Let us consider for a moment the duality of Monster Hunter. At a basic level, it couldn’t be easier to explain – practically everything you need to know is right there in the title! This is a series about tracking enormous beasts, clobbering them into submission, then crafting their bits into better gear, fancier weapons – endlessly repeating that cycle until you simply can’t muster the enthusiasm anymore. But it’s also a series that’s accrued such a vast wealth of interlinking and often comically opaque systems over its two decades of existence that even old-timers like me usually end up having to resort to a Google.
Monster Hunter Wilds reviewDeveloper: CapcomPublisher: CapcomPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out on 28th February on PC (Steam), PS5 and Xbox Series X/S
You’ve got your armour crafting and weapon smithing; your elemental weaknesses and exploits; an ever-stacking list of buffs and gemstone augmentations; cooking that radically impacts your performance depending on the ingredients you shove in the pot; inventories overflowing with the mildly baffling likes of deodorant and exploding poop – all crafted from materials meticulously gathered out in the world. And that’s just the basic stuff. Monster Hunter is a – a staggeringly deep sandbox of murderous refinement, where possibilities pile on top of opportunities until you either run away screaming or it consumes you whole.
2018’s Monster Hunter Worlds – a soft reboot of sorts for the series – was arguably Capcom’s first real attempt at paring back some of that accumulated legacy faff in the name of long-overdue modernisation. But Monster Hunter Wilds goes even further. Nothing feels like it’s escaped scrutiny this time around, with countless core systems either being whittled down to their fundamentals, jettisoned entirely, or expanded to their ultimate form. And there’s no better example of this last one than Wilds’ vast sprawl of undulating sand dunes, lush waterlogged forests, fire-blasted caverns, and snowy peaks – all seamlessly connected for the very first time. That’s not to say Wilds is an open-world Monster Hunter, though. As expansively labyrinthine as its individual biomes often are, they’re still discrete locales linked to their neighbours by a single funnel-like point. So while it’s the kind of change that sounds neat on paper, there’s little meaningful impact in gameplay terms, particularly as you’ll mostly be teleporting around.
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Where Wilds’ world design start to feel radical is in its focus on interactivity and reactivity – weather events, wandering monsters, roaming herds, and scenery all interact to create the illusion of a living, breathing ecosystem far beyond anything the series has accomplished before. Monsters can hunt in constantly fluctuating packs to pile on the pressure; they’ll scrap with huge herds of lesser wildlife, sometimes to the point the sheer amount of chaos onscreen feels a little overwhelming. Sand dunes slowly sag beneath enormous beasts, ice platforms shatter underfoot, heavy footfalls create tidal waves in rushing waters, and there’s no end of crumbling spires, precarious boulders, and other environmental hazards waiting to be exploited in battle. Sure, much of this is built on the foundations laid in Monster Hunter World, but Wilds evolves those ideas to create a wilderness that’s truly exhilarating in its dynamism.
Eventually, biomes grow even more frenetic as Wilds piles on rarer monsters, more exotic combinations. The world enters a state of constant flux, shifting not only from day to night but across changing seasons. Verdant fauna and abundant wildlife make way for fallow periods, before vicious electrical storms, torrential rainfall, and heat waves sweep in to herald a new season of plenty – each change impacting the monsters, endemic life, and other events you’ll see. All this happens in real-time; sandstorms slowly creep across the horizon before engulfing the desert whole, while raindrops turn to torrents, transforming still forest pools into surging currents. Even the corpses seemingly rot over time! Not all biomes are created equal, mind; later areas devolve into a series of rather squalid, indistinct spaces that don’t have quite the same impact or sense of life as Wilds’ early forest and desert biomes. But even so, the engine of movement driving the world makes for something that can be thrillingly dynamic and gloriously unpredictable when it all comes together.