Humanity has always told stories of brave explorers venturing off the corners of the maps in the name of discovery, contending with great beasts that defy both legend and description. Capcom’s Monster Hunter franchise has made a name for itself by making those tales true, and their latest outing, Monster Hunter Wilds, is an incomparable triumph in furthering those myths.
You play as, fittingly, a hunter, tasked with escorting a young boy named Nata back to his home village with the help of an expeditionary fleet. The catch? His village resides somewhere in the Forbidden Lands, an area of the map that has been cut off from the world for a thousand years. No human life was thought to be there, and any evidence of it being inhabited would have remained secret without Nata.
But that’s just a basic plot setup, and Monster Hunter has never been known for its plot. While Wilds invests much more time and care into its narrative than other entries, I wouldn’t call it matching other story titans in the industry like God of War (2018), Spec Ops: The Line (2012), or any of the Xenoblade Chronicles games. No, what Monster Hunter has always excelled at is the gameplay, and I am beyond happy to say that Wilds pushes that envelope even further. Going back to a more grounded feel like Monster Hunter World (2018), Wilds somehow makes fighting large monsters with even bigger swords feel true to life, which is no small task for a game with 14 entirely different and varied weapon types, each with drastically different movesets and game feel. I dabbled in several but mainly stuck to my old reliable sword and shield, allowing for fast, quick attacks that build up large damage after successive hits rather than a single, massive blow. It kept me light on my feet, and I was able to dodge nearly anything a monster threw at me.
But how are the monsters? Well, this is perhaps the best starting lineup of creature features that any Monster Hunter title has ever boasted. There is a fantastic mix of archetypes that manages to innovate off of existing model skeletons and introduces a monster type that I hope stays around: cephalopods. That’s right — you fight octopuses. Specifically, a giant, tar-covered beastie with a fondness for setting both itself, and you, on fire. (It is a wild fight, and wholly unlike anything else in the series!)
I spent about 17 hours in the game to roll the first set of credits and finish the main narrative, but, as I am a veteran of the series, I know and am prepared for the fact that the majority of time spent in a Monster Hunter game takes place after the credits. That’s when you fight harder monsters and really start to dig into the gameplay loop the story has made you comfortable with: hunt monster, carve body parts from its corpse, and make weapons and armor from those parts to hunt tougher monsters. There’s not a standard leveling system like in a Final Fantasy or a Persona game. Progression is tied to gear and the player’s own personal experience, and it feels incredible.
Now for the bad. It’s really badly optimized. I played on a pretty strong PC — RTX 4070 Super and 16 gigabytes of VRAMM — and I had frequent drops in frame rate that went from 70-80 frames all the way down to 10 for no apparent reason. It happened both inside and outside of combat, sometimes when I just turned the camera. My rig was able to brute-force the issue, but, on a weaker PC, the game could easily become unplayable. I recommend this video from the YouTube channel Digital Foundry for more detailed information on performance, but I caution anyone against this game until it has sorely needed performance patches. As for consoles, I have a friend playing on a base PlayStation 5, and he says it runs great. I cannot speak to Xbox performance.
If you can look past or slip around the performance issues, Monster Hunter Wilds is a must-play game of the year and a strong contender for Game of the Year come December. You can find it on all platforms bar the Switch. Happy hunting!
See monsterhunter.com/wilds/en-us.
