Monster Hunter: Wilds [Review]

MH Wilds is a game that has amazing bosses, great mechanics and tight gameplay while being impressively approachable most of the time and still super fun and wildly addictive, with one of the best gameplay loops in gaming AND you can play with your friends!!

The thing is that the same could also be said about any recent Monster Hunter game. So when you consider what the previous base games were, and then compare with Wilds, there are lots of things that stack better, and others that definitely feel like a downgrade.

The faster battles and ease of movement and aiming provided by most of the new game mechanics is something that I've felt personally happy to find on Wilds, but undoubtedly makes the amount of monsters feels less than previous games (while actually having the same amount of base World). This faster battle system sometimes equates to easier fights, if you properly exploit some new mechanics – the game is still challenging of course, but not as I expected to be.

While the main character is voiced and most of the content is dubbed and in high quality, the story is way more intrusive on the low rank than it should be. And, honestly, it is basically the same thing from every other game in the series, now being even more serious and toned down. It still has some expected MonHun silliness, though.

The maps are big and absolutely gorgeous, the weather system is superb, everything feels really high quality and all the zones are nice and pretty but not really as open-ended as they appear to be. It has some “autoplay” functionality, though, and the activities to do around these remarkable environments aren't that diversified, making everything too automated, and sometimes it feels that the game plays itself while exploring.

The menus are a mess (as in every other monster hunter game), there are several kinds of parties, lobbies, links, and whatnot, and it has so many legacy systems that it is super confusing for people that never played a monster hunter game. Again, the way to play together can be convoluted and a mixture of multiplayer and single player moments, something that they've solved on MonHun Rise but now returned to be as bad as World.

I always try to play a game without the toxic mindset of overly comparing with what I've played before. With franchise games, though, this is hard to avoid. Wilds should have been bigger than the games of the previous generations of Monster Hunter in every aspect. Yes, it should have more monsters than any other base game of the series, but it doesn't. Yes, it should have some REALLY new mechanic, like a new weapon, but it doesn't. It should have overhauled all the UI to be less strange, and it should have a better story. All of those things weren't done in Wilds. So it feels more iterative than ever before, more of the same great monster hunter.

That's the thing with franchises that don't really divert from their formulas: is the new iteration of it really worth the price considering how similar it is with previous (and way, way cheaper) games? For me, it was – Monster Hunter is always fun, and I'll return to the expansion, when it arrives.

But for a new player or for someone who hasn't played many games from the franchise yet, Wilds may be too iterative to really justify its price and system requirements. I know that this game is probably going to be the first Monster Hunter for a lot of people, and kudos to Capcom for making this franchise so relevant, but really, if you can't play Wilds, instead of buying a new graphic card or console, you can just buy Worlds+Iceborne or Rise+Sunbreak.

All in all, a great game. Had a great time.

8.5/10