A ‘Monster Hunter Wilds’ Review By A New Player

After 50 hours, sixty hunter ranks and five pieces of Arkveld armor, I believe I have put enough time into Monster Hunter Wilds to offer my perspective as a wholly new player to the series. (Well, almost. I did play some amount of hours of Monster Hunter World, but not many, and that was seven years ago. So, I think I still qualify).

The game has you, a Hunter, tasked with killing a number of increasingly large monsters in order to protect local villages, but mostly to carve them up to make sick armor and weapons. My weapons of choice were mainly sword and shield, but also hammer and bow at times. But there are a huge amount to choose from, many getting into strategies about 100x more complex than “hammer goes bonk.”

The main problem, almost the only problem, I ran into during Monster Hunter Wilds was the campaign. Some of this was the story, which never seemed terribly compelling at any point, especially its dreary walk-and-talk segments, but I will admit some of that may have to do with me having no lore-based history with the series.

But the structure was just so slow, and given the fact that you have to almost re-farm everything immediately when the first chunk of the campaign ends (where credits will roll after), the entire campaign is a 15+ hour tutorial mode that gates the more engaging content behind a pretty large wall. The exception to this were the actual monster fights, and the monster-based cutscenes were also stellar.

Monster Hunter is a unique series in the sense that every battle is a boss fight. Though smaller wildlife may sometimes get in your way and is almost instantly crushed, the main draw is a dozen plus monsters that test your strategy, timing and the strength of your gear as you try to smash off plating and tear open wounds. These monsters get abused as you try to shock them, burn them, freeze them, stun them, strip their armor and dig into their weak spots. Though they can give as good as they get, and unless you have perfect dodging or blocking much of the time, they’re going to put you in the earth. Until eventually, this isn’t so much the case.

The process of forging your weapon and making a specific build is fun. Yes, you will end up farming many of the same monsters over and over, but between target-attacking parts and RNG that is frankly, not all that bad, at least parts assembly is nothing that feels overly punishing. Again, being far from an expert, I was able to farm up some of the best gear in the game and take on the hardest monsters with relative ease.

That may be another issue, however. I’ve seen some say that Wilds is actually too easy compared to other titles in the series, and even though I haven’t experienced those, I can say that yes, that’s probably true. And if I’m saying it with no real experience, that sort of says something.

The game actually gets much easier in the endgame, as you start to group up with other players who can tear through high level monsters with great gear. I think I’ve failed maybe ten total hunts in 50 hours, with half of those being in the campaign where I was soloing everything. Other times, it takes one bad player to use up all the revives for a group in a multiplayer hunt, and you can fail that way. But that just doesn’t happen often at all (I think I was only that player maybe…once?).

The game will get harder. Capcom has already announced a new difficulty of monster past Tempered is going to be added in a new Title Update this spring, along with a new monster. I will return for that, but as of now, the only thing I can farm for are tediously tracking down armor spheres or Artian weapon upgrades, and that’s just not as compelling as anything else I’ve experienced in the rest of the game.

I can understand how new players might immediately bounce off Monster Hunter Wilds. It is very much unlike any other looter out there, or boss-focused games like your Soulslikes. The campaign is not a great introduction to all this, but once you start getting the flow of the monster fights, farming up gear and getting to high-level beasts, it really comes together. It just takes a while, though by the time you reach the apex, the difficulty sort of drops off a cliff. It’s been a bit of an odd experience, but an enjoyable one.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.