Monster Hunter Wilds

Every Monster Hunter has a wall about six hours in where the game stops explaining and expects you to have absorbed a decade of convention. Wilds does not have that wall. The tutorial is genuinely a tutorial, weapon movesets are laid out in a menu you will actually read, and the Seikret mount handles the navigation that used to eat a third of every hunt.

The hunts are better than ever

Monsters now move through a living map with weather that changes their behaviour, and a hunt can begin as one fight and become another when a second monster arrives with its own agenda. The wound system — striking a damaged area to open it and follow up — gives every weapon a reason to reposition rather than orbit, and it is the best combat change the series has made since the underwater experiment was abandoned.

Focus mode is the other addition and it is close to a cheat. Aiming attacks precisely at a wound turns the good players into extremely good ones.

Hunts

Over 400

Weapons mastered

Charge Blade, Insect Glaive, Bow

Carts

47

The endgame is thin

That is the cost. Everything that made the series demanding has been softened, and the high rank grind that historically carried a hundred hours arrives with fewer monsters and far less difficulty than World or Rise had at the same point. I hit the ceiling of the challenge at around hour seventy and spent the following fifty in a loop that was pleasant rather than tense.

Capcom has historically fixed this with an expansion, which is a reasonable pattern and also not something a review can score.

Where it slips

Performance on PC was poor at launch and remains uneven, especially in the base camps where the frame rate can halve for no visible reason. The story is also more insistent than the series needs — long cutscenes at the start of hunts, characters explaining what you can see.

The verdict

A hundred and twenty-eight hours, most of them very good, and the first Monster Hunter I would hand to someone with no history in it. Veterans will hit the bottom of it faster than they want to.

Play with the mouse and keyboard if you have never used a controller for this. It finally works.