Review : Monster Hunter Wilds : Nuh Horizons

Considering the litany of IP that’s part of Capcom’s stable, it’s sometimes easy to forget just how big the Monster Hunter franchise actually is for them. The action-role playing hunting franchise first roared to the scene in 2004 on PlayStation 2, and it carved a significant niche with its portable entries before growing to new heights with 2018’s Monster Hunter: World, still to this day Capcom’s single-best-selling game in its history. 

Hilariously, as huge of a franchise as Monster Hunter is, I’m in the camp that only really got it when Monster Hunter World released. I attempted a few of the portable entries and just found them overly complicated and impenetrable to my feeble mind back in the day (Too. Many. TUTORIALS). I could see the appeal of the hook, but it really only made sense to me on its ginormous 2018 console entry, where I felt they did as good a job as they could to open the franchise to a newer audience. While still complicated in spots, I felt they did a fairly good job in keeping the franchise’s hardcore slant while being more welcoming to new players towards all its extensive systemic depth & mechanical eccentricities. A look at the sales numbers showed they did something right.

Now, some 7 years since the release of the last full console release (I don’t really count the super successful Monster Hunter Rise, which first released exclusively on Switch before being ported everywhere else, the same way) does Capcom capture lightning in a bottle again with Monster Hunter Wilds?

A New Frontier

Monster Hunter Wilds starts you off with your created Hunter character and cat-companion “Palico” on the way to what’s referred to as “The Forbidden Lands.” An unpopulated and previously known-to-be uninhabited land full of monsters, your hunter and crew are sent to this forbidden land to find a missing expedition party. With sudden discoveries about the nature of the land putting to question previous knowledge, you are set on this hunting adventure of discovery to uncover the mysteries of a land full of wonder and possibilities.

While the conceit has an air of similarity to the Expedition crew investigating the Elder Dragons from the New World in Monster Hunter Worlds, one big notable change with Monster Hunter Wilds is how its “campaign” has more of a semblance of a story and personality compared to the previous games. If you think about how in World almost every character had a generic name, like Handler, Commander, Admiral, Field Team Leader, Seeker, Second Fleet Master, Third Fleet Master, or the Huntsman, Monster Hunter Wilds has taken the strides to make your expedition crew feel a little more fully formed. 

Your handler character, Alma, is a major improvement over the Handler in World, and it just felt good putting more of a name to your Guildmates to make things not just seem like a means to an end. Having the story laser-focusing on a specific character to drive you through the early parts gives it more of a hook than I remember from World. Obviously I’m not saying that the story of Monster Hunter Wilds is this earth shattering revelatory narrative, but it certainly feels like Capcom has put more effort into making its initial impression and onboarding feel more inviting and welcome just from a narrative hook, which helps a lot at pushing you along towards its endgame content. 

For the uninitiated, the Monster Hunter franchise is defined by its core gameplay loop as suggested by its name. You build your custom hunter to prepare for these extended quasi-boss fight encounters against these middle-sized to giant monsters in order to level up and build better gear which then helps you against stronger monsters in this perpetual loop. Sometimes, you can engage in side activities to kill smaller beasts or collect certain materials, but, on the whole, the franchise has maintained its monster-hunting focus intact from moment one.

If there is one theme that I noticed the most about my time with Monster Hunter Wilds, it’s just how much Capcom has taken strides to clean up the experience to feel the most inviting to newcomers while getting players more readily-invested in its in-depth systems. As I mentioned before, the few early entries I played were overly complicated and took too long to get to the meat of its core gameplay loop, on top of an over emphasis on text tutorials that made me glaze over them and move on due to fatigue from their frequency. Monster Hunter Worlds was a welcome step in this direction, simplifying many of its systems and finding a way to make you get sooner to the cool stuff. Monster Hunter Wilds doubles down on that approach, better parsing out how it doles out its complex systems and tutorials, never frontloading you with so much to overwhelm you and working in tandem with its narrative to decide when to throw another system at you. It’s a small change, but one that helps make the onboarding as friction free as I’ve seen with one of these games.

Focus on the Work

Another area that’s benefitting from less friction is, for sure, the combat system. Monster Hunter combat has always had a particularly stiff-on-purpose feel to it, a complete opposite of other action games from Capcom where every weapon attack is more deliberate than something you can mash your way out of (depending on the weapon). In previous games, there was always a certain frustration you had to get used to while deciding on when to do your attacks, and more often than not any of the mid-to-heavy size weapons would get you intentionally “stuck” in an attack animation against fast moving beasts. The stiffness has been diminishing with every subsequent entry, and some of the additions in Monster Hunter Wilds have helped the game hit a better middle ground between a slightly snappier game while retaining the deliberate nature of its combat system.

