Review: Monster Hunter Wilds dazzles with beauty but lacks heart

A large beast covered in fur dives through a small, circular arena in the Iceshard Cliffs, tendrils of segmented scales twisting away from its body as it lunges forward and attempts to knock me off balance. I dive between its legs, blades whirling, opening a wound on its exposed chest. Instinctively I take advantage of this opportunity, and in an instant I fly through the air, driving the curved edge of my dual blades over the length of its body, controller vibrating with each impact. Back arching with one final cry, it slumps to the ground and I immediately begin the task of harvesting its corpse for rare materials. A pop-up flashes on the right side of my screen. A new monster has entered the area. It’s time to hunt.

This is the core of Capcom’s Monster Hunter series. You travel out in the world to hunt large beasts of varying size — some more deadly than others. But as Monster Hunter has continued to burgeon in popularity, with Monster Hunter: World selling an additional 1 million copies in the lead-up to Monster Hunter Wilds, the series has undergone a fundamental shift: discarding the need for extensive battle preparations in favor of ease of access, an expanded narrative over simplicity, and story told mostly through text-based quests. It’s the team at Capcom pushing Monster Hunter further and further into the mainstream, for better or for worse.

The developers have continued to place an emphasis on narrative in Monster Hunter through Wilds. While the game has significantly fewer cutscenes (which you can skip this time around) than Monster Hunter: World and its Iceborne expansion, Wilds instead railroads you into forced walking segments where you listen to your companions converse about the current goings-on within whatever locale you are exploring for the first time. These moments are agonizing, purely for the pace and frequency with which they happen, and I doubt they would be more tolerable if the narrative were more interesting. These segments feel as though they were created to showcase just how much detail has been put into these new environments, with some prompts popping up to draw your attention to specific landmarks, but again, to ill effect. It kills any upward momentum the game has managed to create between hunts, which makes the first half of the game drag on.

The Monster Hunter Wilds developers clearly took a generous amount of inspiration from a handful of Indigenous peoples, like the Aleuts of North America or various Mesoamerican tribes. Wilds paints them in broad strokes to create a muddied visual and cultural identity for the native inhabitants of The Forbidden Lands. All we learn about them in the story, to any great degree, is that they are under siege by the wildlife with which they had previously coexisted in some kind of harmony shortly before our arrival — and it’s up to us to find out why. Your protagonist, the Hunter, will move from village to village, protecting these people from monsters, participating in cultural ceremonies that have gone awry, or digging deep into the underground of The Forbidden Lands to discover the true culprit behind what is throwing everything into a state of disorder. This story carries the same notes as Monster Hunter Rise, but instead of the Hunter being a part of the community, we are an outsider who is the only one capable of fighting back against the environmental hazards given flesh, accompanied by a mysterious Indigenous boy and a flock of other hunters setting up camp in this otherwise unexplored portion of the world.

As I was playing through Wilds, that was one of the things that stuck out to me the most — community. In previous titles, with World being the exception, your player character was part of the community. You lived in the region you hunted, fighting back against natural threats posed by monstrous wildlife. And while your comrades from the Hunter’s Guild do accompany you to The Forbidden Lands in Wilds, the camps you set up aren’t as fully realized as previous player hubs, with no communal areas to break bread or gorge yourself on sumptuous-looking slices of meat with other players. So much of Wilds feels antithetical to the narrative and themes of the series, as vague as they were, with much of it previously having been told through quest text as you move from hunt to hunt. Wilds lacks even this, with the game feeling stripped-down narratively and even in the way you interact with its changing environments.

