Monster Hunter Wilds Review
Gather, Hunters! The Guild Authorizes You To Explore the Forbidden Lands.
Since its initial announcement just over a year ago, Monster Hunter Wilds promised to add quite a lot to the traditional Monster Hunter experience: seamless transitions between areas, dynamic environments, more and larger monsters, and greater fluidity in exploration and combat. To its credit, Wilds excels marvelously in almost all these respects and offers even more than advertised, especially regarding its presentation, monster encounters, and, most surprisingly, a good chunk of its plot. While it struggles somewhat with its gameplay balance and incorporation of systems, Wilds still offers some genuinely epic boss showdowns, which anchor an overall thrilling experience.
At the outset, Monster Hunter Wilds lets the player customize their hunter who is on a ship traveling to the “Forbidden Lands,” which are unexplored and, to the best knowledge of the ship’s denizens, uninhabited. The ship quickly finds a young boy, Nata, lying unconscious on the desert sands. After waking him, they discover that he comes from a village attacked by the “White Wraith.” From there, much of the plot sees the hunter, their crew, and Nata attempting to find his village and track down this ever-elusive creature.
Much of the game is spent chasing after the destructive White Wraith.
Surprisingly for the series, the plot and the characters are fascinating, and the expedition through the various biomes and the civilizations within them hold a lot of surprises and intrigue. There’s a delicate, well-balanced theme of each settlement’s dependence on the environment and the constantly changing weather. The initial exploration of how each region’s apex monster affects the lives and rituals of its societies carries decent emotional weight. The general reverence and respect given to the locals by the hunter’s foreign party is also a source of intrigue, especially with the voice performances of key party members within the hunter’s designated “Avis Unit.” Alma, who serves as the hunter’s handler and field guide, and Gemma, who is the unit’s smithy, are both charismatic and generally have interesting interactions with Nata and the various people they encounter. That said, the game’s latter half is less compelling, unevenly paced, and suffers from repetition of content and some dull optional quests.
But of course, no evaluation of a Monster Hunter game is complete without discussing the most important aspect: the monsters. Where Wilds excels the most is in its overall presentation of the creatures and their locales; the composite biomes are absolutely teeming with life, vibrance, and, most importantly, a genuinely stunning variety of well-designed monsters. In the game’s opening area, the Windward Plains, there are massive herds of Caratonoth, stegosaurus-like creatures with large spikes on their back that channel the area’s frequent lightning strikes. Dalthydon, herbivore herd animals, band together for protection against sandstorms and other hazards. These creatures’ designs, movements, and interactions with each other significantly amplify the game’s immersion and make each area feel organic and cohesive.
The environments and their monsters really feel lively and vivid.
The larger monster designs are where the game truly shines, and perhaps the best illustration of this comes from an early game boss, the Lala Barina. A spider-like creature whose abdomen can transform into a bright red rose, it moves and strikes with an unsettling jerkiness. It also has a disgustingly beautiful gracefulness as it pirouettes around the arena and releases paralyzing rose petals, which players must dodge around. The creature’s visual spectacle is gorgeous and unnerving, and its design represents the overall outstanding monster creativity. The game’s various creatures are stellar across the board, especially among the game’s premier behemoths, the apex predators of each region.
The monsters aren’t just a joy to look at, though. They’re also a thrill to fight, which is made possible by the game’s combat system. Players can choose from fourteen different weapons, all of which have their own distinct move sets and abilities. This enables a wide variety of different playstyles to adapt to the game’s various monsters; for committing to big hits and damage, the Great Sword might be the best option, but the Dual Blades may work better for those who value a more evasive and adaptive approach. Whatever the case, all these weapons are viable options, and it’s clear that attention and care were put into designing them, as they all feel satisfying and fluid to use.
Using them against larger monsters, accordingly, feels fun, rewarding, and engaging. In combat, players attack their foe’s body parts, creating wounds that can be exploited to stun them and inflict massive damage. The largest monsters, particularly the apex predators of each region, are some of the most visually stunning and epic encounters not just in modern action RPGs but in any game, period. The way they incorporate their region-specific abilities into the fights is a constant surprise and spectacle to behold. This is doubly true in how they interact with the environment and their superbly designed arenas, further bolstering the presentation of these encounters.
The Lala Barina in its utterly stunning den.
Unfortunately, the gameplay is not all sunshine and rainbows. Monster Hunter Wilds fares significantly worse in interaction outside of combat. This is particularly evident in its equipment, resource gathering, environmental, and item management systems. All of these components do not interact or mesh well with the game’s incredible combat. While these aspects are tightly designed, their usefulness is highly questionable due to the game’s balancing. Further, engaging with them is difficult due to bloated, confusing, and obtuse user interfaces and explanations.
