Whenever a new iteration of a beloved franchise looms on the horizon, there’s always that slight hint of trepidation, even when the track record has been, mostly, incredibly positive. Hitting a 20th anniversary in 2024, the announcement of Monster Hunter Wilds was something to celebrate for sure: the newest and supposedly biggest installment in a franchise that went from semi-international flop to global success with the rise of online multiplayer and the call of challenging, rewarding gameplay. Wilds had big shoes to fill, too, as the latest flagship title since 2018’s Monster Hunter World, and the latest “large” game since the (initially) Switch exclusive Rise in 2021, meaning that a lot was riding on the first “current gen” Monster Hunter in six years.
For the most part, Monster Hunter Wilds succeeds in doing everything people hoped it would do as a successor to World, and if that’s all you needed to read in order to go out and purchase the game, by all means go do so right now! But, there’s a little bit more to the game than that blanket recommendation, so let’s breakdown a little bit of the highs and lows of Capcom’s mega-hit game, and if Monster Hunter is right for you (and who “you” might conceivably be).
The Hunter and the Hunted
For those who may be Hunter-curious or adjacent, Monster Hunter often gets described or viewed as being an incredibly obtuse and hard to get into series, ironically because the core conceit of the game is so simple that it hides the real challenges and depth of the game. In Monster Hunter, you play a Monster Hunter, who hunts monsters. That is, effectively, the entire game from top to bottom; it really is that simple. What makes it so much more than that, however, is that hunting monsters drives every single other system in the game, and that the core MH experience is improving your gear, making money, and fighting stronger and harder monsters, providing one of the most simple (conceptually) and rewarding gameplay loops out there. Unfortunately, this simplistic concept has often been buried under somewhat obtuse and hard to parse user interface, as Monster Hunter’s gear, item, and strategic components are often barely explained, or explained so poorly that old fan culture for the game pre-Wikipedia era was to print fanzines that explained how the game worked.
This has always meant that Monster Hunter’s core audience was somewhat small, but dedicated, and new players often had to rely on being recruited by patient friend groups willing to teach them how to play the game in lieu of the game doing so itself. More modern entries in the series, notably World, improved those issues by making the game more accessible through expanded single player campaigns that also tried to bridge modern gaming tastes for big cutscenes and action shots with the fairly old-fashioned Monster Hunter core. Some of this disconnect comes from the history of Monster Hunter as a social game, and why its initial outings in the West were so poorly received: playing the game locally with your friends in LAN parties or on local co-op via handhelds was the bulk of the game’s popularity in Japan, but in the United States, where such things were far harder to arrange, the game never quite found good footing.
Today, we have high-speed internet to thank for bridging that gap, and between improved* multiplayer connectivity and a far more accessible campaign*, Wilds may be the best* it will ever get for new players who are curious what all the fuss is about.
Oh, those asterisks? Well…
Trail Mixed Opinions
Being Queer in 2025 is a pretty cool experience: on the one hand, most governments in the world are trying to kill you in various ways at any and all times, and on the other, you will often have access to a polycule or close queer friend group filled with Monster Hunter Girls who have memorized every pixel of a Monster Hunter game since they’ve drawn breath. The energy surrounding Monster Hunter Wilds amongst my girlfriends (romantic and non) would have been enough to power a small star, and the extended metamour network ensured that there’d be very little to stop any one of us from having constant multiplayer options and availability, the best thing one could possibly really ever hope for in terms of a Monster Hunter release.
And then Monster Hunter Wilds came out, and… well. Mixed is the best word I can use for my first weeks of Monster Hunter as both a single player and multiplayer experience, the first hurdle being the fact that sometimes, Monster Hunter Wilds seems to flip a coin as to whether it will run well on your computer or not at any given time. I’m sure there are copious reasons and explanations people will discover as to why Wilds seems to be so poorly optimized on PC, but for my group’s experience, the first few days were met with general frustration at just getting the game to run smoothly and stably, which is my biggest standing complaint for the game, and a level of warning depending on what platform you are going to play on: I have no patience for games that cost 80 USD or more that also just don’t fucking work.
Once Monster Hunter Wilds opts to work, though, the game does tend to run smoothly, and most of the time my issues with the game boiled down to having to restart it (or my computer) and then getting it to run on the second try. A few of my friends had less luck, having the game just straight up not work at all, and most console players I know have said they haven’t faced much issue, which is somewhat comforting, I suppose. Actually playing the game brings me to my next set of gripes, which my group and I shared to somewhat similar levels: the game is far too streamlined in the wrong ways, and many of the early hours of the game are spent locked in cut scenes and tutorials that make even Worlds’ intro portion seem short and to the point.
