoyances, it was consistently the only game I wanted to play, even after I finished reviewing it. It feels bigger and much more robust than anything that came before it and may very well set the standard for not just how Monster Hunter plays, but how it tells its story.
