Monster Hunter Wilds Review — Difficulty and Accessibility Hand in Hand

Monster Hunter Wilds is the highly anticipated open-world take on the iconic Monster Hunter franchise which no other gaming studio has managed to successfully replicate. There’s a unique formula encoded into these games based on the monster-player relationship and intrinsic motivators that drive you to improve as you progress through Monster Hunter Games. After spending 40 hours defeating big beasts and grinding out new gear upgrades, I can confirm that Monster Hunter Wilds is the biggest entry in the series to date.

That claim isn’t just based on the huge amount of interest and hype behind the game, but because Monster Hunter Wilds has made the franchise and its tried and tested formula more accessible than ever. For example, Monster Tracking is gone and you’ll always know the location of where to find your next prey. Additionally, your trusted ride-or-die Seikrat can be set to autopilot to whatever target or waypoint you choose, making traversing around the massive open-world areas a breeze.

The Hook Slinger is another accessibility innovation that Monster Hunter Wilds brings to the party. You can just shoot your hook and gather materials and resources while walking, running, jumping, and riding around on your trusty Seikrat. It’s such a massive quality-of-life upgrade that takes the tedium out of an important element of the gameplay loop. It’s also amazing to use mid-combat to gather ammunition or trigger environmental attacks or Flashflies. I miss the Wirebug and its mobility from Monster Hunter Rise, but the Hook Slinger is a trade-off that’s completely worth it.

You can look forward to several other quality-of-life changes as well. For starters, your Handler will now always be with you to manage quests on the fly without having to return to base camp to pick up a quest first. Your Palico is also very useful this time around and will frequently heal, cure, and lay down traps for you while also taking a lot of aggro. Fast travel is easier than ever and loading times are quite short. You have access to meal prep and pop-up camps that will let you restock and change your gear without lengthy walks to and from your base camp. These may sound minor, but a lot of what was tedious in previous games has been made quicker and easier so you can focus on hunting Monsters.

You’ll also have access to SOS Flares which let you invite other Hunters to help you out even when you’re offline, which is great for the more casual players. They’ve built upon the existing formula and made it more accessible than ever before, making this the perfect jumping-in point for newcomers to what can be an overwhelming series.

There are some quality-of-life niggles that still haven’t been addressed, though. Crafting between your item box and pouch still doesn’t share resources. The Photo Mode needs improvements, especially considering how nice the game looks. The game pushes you towards the campaign quests for the first 20 or so hours until you can reach a high enough Hunter Level. This does serve as a solid introduction to the various mechanics and gameplay loops, but it does mean you’ll have to sit through all of it before getting access to the full open-world experience. This may be a pacing issue for more experienced players eager to dive right into the action.

The game ran at a stable 60fps on medium settings at 2k without any major stutters on my RTX 3070. Moreover, the environments looked lush and full of life in brighter areas but I would’ve appreciated it if the darker areas didn’t feel so drab and grey. There was the occasional polygonal texture just turning into origami, blowing up and rotating all over the screen, but these didn’t last long and were quite rare. These issues will likely be ironed out with the official release. What you can expect is smooth and solid performance as long as you meet the minimum requirements.

When it comes to the narrative, Monster Hunter Wilds makes this a much larger focus than it has ever been before in the series. There are more cutscenes and narrative moments in the first chapter of Monster Hunter Wilds than in the entirety of Monster Hunter Rise, and I for one welcome the change. The story does its job of introducing the setting, characters, and monsters in each respective region alongside your character’s motivations for being there. You’re a Hunter on an expedition in the Forbidden Lands investigating strange natural phenomena in the region and their cause. On the way, you mingle with the locals and learn about the precarious natural balance in each unique ecosystem in a pretty natural way. The story is not mindblowing by any means, but it doesn’t overstay its welcome and does its job admirably.

Once the main quest ends, you’re thrown into the real open-world section of Monster Hunter Wilds and it functions surprisingly well. The game is split into seven different regions with transition corridors in between that you can quickly fast travel across and you’ll find around three to six monsters roaming these regions at all times. You no longer have to accept quests before gaining access to these environments which you can now go to and from freely. You can go out to gather resources, complete side quests, or just stay on the lookout for newer more difficult monsters that might pop up. The dynamic weather system completely alters the appearance of the environments and different monsters show up during different weather cycles. It also means you can sometimes get really cinematic encounters such as a three-way brawl between monsters during a thunderstorm.

The real meat of the game, like any other Monster Hunter game, lies in the post-story quests and encounters. There’s a lot of creative design and variety going on for the newly added Monsters along with the return of several staples. From the new monsters, you can expect lightning-infused wyverns, leviathans rising from the sea, gigantic spiders, angry flaming apes, and much more. Each monster fits its biome and feels like a natural presence within it.

In my 40 hours, I encountered around 35 monsters in total. Despite the monsters being unique and well-designed, I wish there were more of them. That being said, the existing designs are excellent, complete with their distinct animations and movesets. As you approach the more difficult levels you’ll start encountering stronger variants of existing monsters such as the Frenzied, Tempered, and Apex monsters who have higher stats and more aggressive movesets. This is where your mastery over each monster battle will be tested and you’ll be required to make full use of your resources.

You can even encounter Tempered variants of Apex monsters at high enough Hunter Ranks which make for some of the most challenging content in Monster Hunter Wilds. These monsters give you high-tier rewards such as multi-skill Decorations which let you make highly optimized builds. They also give you access to Artisan parts which can be used to make some of the highest-tier weapons in Monster Hunter Wilds. You’re going to need them because the game features several difficulty spikes and walls for you to cross.

Preparation is a huge deal and makes the difference between a failed and successful hunt. Choose a weapon (or two now) from a selection of 14 types, eat a meal to get a stat buff, equip the right armor set, and study the monster’s weaknesses before heading out. You’ll find yourself happily trapped in the loop of wanting the best armor and gear for a difficult monster hunt, which requires materials from several other monsters. This loop requires you to go out and terrorize the local ecosystem as you fashion these fearsome monsters into helmets and swords. Fight strong monsters to get better equipment to fight even stronger monsters is the rinse and repeat cycle you can look forward to same as usual.

There have been some tweaks and adjustments to the existing weapons, including some buffs and nerfs, but for the most part, every single weapon feels usable. One thing to note is that the gameplay actually feels faster than before which is where I start to miss the Wirebugs and the additional mobility they provided in Rise. Monster Riding also feels much more watered down than before as you just mount and hack away at the monster for a bit rather than piloting it around the environment. That’s not to say all the changes are bad, as there are unique new additions like power struggles with monsters and offset strikes that let you counter and turn the fight into a back-and-forth dance.

By far the best feature they’ve added to combat is the Focus Strike system that lets you wound monsters and then target those wounds for critical strikes and burst damage. As you deal damage to monsters, wounded regions appear and you can land a precise strike on them for stuns and unique critical attack animations. It’s a brutal process that gives you the feeling of tearing apart and dismantling the behemoth in front of you. Few other games let you choreograph fights and carve up terrifying giant creatures quite like this.

Monster Hunter Wilds sets a solid standard for the new open-world approach and it pulls it off in the best way possible. It’s a great base for the game right now and future updates and expansions which introduce new areas and monsters will only improve upon this and give fans an experience they can once again sink hundreds of hours into. If you want to get your friends into Monster Hunter, this is the game to start with.