In our Monster Hunter Wilds review, we take a closer look at the game that takes the series one step further after World and offers an enjoyable hunting experience for experienced players.
Monster Hunter Wilds review : First released in the West in 2018 Monster Hunter World With Rise, we are here with a new version of one of Capcom’s most valuable series, which reached a wide audience and continued its rapid progress with Rise. Unlike Rise, which was released exclusively for Nintendo Switch and then came to other platforms, Monster Hunter Wilds comes as a direct sequel to World.
Monster Hunter Wilds Review: Return to Monster Hunting
Our story begins with a lost child. Based on what this child tells, the Hunter’s Guild learns of the existence of a new and dangerous monster and sends a research team to check it out. During our journey to the Forbidden Lands with our ship, we save the first inhabitants of the region from trouble and set up our camp in the area with its unique features.
With Monster Hunter Wilds, a new path has been chosen in storytelling, this time our hunter is not a silent main character, he has his own comments on events and in some places he has dialogues that give the player freedom of choice. If there were various choices in the story and deeper side characters, it would be a game that could get quite close to classic RPG games. In fact, this time the side characters are not just the guys in the camp, they wander around with you throughout the adventure and constantly remind themselves. Moreover, none of them are annoying.
The constant activity of the characters, the hunters in the camp coming to help when we sent an SOS, their comments while visiting the areas, our supervisor giving us the necessary permissions when the hunt started and sometimes some comments made by our character just before the hunt enriched the atmosphere so much that this time it made me care a little more about the story of the game. The only thing I got a little annoyed with was the kid next to us, and I can’t talk about that too much because of spoilers. By the way, you probably already know that you shouldn’t be happy about finishing the game after the credits roll, but let me remind you again.
Time for Targeted Attacks
When the name of the game is Monster Hunter, we say that the story is limited to a certain point, our goal is to hunt monsters, develop equipment and hunt more monsters. All for ecological balance!! Capcom’s game using the RE Engine is very similar to Monster Hunter World both visually and mechanically. But this does not mean that Wilds is a version released with an expansion pack and different monsters. A lot of different mechanics and things you miss from the old games are waiting for you in Wilds. Let’s look at them.
The hunter’s most important tool is his weapon, here all 14 weapons we used in World are back. There is no new weapon, but almost all of the old weapons have been reworked, making them more comfortable and fun to use. Since I couldn’t get used to the new version of Insect Glaive, which was my favorite in World, and I had limited time to review it, I focused on Long Sword – Dagger – Sword Shield weapons, but I had the chance to try almost all of the weapons. Dagger’s Focus Attack attacks, giving the Attack on Titan atmosphere, attacks to headbutt monsters with shield and sword and push them back, and the new Spirit Sword skills, Long Sword is really fun. Hunting Horn, Bow, Bowgun types have also become effective to use alone.
The newly added Focus Mode in combat mechanics is a great feature. Focus Mode, which you switch to by pressing a button, selects which point of the monster you will target, and you can turn this point into an open wound by hitting it. Open wounds are easier to break, and also provide opportunities for Focus Strike attacks. It creates very good opportunities to disrupt the monster’s balance, gain extra parts and deal high damage. Focus Mode was very useful for me when making heavy but effective attacks such as Hammer and Greatsword, while 75% of the attacks were wasted before, now only half are wasted.
The Hook Slinger, which we can call the hunter’s second weapon (or third now), has an important role in this game. We still pick up and throw explosives from the ground, but now it also allows us to interact with the environment. The slinger has become an important piece of equipment as a tool used to collect materials from the environment, grab pieces dropped by enemies, escape from large attacks by holding on to objects, and activate some traps. Of course, you also use it for objects that will turn the conditions in your favor in various situations, such as flash pod, screamer pod, grounding pod.
Speaking of second weapons, we can now carry two weapons in the game! In World, when monsters switched to their second form while using knives, there were times when I said “I wish I had a hammer now”, the developers must have heard this! With Wilds, we store a second weapon on Seikret and we can call the bird and take the other weapon at any time during the battle. I will talk about Seikret’s other beauties in a moment, but this weapon switching thing is what made me love the bird the most. It is a great innovation that allows for actions like giving a buff to the team with Horn and then switching back to knives.
