Monster Hunter Wilds PC Review

So, this is a weird one. I love Monster Hunter and, in recent years since the release of Monster Hunter World, so do many others now too. After some cracking titles released on Nintendo consoles that massively raised the series’ status in the West, Monster Hunter World finally cracked it and turned the series into a global hit, rather than one that tended to be a bit more of a niche title outside of its native Japan. Capcom had been refining the formula game on game until Monster Hunter World trimmed off enough of the awkward edges of this notoriously oblique bunch of games and allowed more people to get their foot in the door, creating a mega successful game with much wider appeal, without losing too much of what made Monster Hunter, well, Monster Hunter to begin with.

The thing about Monster Hunter Wilds is – for the first 15-20 or so hours – it is a bit of a confused mess. You can tell that it aims to further streamline the Monster Hunter experience further from Monster Hunter World and get you doing the coolest part of the whole Monster Hunter thing – actually hunting the monsters – as quick and as frictionless as ever before, but in doing so, removes some of the necessary friction needed to make you feel like you’re actually doing something most of the time you’re playing the game. It practically plays itself, as simply tapping up on the DPAD to get onboard your Seikret mount will automatically run you towards the target destination, whatever that may be. Whilst you’re doing this, you can do everything from cure to sharpen your weapon – all things you traditionally had to do whilst in battle and part of the skill and strategy around the game was knowing when to take the risk to do these things whilst a bloody great big dragon thrashes around in front of you. This renders a little too much of the previous Monster Hunter DNA completely irrelevant – why hunt and track monsters, or use paint balls to allow you to follow them if they run off, when you can just auto-run to them at the touch of a button? Why slowly explore the various areas, finding rare resources and stocking up on necessary items when you can just beeline towards the objective? Honestly, you spend so much of Monster Hunter Wilds barely touching the controller.

Weirdly, despite this attempt to shed the series’ traditional amount of downtime and busywork, there’s probably more than ever before in Monster Hunter Wilds. There’s SO much story during this first bit of the game and, frankly, none of it is particularly good or compelling. The characters are a fairly unmemorable bunch and the world itself kind of blurs into one big mass, rather than the unique and curated areas of previous games. The cutscenes all seem to last a ridiculous amount of time – often five plus minutes you’re just sat there watching a bunch of marks drum up some new reason as to why they need to go and tackle some big beastie monster – and even though you can start skipping these when they do start to bore you to tears, you can’t skip any of the many forced walk/ride and talk sections, which again can take over five minutes. Sure, you can jab B to pick up resources whilst automatically riding through an area, but that’s hardly the most compelling thing to spend your time doing and you’ll be doing it A LOT.

I mean, who is asking for this stuff? Can any of you lot who played the frankly brilliant Monster Hunter World, or Rise, or one of the absolute, stone cold classics like Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate genuinely say that you were sat there after a thrilling, near-death battle with one of the flagship monsters with a full party of your best mates thinking “do you know what this needs to really make things better? A really long-winded story mode.” It just seems so misguided and, although it is acting as a means of slowing the game down and allowing every single element of the Monster Hunter experience to be tutorialised, it has the somewhat unwanted side effect of making everything drag so, so much.

It’s also remarkably easy during this storyline segment, with only a few of the monsters who show up towards the end of the proceedings being any kind of real threat. This has the no doubt unwanted side effect of meaning you don’t really have to engage with one of the core aspects of classic Monster Hunter – grinding a particular monster so you can carve resources off their defeated corpse to make yourself better armour and weapons. I managed to finish the entire ‘campaign’, for lack of a better word, only using the armour sets and weapons you can craft from finding rocks and bones scattered around during missions, rather than any monster specific bits of kit. For a while, it honestly feels like in further streamlining, simplifying and modernising the Monster Hunter experience for the larger market, Capcom had lost sight of a lot of the things that made people fall in love with this series in the first place.

So much of the Monster Hunter experience is gated behind the completion of this storyline. Item farms, fishing, the ability to freely roam the environments, hell, you don’t even get tasked with capturing a monster until after the credits have rolled on the game and you unlock High Rank. This is traditionally the case with Monster Hunter titles, so this isn’t a surprise, it’s more just how MUCH is saved for High Rank this time around. There’s more post-game content than the game itself and this is where all of a sudden, something clicks, the handbrake comes off and it turns into a real, next-gen Monster Hunter game. A bizarrely strict content embargo around spoilers of monsters that turn up in the game prevents me from discussing specifics but there’s plenty of monsters that show up post-credits that offer the kind of scraps that fans of the series both new and old would love to hear about and will enjoy a lot – you’ll just have to take my word on that one, I’m afraid.