Where my opinion tends to differ from others is not that streamlining is bad, but that the way in which Wilds does it tends to suck a lot of the fun out of the Monster Hunter experience past the initial few hunts; there is no real variety in missions in Wilds, with every mission boiling down to, roughly, “Hunt Monster.” And yes, I know you will point above and go, “But Miss Marcy, you just SAID that the game is about hunting monsters,” and I will politely pat you on the head and say “Good girl/boy, hush now.” Because in previous installments, hunting said monsters meant more than just fighting them in huge arena combat: It meant tracking them, dealing with other monsters that might invade or gate crash the environment (as one might expect in the natural world), or doing missions that facilitate hunting, like gathering and collecting materials. Wilds dispatches with almost all of this, and even the idea of capturing monsters instead of killing them is also mostly removed as a general option. In practice, this mostly meant that the single player/campaign of Wilds is going from one streamlined travel section to a boss arena, a cutscene, and then another one of the aforementioned segments. The Seikret, the newly introduced mount, is kind of core to this problem: It makes the huge sandbox you can see less of one, and more backdrops to auto-pilot parkour travel sections.
For new players, this means that you will get to the “core” part of the series faster: Fighting huge monsters, and then working to improve your gear and hunt more huge monsters. And it is undeniable that Wilds is absolutely fun when it comes to this core concept, because it mostly improves on World’s combat, and fighting what are essentially giant multi-stage bosses is the true appeal of Monster Hunter to me. In that aspect, Wilds is a huge success and certainly where I’ve felt like I’ve gotten my money’s worth and what I signed up for in that regard, but the more of the game I played, and the further into the game I got, the more of a problem I started to have rattling around in the back of my head:
Why is this game only fun alone?
It’s My Party and I’ll Solo if I Want To
My biggest actual gripe with Wilds is the most Hardcore Gamer Cringe Moment of them all, which is that the game is too easy. Even HR monsters are too easy when you face them with other people, mostly due to something that is, honestly, actually a change that could be made: Monster wounds don’t scale, meaning that even though monsters gain more health depending on the amount of players that are hunting it, the wounds don’t, and opening them and attacking them makes staggering monsters increasingly easy. As a solo player, this can reward you for riskier or aggressive play, which isn’t always a staple of Monster Hunter; the series historically loves to punish greedy button mashing, and that is still somewhat true here… if you are alone. In a party, wounds in Wilds somewhat trivialize fights, making them easier, even for higher level and more advanced monsters.
I am welcome to hearing the counter-argument to this, which I will actually present: Wounds help make the game more accessible, more action-oriented, and less punishing to new players, and also do have a lot of “Look Ma!” energy as your character does something cool. As wounds currently stand, though, they are a detriment to endgame play, making hunts a little less about strategy and more about wailing on a monster until it dies, which a party of competent players (or even mildly competent or mixed skill level players) can achieve. Again, in theory, this has cool functionality for helping newer players “feel strong” and do well, but detracts from the skill ceiling of timed, patient, skillful play.
I am at least somewhat hopeful this will be addressed, as Capcom has promised a lot of timed, new content for the game, and I feel like wound scaling is something that could be easily patched into the game or added to higher end content, allowing new players and intermediate players to still have what they need, while the dedicated core Monster Hunter audience can experience the type of challenge expected that doesn’t trivialize the game too much.
This might be the most debatable criticism I have for the game, because it certainly feels like it can be slightly niche; certainly, this is a Mileage May Vary comment, but for myself and my group, we found that while playing the game together was fun for the fact of doing something together, we all seemed to a consensus that the fights were more enjoyable, and more rewarding, solo, which was not the most exciting thing to recognize about the game your group of 8+ people had been excited to play together for the foreseeable future.
It was, perhaps, even odder for the upcoming “MMO Dungeon Clearing” game, Fellowship, seemed to arrive on the scene to promise what it was that a lot of us were looking for: a challenging obstacle to overcome together, rather than alone. There are plenty of games that reward single-player skill, and frankly, Monster Hunter was not always the game I or many went to for that rush of adrenaline, and so I’m currently at a crossroads of what I want to actually achieve with Wilds.
Trophy Hunting
While much of this review might read as negative, the reality is that it is more just overly critical; Wilds is a game I have been looking forward to before I even knew it existed, and the past months leading up to it’s release, I have had it as my most anticipated game of 2025; ironically, 2024 had a similar issue where I had deeply been excited for Dragon’s Dogma 2, which also underperformed in my eyes. At least with Monster Hunter Wilds, though, my hope is that the title’s success and longevity of most Monster Hunter titles will see Capcom attempt to address the concerns of content and difficulty, updating issues like wounds or finding ways to make higher level hunts more challenging and rewarding for tackling with multiple hunters; I am less hopeful for issues dealing with performance, as Capcom’s history of addressing technical concerns in games is often not stellar.
So, would I recommend Monster Hunter Wilds? My actual suggestion is “maybe,” if you have the ability to obtain a refund via a platform like Steam; if you are a longtime Monster Hunter fan, I can safely state that I think the hunts and new monsters are worth fighting and experiencing if you can afford the game; if you have never played Monster Hunter before and are curious, unless you have a group of players to experience Wilds with, my actual suggestion is to go and play Monster Hunter World, which can often be purchased on deep discount during Steam sales. My griping aside, I expect to pour a few more hundred hours into Wilds over the course of 2025, but how much of that time will be in marathon, tunnel visioned sessions while ignoring all other games is hard to say; my gaming group has already kind of shelved the game, and I find myself currently waiting for content releases rather than grinding out gear.
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