Monster Hunter Wilds has taken a huge leap graphically since the last Monster Hunter game with one of the biggest changes being a dynamic weather system making hunts constantly look refreshing and unique. All the areas look great and are packed with details and the monsters animations are smoother than ever making hunts feel a lot more enjoyable and cinematic. If you're playing on PC and have the specs for it you can crank the graphics up to make the game look even better but for most that isn't possible which brings me to my next point:
Sadly this game's performance leaves a lot to be desired. If you're playing on PC you require some very beefy specs to play without making the game look very bad, and lowering the settings really does make the game look impressively bad, especially considering how good it CAN look. Capcom has promised to continue updating the game and will keep attempting to fix PC performance (As I'm writing this the next big patch with any kind of performance enhancements is still months away though). As for console, I can only tell you what I've read online: It comes with a high graphic fidelity setting for 30 FPS, a balanced setting for 40 FPS and a performance setting for 60 FPS but most people mention their consoles are struggling to maintain any of these steadily.
Monster Hunter games have never been known for having an amazing story, it rather just feels like a way to push you from hunt to hunt and area to area. To summarize it shortly: you play as a hunter, who is tasked to (together with an expansive team) delve into a previously thought uninhabited land to help a young boy called Nata find their people again after he barely escaped with his life when a large monster attacked his village. Along the way you realize these lands are a lot less uninhabited than you previously thought with multiple villages of people, a massive ecosystem of monsters and other species is living here. Wilds tries to make the story a bit more interesting than it was in previous games but really, all I'm here for is:
The gameplay is really the main draw of the Monster Hunter games and Wilds is no different. You get to choose between 14 different types of weapons, all with very varying movesets and all very viable to use. No matter what you choose to use (and you can actually bring 2 with you to every hunt!), if you put enough time into learning all the ins and outs any weapon can be very powerful and satisfying to use. The game has 29 large monsters to hunt (and a lot of smaller species like endemic life, fish and small monsters) of which 20 are completely new and 9 are returning monsters from previous games, with every single one of these monsters having their own unique weapon and armor builds.
The 2 biggest new gameplay mechanics of Wilds are the focus mode and the wounds system. Focus mode allows you to aim your weapons with high precision, which is especially nice for hitting those slow and hard hitting attacks even when monsters move around a lot. The wounds system allows you to 'create' wounds on large monsters by hitting them in the same spot a bunch. These 2 mechanics work amazingly well together, focus mode allowing you to easily hit the same spot of a monster a lot of times and then when a wound is created, every weapon has a focus attack that, when it hits a wound, performs a very powerful and flashy attack doing a lot of damage, breaking the wound and often knocking down monsters to allow you to use your hardest-hitting combos.
Finding and using a weapon that suits your preferred playstyle, learning monsters' movesets and using the new focus mode and wounds system makes for a very satisfying gameplay loop. The only real complaint I have is that some of the hunts can really drag on and start to feel repetitive, especially for monsters that fly around a lot (this is probably not as bad if you use a ranged weapon though) and monsters that constantly move to different areas where it sometimes feels more like you're just chasing a monster instead of hunting it.
Monster Hunter games are never the hardest games out there at launch. Just like in past titles, you start off in Low Rank and somewhere past the halfway point of the game you reach High Rank. I'm not the greatest Monster Hunter player out there but I didn't lose a single hunt until after I had beaten the story and I started grinding the post-game 'Tempered' versions of monsters (which are harder versions of previously fought monsters). Previous games did eventually get a paid expansion that adds a lot of new content (often doubling that of the base game) and a new difficulty rank called G Rank or Master Rank which is often where the real difficult hunts start, but it remains to be seen if an expansion like this will be released for this game and if it's as difficult as it is in previous games.
They have, as of writing this, added 3 new monsters to the game in the form of free 'Title updates" which definitely turn up the difficulty a bit compared to the base game monsters and more are planned to come soon.
The amount of playtime you’ll get from Wilds really depends on how much you struggle with hunts and how much of a completionist you are. It took me just over 50 hours to finish all side quests and grind out a solid build, but there’s still a lot of content I could do. You can easily sink 100+ hours into hunting Tempered monsters, completing timed challenges and event quests, raising your hunter rank, and playing multiplayer with friends or random people. If you only plan to beat the main story and skip most optional content, expect 15–25 hours.
Monster Hunter Wilds feels like a natural follow up for the series, with a new open world that still keeps the addictive gameplay loop of the previous games. Whether you're a veteran of the series or a new hunter, this is definitely a must-play. Really the only downside I can give is the inconsistent performance across all systems (except probably GeForce Now) and a less than stellar story, but really, that's not why I come to Monster Hunter.