There is no doubt the Capcom team put a significant amount of effort into the handful of regions you can explore, ranging from verdant jungles, frozen caves dusted with snow, and sprawling deserts. But there were only a handful of times in which I was actually able to appreciate the level of detail put into these areas, because most of the time I was on my Seikret, tapping a button to put it on autopilot to navigate to my next objective. It doesn’t help that you can just snatch up herbs, bugs, and other ingredients without even having to get down from the back of your new mount. You aren’t forced to engage with the environment in any significant way. In World, I was at least forced to remember landmarks, to take note of various hazards or even tangles of vines that could trap whatever I was hunting. I can’t say the same for Wilds, even if the very few moments I chose to stop to take in the scenery were exceptionally cool. Taking a break from gathering ore, I watched a bird land on an unassuming plant only to get devoured by it. I watched pterodactyl-like monsters land in shallow pools of water to slurp up small fish. I watched rain roll in through the Scarlet Forest and with it, the endemic life change almost entirely. All of this detail is incredible, but there isn’t any reason to engage with it, nor does the game actively encourage you to stop and notice it. Instead, you move mindlessly from hunt to hunt, with much more of the “tedious” aspects of the game removed.

You can cook on the fly, you can gather from the back of your Seikret, you can do just about everything on the field without reason to return to a main hub or one of your pop-up camps. Even supplies are sent to you intermittently. The only reason I ever actually did visit a camp was to stock up on traps and tranquilizers to capture monsters instead of slay them — which you’re taught to do after you complete the main story. In fact, so many basic upgrades are locked behind its completion. You actually can’t even upgrade your Palico’s skills without completing it. Thankfully the main story wasn’t very long, and I was able to beat it in under 10 or so hours. Completion time will probably vary from player to player, but once you’ve knocked that out of the way, you can actually get into the real meat of the game, as the main story is almost agonizingly easy to a veteran player.

I ran through the story with minimal upgrades; I only upgraded my weapon twice, opting for the paralyzing dual blades of the Lala Barina (which felt extremely overpowered), and my armor once to get some choice passives. I want to say Wilds is perhaps the easiest entry in the series yet, largely due to the new Wound system, which allows you to perform special attacks on monsters that deal devastating amounts of damage — often netting you monster parts or in some cases knocking them over. The dual blades had me tearing through even the most formidable monsters, lacerating their legs, puncturing their hides, and creating wound after wound to continue a cycle of just dealing a disgusting amount of damage over and over and over again in a way that almost felt mind-numbing. I zoned out during fights, my evade window so large that I could often get a boost from perfect dodging attacks, which meant when I would dodge I would also spin around in a flurry of blades, dealing even more damage. Frustrated, I switched to the Hunting Horn weapon to try and give myself a challenge. But the experience was mostly the same.

Even High Rank hunts, tempered monsters and all, felt a touch too easy. And as I clocked in at around 60 or so hours, having soloed the main scenario and all of the endgame content, I walked away feeling unsatisfied. There is not a doubt in my mind that the fun I will find with Monster Hunter Wilds will be with friends, because when I did jump into a multiplayer session with another reviewer, I was having a blast. It was fun coordinating attacks and being able to seamlessly join them on hunts. This is where I think Wilds shines — its multiplayer component and the general stability of online lobbies. Outside of a few hiccups on the end of the other player, online ran extremely smoothly, and there were no lobby issues for me like there were in World.

And for the most part, the game performed great. I experienced little to no frame drops on PC, even if lowering the texture quality to medium makes the game look less than ideal. Character models specifically look a bit muddy, and pop-ins are bound to happen. There were a few times my camera freaked out, which caused random triangles to pop up in the periphery of my screen if I swiveled my camera a bit too close to a wall. But I doubt most players are diving into Monster Hunter Wilds for the character creator, which is no Dragon’s Dogma 2 and does a serviceable job, or to scrutinize every little detail in the zones or on the monsters themselves. That said, the game was stable, and sometimes that’s all you can really ask for in something as ambitious as Monster Hunter Wilds.

Yet I continued to yearn for what the series used to be: the friction, the necessity of gathering and preparation for hunts, a larger sense of community, and a real challenge if you chose to go it alone. Monster Hunter Wilds is no doubt a step forward in a lot of ways, with the technical aspects of these games increasingly more impressive than the last. Though I can’t help but feel like the core identity of the series is getting lost along the way.

Monster Hunter Wilds will be released Feb. 28 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a pre-release download code provided by Capcom. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.