It seems insane to me that Monster Hunter Wilds is sitting second in our Most Wanted rundown. Not because it’s going to be bad – I’m fairly certain it will be the best Monster Hunter game since the last one – but because for years and years, Monster Hunter was this weird, niche co-op series that was huge in Japan and played by a minimal number of weirdos (like me) everywhere else. Monster Hunter is now Capcom’s biggest franchise, and it’s fair to say that the hype surrounding Monster Hunter Wilds is so big, it probably had something to do with Assassin’s Creed Shadows moving its release date back yet again. That’s right — Assassin’s Creed.
While Monster Hunter Rise was an epic sojourn back into Nintendo-centric Monster Hunter games, it was technically limited by arriving natively for the Nintendo Switch. Monster Hunter Wilds though is fundamentally a direct successor to Monster Hunter World – an incredible, era-defining action RPG that I awarded a rare 10/10 to back in the day. Add in the benefit of this console generation, with the game set to launch for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC all at once, and we’re already lined up for what will be the most technically advanced Monster Hunter ever.
That’s not to say that some of the advancements from Monster Hunter Rise have been forgotten. While we can bid farewell to the flashy Wirebug moves – I don’t know how long it’s going to take me not to try and airdash out of trouble in Monster Hunter Wilds – we are getting an all-new mount to speed us around the open world of Wilds. This time out, rather than those good-boy Palamutes, we’re all going to be riding massive feathered creatures known as Seikrets, who, alongside running really fast, can also glide slowly down from great heights.
It feels as though they’re going to help open up the world, which, rather than being broken down into separate stages, will have different hunting areas to explore. It’s an expansion of the idea we saw in the Guiding Lands of Monster Hunter World’s endgame, where the traditional different landscapes of Monster Hunter were all mashed together, though here in Wilds it’s going to be on a scale the series has never seen before. The dev team aren’t totally labelling it as an ‘open-world’ but equally, they’re not shying away from that tag either. You can expect it to be big.
It needs to be big too, when it’s going to be stuffed with huge monsters for you to take down. If you’ve never played a Monster Hunter game, the loop goes like this: find your target monster, attack them, chase them down, try not to die, capture or kill them, carve off pieces from the carcass, use those pieces to make better weapons and armour, find a bigger monster, repeat. Any story the series has ever had generally stands as an excuse for you to do this over and over again, and, as someone who’s been doing it for twenty years, it’s a loop that doesn’t get old.
Monster Hunter Wilds will also continue the series tradition of being better with friends, and you can form a party with three other Hunters to take down Monsters in an even more efficient way. Then again, they scale in difficulty and health with more Hunters, so you might just as easily be making things more difficult. There’s nothing better though than working together to bring a monster to its knees, coordinating attacks, focussing on specific limbs or wounds, or laying traps for you all to lead it into. For the first time in the series, Monster Hunter Wilds is going to be cross-play, meaning you can hook up with fellow Hunters across whatever platform they’re playing on. This alone is an epic improvement. If only we could get cross-save too, and then I’d be utterly content.
Monster Hunter Wilds is set to be one of the biggest games of the year, and it’s also nearly within reach as it’s set to launch on 28th February for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
