Overview
For an old-time fan like me, Monster Hunter Wilds is incredibly frustrating because it’s simultaneously one of the best and worst games of the series. On one hand, the monster designs are excellent, the combat is more fluid than ever, the environments are beautiful, and the map feels like a living, breathing ecosystem.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!
On the other hand, half of those things are held back by extreme contradictions to the game’s design that clearly exist due to an absurd level of streamlining. I hate writing this review because I am absolutely going to be screaming into the void. I’m just an old man yelling at clouds, but I gotta yell just to let the screams out.
The massive capitalistic-backed push to make every single game appeal to the widest possible audience is absolutely crushing the very souls of video games themselves, especially those in existing series. I’d say Monster Hunter Wilds is the canary in the coal mines, but we are way past that point and well into the realm of the entire AAA industry becoming a homogeneous wheel of mediocrity kept spinning for the sole purpose of investors watching numbers go up.
I couldn’t ask for a better poster child of this phenomenon than Monster Hunter Wilds. It’s a game that’s super close to being great, and completely neutered by decisions made purely to sell more copies instead of making a better game. It’s aggravating because Monster Hunter was already a popular series, but the obsessive need for infinite growth is slaughtering the integrity of video games, and Wilds is the most recent casualty.
| Gideon’s Bias | Monster Hunter Wilds Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: Capcom |
| Hours Played: 34+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: Xbox Series X | Platforms: PC, Xbox Series, PlayStation 5 |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: Third Person ARPG |
| Mode Played: N/A | Price: $69.99 |
On Rails
The first issue is the on-rails story, where the pacing manages to speed you along too fast to smell the game’s proverbial roses while simultaneously crawling along at a snail’s pace for that cinematic quality that absolutely no one asked for. Seriously, ask any Monster Hunter fan why they play the series, and the story isn’t even going to be in their top 10 reasons.
The issue isn’t that Wilds tries to tell a story. In fact, Monster Hunter lore is quite fascinating. The problem is that the vehicle it uses to feed you the story is on rails, metaphorically and literally. After every cutscene and before each hunt, you have to do slow walk-and-talk portions that are unskippable and where you have no agency except to pick up some nearby materials en route. If you try to divert from the path, the game literally doesn’t let you.
These sections felt like something out of Red Dead Redemption 2, a game with a very different target audience and design goals. For your first 10 hours, most of your interactions with the game world are going to be on rails. Once I finished the story, I realized I didn’t know the maps at all. I was auto-guided through them for every hunt.
There were many cases when I spent more time watching a cut scene and listening to the walk-and-talk dialogue than I actually spent fighting the monsters I was being led to hunt in the first place.
At the same time, the game aggressively prods you along to the next story mission. You blast through almost the entire roster of monsters quickly without time to savor any of them. You can technically do some optional hunts between story missions, but there’s no point. First, the game showers you with materials during the story so that you never need to fight the same monster twice, and secondly, if you attempt to hunt a new monster the story hasn’t introduced yet, the game yells at you and won’t reward you for doing it.
I had a very familiar feeling playing through the story of Monster Hunter Wilds. A feeling that it took me a while to put my finger on. I’ve played a bunch of Monster Hunter clones through the years: Wild Hearts, Dauntless, and Tokuiden Kiwami. Good games in their own right, but they have all had a similar feeling. They were faster and more action-focused than Monster Hunter. You blazed through their roster of beasts quickly, and they all felt somewhat arcadey.
I got the same feeling when playing Monster Hunter Wilds, like I was playing a Monster Hunter clone, despite the fact that I was playing a mainline entry in the series.
Once you get through the story, which took me roughly 10 hours, a good portion of which was not spent hunting. The game opens up more and feels better, but some of the stank lingers well into high rank.
Brokenly Easy
I’m about to get pretty harsh, so let me make something clear. If you struggle in Wilds and find the game challenging. This is not an attack on you, I’m criticizing the game’s inability to cater to old fans in addition to new ones. I don’t want to take Monster Hunter away from you, I just want to feel included again.
Monster Hunter Wilds is the easiest game in the series, flat out. Yes, I’m a veteran who has played the series since its inception way back on the PlayStation 2, but let’s nip that in the bud right now. I suck at Monster Hunter, watch any gameplay of me playing and that becomes obvious. I fight through with sheer will, stubbornness, and, up until Wilds, preparation. The thing is, I can boot up my 3DS right now and get bodied in Monster Hunter 4U, even in low rank.
I have a much easier time in World, but I’ll still have to at least try. In Wilds, I had to actively impede myself to get any enjoyment out of the game. This isn’t a matter of the game feeling too easy because I’ve played other Monster Hunter games. The game is simply too easy.
In Wilds, your armor and weapons can carry you through multiple tiers of monsters without upgrading them. Your Palico is super strong with access to all of the gadgets they had from World at the same time, and you constantly get resupplied mid-mission with more healing items. Your mount, the Seikret, can pick you up at any time, even when you are on the ground, and you can safely dodge all of a monster’s attacks on the Seikret while you heal, sharpen your weapons, or do whatever else you feel like doing.
You now have a focus mode that makes the combat a lot more fluid but allows you to aim attacks with 100% accuracy without the need for careful positioning. Plus, there’s a new wound system that makes it very easy to stagger and flinch monsters.