One crucial aspect of any Monster Hunter game is fighting or taking down monsters, then utilizing the various broken parts to become stronger through crafting equipment. In Wilds, this often feels unnecessary, and it’s very rare that the game necessitates or even encourages the player to utilize the smithy. For skilled players or series veterans, it is troublingly possible to progress for extensively long periods of time without needing to upgrade armor. This is possible primarily because the game is just too easy. While bosses carry surprises the first time players face them, there isn’t enough damage output or threat to reliably carry the danger of failure.
On occasions where the game attempts to be more challenging, such as against some of the apex predators, the ease and abundance of healing items wholly trivializes the threat. It is not uncommon for players at high health but without defensive buffs to survive a long-telegraphed arena-wide explosion, and immediately be able to heal straight back up. This overabundance of items, which can be fully replenished if players faint or leave a fight, also reduces engagement with resource gathering, which is unfortunate, as Wilds sports one of the smoothest gathering experiences in gaming. Its wide-ranging grappling hook is an apparatus that values the player’s time and would reward engagement with the environment if only item crafting were more useful and applicable to combat.
The grappling hook’s utility goes beyond gathering honey — it also spices up combat by increasing vertical maneuverability.
Plenty of examples drive home the lack of synthesis between combat and the game’s lush, brilliant ecological design. In the game, players can gather Brightmoss, which can be shot at enemies using the hook slinger, and if Vespoid monsters are in the area, they will swarm the targeted enemy to inflict massive damage. Additionally, in the Windward Plains, if there is a group of Talioths (small, raptor-like monsters) nearby, players can draw a larger boss monster like the Chatacabra or Quematrice into their area to have them attack the monster and draw enmity away temporarily. These systems are brilliantly designed and work flawlessly when engaged with. However, in actual practice, the game never gives any real impetus to utilize them, which is a disappointing missed opportunity that undermines the developers’ clear effort and attention to the environmental interplay.
Irrespective of the game’s failure to properly integrate its systems, it’s important to note that they are still helpful and well-designed. The armor is stunningly gorgeous, and playing with abilities and stylizing the hunter and their Palico companion is fun. Luckily, engaging with equipment is more consistently useful in the late game when High Rank equipment is introduced. But the ability and relative ease of getting by without them undermines so much of what the series is known for. Gameplay concessions to garner wider appeal were already present in World and Rise but are taken to an entirely new level here.
In the game’s other dimensions, it is worth noting that Wilds’ graphical fidelity is mostly phenomenal, as is its performance on PlayStation 5. Frame rate drops are near-nonexistent, which helps to keep combat smooth. Beautifully designed areas are brought to life with spectacular lighting, dazzling colors, and impressive design. However, it is not uncommon for these areas to slowly render, especially in cutscenes or when transitioning from scenes to gameplay. Dialogue also strangely suffers from odd pauses and occasionally bad lip-syncing, though this doesn’t hamper the experience too much.
The scope of the world and the sheer amount of graphical detail is both awe-inspiring and breathtakingly gorgeous.
Sonically, the English voice acting is crisp and effective across the board, and the musical tracks are delightfully well-composed. Alma, Gemma, Olivia, and Fabius all stand out as noteworthy voice performances, with Anjali Kunapaneni as Alma speaking with empathy and intellectual alertness, befitting her role as a cultural anthropologist and handler of the player’s hunter. Music during boss fights, especially the apex predators, explodes with all the proper bombast, and tracks are littered with fitting, fight-specific orchestral flairs. The quieter compositions are even more interesting, and one camp track has a curious combination of a Western-style slide guitar and hammered dulcimer that fuses together surprisingly well.
Overall, Monster Hunter Wilds is a truly extraordinary game and a masterpiece of presentation. With its compelling monster designs, riveting fights, and amazingly lush world, it’s bound to thrill and fill players with intrigue and wonder as they smoothly and effortlessly traverse beautifully crafted environments on their Seikret mount. The environmental systems and interactions between monsters are truly something to behold, and even though their integration leaves more to be desired, the rest of the package soars tremendously high in every other element for what ultimately amounts to a monstrously mouthwatering RPG.
Disclosure: This review is based on a free copy of the game provided by the publisher.
Gorgeously designed and inspired monsters and environments
Exciting and riveting combat, especially against apex predators
Outstanding presentation, musically and graphically
Some odd visual rendering issues and dialogue breaks
Interactive systems are poorly incorporated due to the game's easiness
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