Seikret is one of the best innovations that Forbidden Lands has to offer us. We no longer have to run everywhere or use taxi services, we call our bird friend, we control it ourselves or it automatically goes fast to the point we put it. We can fight on it, use items and change our weapon with a spare. Seikret, which makes walking around the game more fun, also plays a very effective role in battles. It comes in handy when I’m escaping big attacks, I don’t have to stand still and open to danger in a place to increase the sharpness of my weapon in the middle of the battle, I even drink my potion. Walking with a dog was also good in Rise, but Seikret has managed to surpass it many times over.
When you progress enough to see the credits in the game’s story, higher-level monsters are unlocked. More monsters, different types of monsters you know, and different things come to you for hunting. It took me about 25 hours to even get here, and when I got there I said, “the game hasn’t shown me much yet, there are a lot of new things.” With arena-style fights, research, online features, there is hundreds of hours of playable content. Of course, we can’t tell you more than that without breaking the review rules. But it is known that more monsters will come with periodic updates. My concern about this may be that it will receive fewer updates like Rise, but since it is a sequel to World and I remember how rich its content is, I am not too worried.
Finally, I would like to mention the SOS system. Although I played the game alone for a long time, I needed help in some hunts. In the game, we can throw an SOS Flare and ask for help from other players, this was already there. However, when SOS Flare is active for a while, we can see the NPC hunters we encounter in the camp come and help us. They play well, and I am usually the one who dies in battles. I came across other reviewers a couple of times, either I went to help or they came. In this case, one of the NPC helpers comes out and the player takes his place. Of course, I didn’t have the chance to try the squad or party features on the online side, but I saw that various improvements were made for both solo and friend play.
Graphics and Performance
Wilds, which uses the RE Engine developed with Resident Evil and also used in Monster Hunter World, looks very nice, but it caught our attention with performance issues during the beta period. Although they said that it was an old version and that these problems would not occur in the main game, we still said it was worth being cautious. I played the review version of the game almost flawlessly on my computer with an RTX 4070 graphics card and an AMD Ryzen 5 7600 processor. I got an average of 60 fps at the highest settings at 2K resolution, and when I changed the settings from Ultra to High and turned on DLSS, it ran very smoothly with an average of 75 fps. Well, as someone who played World on PS4 for 2 years at 30 fps, I am happy with this performance, but I also saw that it got higher values at 1080p resolution.
The game looks great, I really enjoyed just walking around the game with the unique structure of each region, places that look different at different times and climate conditions, and giant maps that are directly connected to each other. Different regions are actually directly connected to each other and you can reach another region while traveling with a bird. The game does a short loading during these transitions, it actually does this in a subtle way but for now I noticed it because of the lags during those loadings, maybe it will be smoother on release day.
The graphics look very nice, but maybe it’s because the game’s graphics drivers aren’t ready yet, I encountered various errors. I didn’t have a big problem with loading textures, sometimes there were seconds of delay in large areas. However, there were sudden graphical breaks in some fights. When it happened to me in the open world, I thought it might be because there were too many factors in the environment, but when it happened to me in the arena, in the most closed area possible, and with an enemy that didn’t have very detailed attacks, it felt strange. I couldn’t find any other way to solve it other than seeing my way through a bunch of triangles, running towards a safe point, and praying for it to pass. I know that at least one other person who reviewed also experienced this problem.
The game has once again nailed the music, I liked almost every monster’s theme. Our camp music and the tent’s own theme are also very nice. I’m very happy with the voice acting, I tried the game with both English and Japanese voice acting, both are very good. Now our Palico friends can also speak out loud, their voice acting is also nice, but I think I would prefer it to continue with the “purr purr”.
By the way, let me open a final section on the graphics, the food is again Monster Hunter quality, they look amazing! We make meat, fish, vegetables, etc., we make ribs on the grill, it looks great, but I can’t tell you that there is a feast scene in the game. I had a game session where I didn’t turn down the offer “our village has prepared a feast for you” while playing at night and then looked at the droopy yogurt in the fridge. They just put melted cheese on bread, even that makes you hungry!
Conclusion
Monster Hunter Wilds is a great game. With World, a lot of new players joined the Monster Hunter world, some of them were lukewarm about Rise and preferred not to play it. I am not one of them and I think Rise is a very good game too, but this game is great enough to appeal to everyone who loves World. It is also good enough to make new players play comfortably with a lot of additions that make life easier. It is as if they brought together the best parts of Monster Hunter games and prepared a plate that is good enough for new players to enjoy.
Monster Hunter Wilds, which normally costs $70, is now available on Steam with a price tag of $53 with regional pricing. On consoles, the sale price on the Playstation 5 version.