You might say, “You control the buttons you press; don’t use those things.” I tried, I really tried. I shaved off game mechanic after game mechanic. No cooking buffs, no Palico, no using armor spheres, no Seikret in combat, and no AI hunters. I limited potions, and it didn’t matter because, ultimately, the monsters dealt too little damage and had too little health. I still ended most hunts quickly with very little threat, despite my sloppy play skills.
You no longer bounce off of a monster’s hide in most cases, even when your weapon needs to be sharpened. Blights rarely matter, tremors, wind pressure, and getting staggered by roaring are almost non-existent. The game does everything it can not to inconvenience you in any way, and the Monsters just do not have the toolset to keep up with you.
On some higher-ranked hunts, the closest I could get to having any challenge was taking on Monsters with all of those limitations and gimping my equipment as low as could without getting one shotted. And as I struggled with all of those house rules, it dawned on me that I was not playing Monster Hunter anymore.
Cutting out nearly 10 different game mechanics to get even a sliver of challenge while being unable to take part in the core loop of upgrading my gear and preparing myself to face a new meaner monster meant I was no longer even playing the game. And that’s the thing. The lack of challenge impacts everything the game does.
The entire loop of hunting a monster and using its gear to hunt stronger monsters is nullified when you not only don’t have to do that, but you have to avoid doing so to make the next monster in line threatening. You have access to traps and bombs that you will never need; in fact, it is faster to just beat on the monster.
The environments are littered with things you can use against a monster, but why bother? It’s faster to just wail on them. You can lure monsters into each other and make them fight, but why bother?
The game’s entire conceptual premise is violated by dumbing down the difficulty of the game. The whole thing is dumbed down, too, not just low rank or the story, but the entire game. I never even bothered to play Multiplayer. Why would I? So hunts that already ended way too fast could end even faster? I didn’t see the point
Seamless Contradictions
Monster Hunter Wilds boasts seamless maps where the monsters roam and interact with or without you. The weather changes, and with it, parts of the environment shift with different materials as monsters come and go.
This entire system is completely ignored during the story, but once you reach high rank, you get a bit more freedom. You can technically go anywhere and hunt whatever you find, but the game steps in its own way.
I mentioned that I never learned the maps. The map is cluttered with more icons than an Ubisoft game, and the monster’s locations are always visible. You never have a reason to go explore. Firstly because, you almost never need basic materials as the game practically showers you with them. I know there are spots on the map that have honey, but I can’t tell you where. I gathered everything I needed while my Seikret auto-piloted me to the monster.
The Seikret isn’t really optional, many routes can only be traversed by the Seikret, so you kind of need it. Furthermore, it is faster to just pick a monster from the map screen and choose to hunt it from there than it is to actually go out looking for it (which would be redundant because it’s always shown on your map anyway)
So you essentially select a monster from a menu, auto-pilot to it, and then fight it. Those big seamless environments are totally wasted. If they just had you fight every monster in an Arena, it wouldn’t feel functionally different than it does now. Wilds has all but cut the hunter portion from the game. Between the lack of challenge, the fact that you don’t need to prep, and the auto-piloting mounts, it’s just Monster Fighter now.
Verdict
There are good things I could say about Monster Hunter Wilds, but doing so feels like it would undermine just how much is wrong with it. I don’t want to give any impression at all that I am recommending the game in its current state because I’m not. There are simply too many things busted under the hood, and the problem is, it’s all intentional.
When I criticize most games, it’s not usually because a game was developed to make its own systems redundant on purpose. With Monster Hunter Wilds, it’s all part of capturing that mighty dollar from the potential casual newcomer. Here’s the thing. I’m not some unreasonable grognard. I’m super okay with things being reasonably streamlined.
I don’t miss the days when you had limited pickaxes and bug nets, for example. Gathering materials quickly with the slinger is super okay with me. We don’t need to have long animations to gather a mushroom. As someone who has always loved Bowguns, I’m totally on board with streamlining the process of getting ammo for the dang things.
I don’t want to punish people who haven’t played every game in the series like I have. I just want to have my favorite series back. I want difficulty settings. I want every newbie to be able to pick easy mode and have the time of their life. As long as I’m able to pick hard mode and have my fun, too.
The problem is that Monster Hunter Wilds has eviscerated its identity for new fans with no attempt to appeal to old ones. They figure, probably correctly, that we will buy it anyway, so they get all of our money.
Sure, you could ignore half of the new mechanics and intentionally handicap yourself, but not only is that not enough in Wilds, you shouldn’t have to. It’s not on the player to balance their experience, it’s up to the developer.
The game should encourage you to upgrade your gear, use the environment, and have synergistic skills and elemental weaponry. It should reward the use of traps and bombs and everything else at your disposal. Because otherwise, why include it in the first place?
It’s frustrating because I’d love to talk about and gush over all of the cool aspects of Wilds, but for a review, there’s largely no point because the overbearing streamlining, hand-holding, and dumbing down of the game completely ruins those cool aspects for me. Anything positive thing I could say would have a hundred caveats waiting in the wings.
For the first time, I have a new entry in one of my favorite video game series, and I have absolutely no desire to play it.