The addition of Focus Mode is probably one of the most important additions to the combat system. While, technically, you could aim your ranged weapons before, Focus Mode allows you to redirect your weapon swings at any moment, which has single-handedly made combat that much more enjoyable by quickly allowing you to redirect your attacks. It’s finally made me venture into trying some of the more heavy weapons that do the most per-hit damage because I feel I don’t have to constantly have to deal with my impatience of starting an attack animation and getting stuck attacking thin air. While it doesn’t exactly make every attack super precise, it adds an extra flavor that keeps you more focused than before. And combining it with the addition of the Focus Strike, which enables super strong attacks on a monster’s bleeding points (which sometimes sends you flying around, depending on the weapon), and suddenly Monster Hunter Wilds has eliminated some of the combat friction that took too long to get comfortable with for my liking in previous Monster Hunter games. I have felt more encouraged to test my mettle with so many weapons because they feel so much better in the new system, whereas I always defaulted to the smaller, quicker weapons before because they were the only ones that felt good to me in World.

But it’s not just those mechanics that have made combat better. Due to the nature of the structure of Monster Hunter Wilds, the addition of your Seikret mount (building from one of the additions of Monster Hunter Rise with its Palamute) just adds extra dynamism to not just world traversal, but to the combat as well. With your Seikret, you can house an alternate weapon if you wish to switch to a different style on the fly. Your Seikret has an extra stash of items that may be of use at a moment’s notice. And using your Seikret where you can start slashing at a boss, escape with it to either heal or switch to a weapon and quickly go back to the monster where your jump-off-mount attack lets you climb the monster again just raises the combat to the point where going back to an older entry will feel tough. While some may still find some issue that the combat overall still has a little bit of that deliberate stiffness to it compared to other action games, all these additions have definitely made the gameplay in Wilds the most fun I’ve had with a Monster Hunter game.

Wild Plains

Continuing this train of diminishing friction is the banner feature for Monster Hunter Wilds: this is the first fully seamless open-world Monster Hunter game where you can go from your camp out into the world and its other biomes with nary a load screen present. While Monster Hunter World was the first one to more fully seamlessly connect the different areas without any fade to black (the games previous to that had separate areas in each map that you would load in to), it still separated its different biomes (maps) via loading screens. Monster Hunter Wilds builds upon that foundation, which, by itself, really has hastened the usual series’ gameplay loop.

The Monster Hunter loop has always been on a perfect rotation of being at your camp, crafting and building your gear, eating some food for some stat boosts, and going out on your quest hunt, rinse and repeat. That loop is technically still in place, and you can decide to play the game that way too (especially if you launch the major quests and side quests through your camp). However, the seamlessness of being in the open world allows you the chance to start any quest out in the wild and seamlessly move from hunting a big monster that naturally happens to show up while you are exploring (fighting it automatically starts and accepts a “quest”), and then just continuing on living your day. 

The seamlessness of being out and about means a few systems that used to be at camp come with you this time. The game’s cooking mechanic, which previous games mostly reserved for the Palicos back at camp in previous entries, is now available to you at all times. Longtime fans will certainly lament that one of the quirkiest traditions of the series, being the fun animation of the Palicos preparing your food, no longer exists. However, the animation of cooking delicious food still exists, but it is you doing it this time, anywhere and anytime you desire. But if cooking has been untethered, other systems, like the crafting of gear and other vendors, are still present, which still makes trips to camp worth taking even if they are not part of the exact same loop like it used to be. And considering these places are still a hub for multiplayer, they still find their place in the series’ new sandbox.

Multiplayer has certainly always been part of the Monster Hunter DNA, and Monster Hunter Wilds takes some strides into trying to make multiplayer something that’s more seamlessly integrated while still being unnecessarily obtuse in spots. On the positive, the ability to link with a player that allows you to stick together for quests seamlessly flows way better than it did in Monster Hunter World, and it’s at its best when you just roam the world and naturally hunt what’s in front of you. And the game has fully enabled cross-play between the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, and in my testing in the pre-release environment, it was working fairly well, which obviously bodes well for a big community for this game.

On the other hand, I do feel that Capcom may have tacked on one too many multiplayer layers to the game that’s just obtuse. There’s like literally four separate friends lists available within the same game (and that’s not even including normal game invite done through your base online system), and the fact that joining the game’s version of clans and connecting to certain people needs passcodes is just backwards for a game that otherwise has implemented online well elsewhere. There’s a follow system on top of a friend request system within it, and the fact that the online portion is seamlessly tied to the questing of the game, where you can see your friend’s quest they have posted on top of SOS calls and clan quests and such, feels like something that could have been more streamlined considering a lot of this game has streamlined many of its processes. 