As always, the monsters are the stars of the show. They looked fantastic in Monster Hunter World, of course, but most of the roster in that game leaned quite heavily towards the more ‘dragon-y’ types. Here, Capcom have really flexed their creative muscles a bit more and delivered a much more diverse and – at times – actually quite horrible looking bunch. One again, coverage guidelines prevent going into any real detail but some of the monsters that show up towards the end of the campaign are absolutely nightmarish creatures and there’s at least a couple top be encountered that’ll be giving arachnophobes the big fear. They’re all much more fun to fight too – some of the tougher, endgame monsters in World required you to really specialise into a particular elemental damage/immunity and although that’ll certainly help in some scraps in Wilds, there’s a greater focus on learning the enemy attack patterns and then using your knowledge and skills to avoid them.

Alongside this, the little tweaks to the combat, with all the weapons getting a few new moves and ways to utilise them in battle, all make for a much more fleshed out, satisfying feeling Monster Hunter game than ever before. I’m a lifelong hammer main and there’s nothing more satisfying that cracking the skull of some elder dragon with a fully charged big bang, but now there’s actually a load of reasons to utilise the entire hammer toolkit, including a new dodge ability that allows you to to maintain your charge whilst you do so. It almost feels broken, having this new movement option whilst being able to dish out maximum damage and allows you to be more mobile, more offensive. Every weapon has been given a little something to make them feel fresh yet familiar to veterans and simply all full of cool stuff to utilise for newcomers. You can also take two weapons out with you into the field now and switch them when onboard your Seikret, affording you a lot more flexibility, especially in multiplayer. If someone joins you and they’re using a heavy melee weapon, maybe you can take that as an opportunity to try out that heavy bowgun you’ve got with you? They also look amazing, as do the new armour sets, thanks to a combination of some clever redesigns and Capcom’s versatile in-house engine, the RE Engine.

There’s also the new ability to go into a ‘focus mode’ that allows you to freely aim your strikes and this is where I think a lot of the real skilled players will spend their time. You can whip the camera around almost like you’re playing bloody Fortnite, offering you the ability to quickly pick out specific monster body parts to target with your weapon, which is extremely useful when going for head breaks and tail carves, for instance. Utilised by a player who has put in a bit of practice, you can use this mode to really minimise how many attacks ever miss. Another new feature is the ability to inflict wounds upon specific places on monsters and then target them in focus mode, causing body part breaks and – usually – stunning the enemy in the process. These two new mechanics synergise nicely not only together, but with the existing combat Monster Hunter is known for, as you can switch between standard and focus modes at the touch of a button, so you can dish out the usual damage and then flip over to focus mode to start targeting wounds, for instance.

The Monster Hunter series is, of course, famously about playing with others. Getting together a four person hunting party to take on any of these famous monsters is one of gaming’s finest multiplayer experiences. You can now get together in what is called a ‘Link Party’, essentially connecting you with up to four players from your friends list, all in their own individual games still but granting you a shared in-game chat (both text and voice) and whenever any one of you starts a quest, it’ll prompt the other members and they can join it with ease. From this Link Party, one player can request to invite everyone to a ‘Link Environment’, which basically brings all the players into their specific instance of the game world, allowing for more freeform exploration and hunting as a team.

That freeform exploration and hunting is where Monster Hunter Wilds really excels and genuinely expands on the classic formula. Once you’re in High Rank, getting together in a linked environment and seeking out these monsters as they roam the various biomes, you can highlight them on the map screen and instantly create a bespoke hunt quest for them, allowing anyone to accept it and come and join you. It feels great to be wandering through an area, stumbling across a rare monster, such as one of the new ‘Tempered Monsters’ – essentially double hard versions which require you to focus on hitting their wounds to do decent damage to them – creating an ad-hoc quest for it and having all your hunter mates come rushing in to help out. This is a much more compelling use of the semi open world space and always online multiplayer that the series has been moving towards and expands on it in a way that fans of the series always wanted from a follow up to Monster Hunter World. It takes a while to get going, but when it does, it is absolutely superb.

It becomes such a good time, ultimately you can almost forgive it for the disjointed, confused main game. If you’re a big fan of the series, you’ll power through until you get to the good stuff and perhaps if you’re a newcomer you’ll get something out of the greater narrative focus but personally, I found it to be a bit of a bore until it really kicks into gear once it bins all of that stuff off and tasks you with the titular hunting of monsters as the primary focus. As much as I’d like to say you can forgive a poor 15-20 hour story mode when the post-game is potentially hundreds of hours of incredible content, the way I’ve always seen it is 20 hours is still a LOT of time to invest in a game before it gets truly good, regardless of how good it gets.

If I offered you a lovely sandwich full of your favourite ingredients, but the first 10% of said sandwich I had filled with my toenails, you’re probably not going to be able to give that sandwich the score you’d otherwise like to give it, right? When you’re in the thick of the combat and the game is allowing you to focus on tackling these incredible foes, alone or with others, it’s probably the best the series has ever been. It’s just a shame it makes you slog through a tedious story before you get there. It’s absolutely worth it, but only just.