Feudal Japan occupies a unique place in pop culture. From the jokey satire of Gintama to the tragedy of Ghost of Tsushima, there’s an almost ubiquitous fascination with the world of bushido, and samurai culture in general. Now we see a fresh take on this romanticised setting, Wild Hearts doing so through the use of fictional ‘karakuri’ — ancient tech that very few can wield to fabricate devices out of thin air.
You could be forgiven for trying to boil Wild Hearts down to “Monster Hunter had a baby with Fortnite and raised it with Tsushima”, but that would be far too reductive and not entirely accurate. While there are similarities and potentially even inspirations, Wild Hearts is very much its own game doing its own thing.
Monster Hunter is, however, the easiest comparison to draw, thanks to both games being in the hunting genre. Instead of monsters, you have kemono (the Japanese for ‘monster’ if you drop the first letter — I see what you did there, Koei Tecmo), but otherwise it’s pretty similar at a basic level: pick one of eight weapons, choose a monster to hunt and go and hit it until one of you dies.
But Wild Hearts is very different to its forbears and inspirations in several ways. Unlike Monster Hunter, where there’s all manner of wyverns and dragons, this game is very much grounded in nature, asking what would happen if you infused animals with nature, and the power to shape the natural world. This leaves us with giant rodents, the aptly named Kingtusk and a slew of other monsters. As the embodiment of raw natural power, the kemono look more demonic than the bestiary of Monster Hunter, especially when you compare Kingtusk to, say, a Bullfango, but that doesn’t make them look any less cool. We don’t know why they look so demonic at this point, or if that ties into the story, but we do know there is an overarching story to play through, and that the once-peaceful kemono are now driving people from their lands.
We also know that you’re a boar hunter in this world of Azuma. You happen across a strange device — a karakuri left by an ancient, far more advanced civilisation – immediately before losing a battle to a Death Stalker (giant ice wolf) enemy, causing the device to meld with you and saving your life. It also provides the ability to craft karakuri on the spot, which only you (and any co-op friends) can do. At the beginning of the game, this is simply crafting boxes for height advantage and barricades to knock down a charging enemy, but your abilities quickly blossom into zipwires for traversal, hammer traps to bludgeon the enemy with, and even camping equipment, scanning towers and a host of other gadgets and gizmos.
The co-op is particularly interesting, considering that you a maximum party size of three compared to Monster Hunter’s four-player co-op. This is in keeping with a lot of Japanese titles — Naruto and Pokémon immediately spring to mind – as opposed to the the devs say, was the sweet spot in terms of stuff on the screen, especially when you consider the karakuri you’re all dotting around the place.
It’s also worth considering that Wild Hearts is significantly more open-world than even Monster Hunter World was at any point. There are huge areas in a similar fashion, but you’re not limited to a 50-minute mission, and you can change and upgrade your weapons and armour as you see fit. There is a central hub that you can return to, but you’re not forced back there after every story beat. In fact, you can roll through the whole campaign alongside your friends without visiting the hub beyond the story elements, which is pretty cool.
And speaking of friends, now the perfect time to mention that not only is cross-play supported, but there’s no ranking system keeping you from playing with your higher-ranked buddies. Difficulty will scale based on the number of people you’re playing with, but we can also confirm that there’s no mad rush to get the best loot either. If you chop off a tail, everyone can carve it for loot, and all loot is rolled individually — think Monster Hunter, not Borderlands.
In a press event ahead of our hands-on preview of Wild Hearts, we were told that what the devs were really going for was fast-paced action that combines hunting with crafting, and from what I played, I can say they’ve done an admirable job. It was still an early build, and there were technical issues that we came up across, but that’s par for the course when we’re still four months from release.
Specifically, there were issues with lack of lip-syncing which will be corrected by release, along with some missing assets and character customisation options. Interestingly, some translations failed to be carried through in the subtitles — which it turns out was intentional; words that translate to ‘um’, ‘thanks’ and a very gruff ‘sorry’ (eto, arigato and suman) — were left in Japanese to help “further ground people in the Japanese setting”. Fair enough.
The biggest issue that we had was undoubtedly frame rate issues, particularly in the most frenetic of combat, which was pretty jarring. The Radeon RX 5600 in our PC isn’t the highest-powered GPU by any means, but should get better performance than we saw as the developers continue to optimise the game in the next few months.
Wild Hearts is shaping up to be a unique take on the genre that we’re very excited to play more of. It’s both similar to a lot of what we’ve seen before, and yet is pushing the envelope at the same time. Some of this comes from the extreme flexibility that you have in taking down your enemies, but equally there are the arguably smaller things like armour being gender neutral and the game asking for your preferred pronouns. Whether it shapes up to be the first title in a new and successful series remains to be seen, but I, for one, will be crossing my fingers for a game to truly rival one of my favourite franchises of all time.
Wild Hearts is out on 17 February 2023 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.
Dominic L
Sounds great! Is the building intrusive, or does it fit naturally into combat?