It’s been a while since we did a full 3-part review (initial, further and final thoughts), but Monster Hunter Wilds is going to require it!
At about 10 hours in, we haven’t even got out of the low-rank story stuff yet. But there’s so much to talk about!
That’s the point of the initial thoughts phase of the review. Get all those immediate knee-jerk reactions out there. Then we can assess it further down the line.
Monster Hunter Wilds has absolutely filled our heads up with so much, we’re bursting to get it out. So, let’s crack on.
Monster Hunter Wilds
Lets go over things broadly, first.
Monster Hunter Wilds feels like the most realised version of the series to date. Fluid, accessible and with a proper narrative focus. It’s taken what World and Rise have done, and merged them into something quite exceptional.
How it looks and how it feels are of course impacted by performance, so let’s start there with the detail.
Performance
Performance on PC is a hot topic, for sure. But so far, moment to moment gameplay has been fine at 1080p getting a pretty solid 60fps
That’s on a RTX 4060, 32GB RAM and a Ryzen 7 5700X3D processor. So not earth shattering, but fine for most things.
We can’t vouch for consoles. And to be honest, you should reasonable expect a 30 or 40 series card to deliver with ease. But it looks like Monster Hunter Wilds is in need of some serious optimisation according to Digital Foundry and online forums.
We can’t stream it with any consistency, which is a pain. But hopefully things will improve in the coming weeks.
Not great at launch for a lot of people. But, conversely, I’ve seen reports of Monster Hunter Wilds running reasonable on the Steam Deck. So we have some investigative work to do!
Narrative
Monster Hunter, to me, has never been about the story. Often cutscenes there to fill the time or introduce you to monsters.
Wilds feels like it’s delivering a coherent story, with characters you care about and in an engaging way. It’s really taken me by surprise this time around.
Sure, you’re part of the guild, travelling, learning, exploring. Same old. But now there’s a narrative thread to follow and everything falls in around it.
Will it win story awards? No. Dialogue is often a bit naff, too.
But, it’s trying and it’s much more engaging than we expected it to be.
Aesthetic
I’ll say it. I don’t think Monster Hunter games have ever really looks good.
They look fine, and serve the gameplay perfectly. But people looking for 1440p and 4k are crazy to me. The textures are always a bit retro, the lighting is usually ok. Monster designs and animations are excellent. But they’re never likely to win awards for being the best-looking games in the world.
Monster Hunter Wilds follows on in the same tradition. Although cutscenes are slick, moreso than ever before in my experience. Add to it that open world that vibrantly and very visibly changes between the Fallow and Plenty seasonal changes. These are impressive and the Plenty looks stunning against those Fallow days.
The music is excellent, as always. Something Capcom let-rip on in this series is the scoring and audio, for sure.
A great experience as always, but not going to change the world on a visual level. Particularly where so many people are experiencing significant performance issues.
That’s it for now
As we carry on there’s one big element missing here which is the gameplay, the moment-to-moment action, the open world stylings of Monster Hunter Wilds. Until we’ve finished the story and started on the High Rank content, and spent more time off-rails, it seems redundant to go into it now.
That considered, it’s worth saying how great it feels to hop onto your Seikret and just go for a wander. We also need to change those awful auto-route settings where the Seikret just basically drives itself. It hasn’t been important enough yet, but once we’re out of the training wheels, there are changes to make so we can settle in properly.
All being well, in the next week or so, we’ll be hitting HR and really into the meat of the game.