Since we have mentioned some quibbles, I feel it’s worth noting that, with as much streamlining as has happened which has eliminated a lot of friction points that are for sure going to bring newer people in, I do feel in certain spots they may have gone a little too far at making things a little too easy. Compared to World where I definitely needed to grind specific gear during the campaign in order to succeed in its campaign, I feel Wilds almost gives you everything you need by just completing the different mainline campaign. As long as after every main battle you go to create new gear from that immediately, you won’t find yourself in any tough spot as what you craft is almost perfectly in sync with the things you need further in the campaign. I only really had trouble in two spots with two beasts. One was because I slacked with gear crafting where I needed heat resistance for a specific incredibly cool (or hot) monster, and the other happened on what I felt was like the legit hardest monster of the entire campaign, which is somehow harder than what’s ostensibly the final boss before rolling credits that lead to the endgame.

As for said endgame, I certainly have found more of the challenge that reminds me of the toughest moments in Monster Hunter World. But continuing the same theme of the game, where I currently am on the endgame at Hunter level 20 with more to come, I still feel the game hasn’t quite required as much minutiae out of my build and pursuits like it used to be in previous Monster Hunter games, which I feel is a very deliberate choice that has probably really backloaded a lot of the complexity and challenge. As someone that wouldn’t even remotely consider myself hardcore, I still want to play more because I haven’t hit much of a wall and the progression is still going nicely. Still, I can see some tension growing in those that would love things to be uber challenging.

Monster Hunter Wilds is the the second Monster Hunter game running on Capcom’s RE Engine, and the first built from the ground up for the new consoles (Monster Hunter Rise targeted the Switch hardware and its design limitations), and you can see the engine both fulfill the expansion of the ideas built for Monster Hunter World, and the places where the RE engine feels stretched past what’s capable in the current base consoles. The scale of the playable spaces is quite a sight to behold, with some awe-inspiring art direction that makes traversing the Forbidden Lands quite a joy. Geometric density surpasses what was seen in World, and a lot can happen on screen that’s busier than the craziest moments in the previous major console release (wait until you see the dynamic weather effects in motion). It’s a very pleasing game aesthetically, but one that has quite the variance of quality in its different performance modes.

I have tested the game both in its beta form in the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro, and did the full retail version on the Xbox Series X for this review. From the beta to the retail release, the biggest improvement I saw was on the performance mode. In the second beta released in early February, Monster Hunter Wilds was running much better than its concerning first beta on its “Prioritize Frame Rate” mode, but it also came at a severe cost to image quality which made it one of the blurriest games I’d seen. Testing the retail version, I can say the image quality in its performance mode is much sharper than the beta and maintains a rock solid 60fps, but it’s still on the soft side where, out in the big open areas, it can still look blurrier than you’d like. On the retail version, there is a “Balanced Mode” available for those who have the 120hz TV/Monitor with VRR, giving the option to run unlocked framerate or to lock in at 40fps. I ended up playing most of my time in the Balanced Mode with unlocked frame rate despite not having a 120hz TV, and I found the experience to be the best in that mode. It maintained most of the visual splendor of the “Prioritize Resolution” Mode while making the game run faster than that mode, which you can cap at 30fps or have framerate unlocked. 

A word of note, Capcom has been touting Monster Hunter Wilds being PlayStation 5 Pro enhanced, where they will add Ray Tracing to the Resolution mode and run PlayStation’s AI upscaler PSSR on its performance mode. Since this review was conducted on the Xbox Series X version and both it and PlayStation 5 uses FSR, we can’t quite confirm the improvements for now. Jury’s out on whether or not PSSR improves the look of the game in its performance mode as it has happened in many contemporary games that were heavily compromised on the base machines. If the improvements are significant, we’ll make a note in the review in the future.

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It’s always a funny feeling when you know something is so big and popular, but it may end up not being for you. That’s how it always felt with Monster Hunter for me until its massive 2018 game gave me hope that I could finally get into the franchise. If Monster Hunter World was Capcom’s attempt at making their ever-growing franchise more accessible to a bigger audience, Monster Hunter Wilds pretty much perfects it, providing an entry that’s sure to satisfy longtime fans and create new ones as well. The quality of life, alone, is very welcome, and having as little friction as possible to enjoy its addictive loop is an absolute plus!

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