Monster Hunter Wilds Review: Rise of a New World

A Frustrating Frontier

I have about a handful of gaming franchises that, whenever a new entry releases, I find myself clearing out my entire schedule so I have a few days of uninterrupted playing time to enjoy the game. Over the years, some franchises have found their way off my list, like Diablo and World of Warcraft, while others, like Xenoblade Chronicles, have been added. Monster Hunter: World wasn’t the first game I played in the series, but it was the title that added the franchise to my list of games that justify taking days off work. I collectively played over 400 hours of Monster Hunter: World and Iceborne, across both PlayStation and PC and spent over 100 hours with Monster Hunter Rise on Nintendo Switch. Before those two, I spent hundreds of hours on Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate (Wii U) and Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate (3DS). Needless to say, Monster Hunter Wilds wasn’t just one of my most anticipated games of the year; it was the most anticipated game of the year.

Ahead of launch, I had participated in the beta tests on PlayStation 5, but after the PC benchmark tool was released, I felt confident in making PC my platform of choice. After all, what’s the point of building an RTX 4090 PC if not to enjoy games like Monster Hunter Wilds? Unfortunately, after about 40 hours of play time, part of me regrets that decision and wishes I had chosen to play on my PlayStation 5 Pro instead. There’s a reason why I’m leading my review with this point, because I was very disappointed in the overall performance of Monster Hunter Wilds on PC. Other than upgrading to an RTX 5090, there aren’t many ways to improve my PC, and I can usually ignore reports of poor optimization because my rig is powerful. That wasn’t the case with Monster Hunter Wilds, where I was met with numerous crashes and ultimately had to disable DLSS entirely in order to have a stable experience. While I still managed to maintain over 60 fps for the most part, visual artifacts would still appear from time to time, and the reliance on DLSS and frame generation to achieve over 100 fps on my setup was just unacceptable to me.

This is definitely a first-world problem, but I can’t imagine how rough the experience is on weaker setups. Visually, the game can be stunning in some areas when it runs on Ultra with Ray Tracing, but in order to prevent it from crashing, Monster Hunter Wilds looks worse than Monster Hunter: World in some instances. I’m going to assume this will eventually be fixed, but for such a highly anticipated launch that was clearly trending to set records, I feel Capcom could have done a better job with the PC version. Performance at times was so frustrating that it really did make the game less fun, which is a real shame because Monster Hunter Wilds is really fun to play.

The rest of this review is primarily aimed at those who have played Monster Hunter: World or Monster Hunter Rise. If you’re here as a newcomer and want to know whether Monster Hunter Wilds is right for you, I can make it simple. If you enjoy fun action RPGs where you can swing a giant sword or fight from a distance with a bow, collect loot, and craft upgrades, then this is a fantastic entry in the series. You can read on for more context, but if you aren’t comparing Monster Hunter Wilds to a previous Monster Hunter game, just go get the game if you like having fun.

Nature’s Might

With PC woes out of the way, let’s talk about the Monster Hunter franchise as a whole. If you’re new to it, Monster Hunter games are essentially action RPGs with a core gameplay loop of fighting monsters, obtaining drops, and crafting better gear to hunt even larger monsters. Over the decades of its existence, it has built a reputation for being a fairly difficult franchise, long before Soulslike titles became omnipresent. There was a strong emphasis on learning when to safely attack, when to dodge, and how to avoid being punished when you needed to use items. Monster Hunter: World brought revolutionary changes to the series, making the game much more accessible without giving up its soul. While Monster Hunter Wilds does have various changes to further streamline that experience, it’s nowhere near the significant jump from Monster Hunter: World.

Some veterans of the franchise may not look favorably upon some of these changes in Monster Hunter Wilds, getting the feeling that all this streamlining to appeal to a bigger audience chips away at the soul of a Monster Hunter game. It’s honestly a fair argument, depending on how long you’ve been playing the series. I don’t believe the jump from Monster Hunter: World or Monster Hunter Rise to Monster Hunter Wilds is particularly dramatic, even though it does introduce several new features. Personally, I found many of these changes to be favorable quality-of-life updates, like how coatings now work with the Bow—you no longer have to craft them, they’re available through another resource bar that needs to be managed in combat.

Seikrets, which players can ride on to traverse the open world, feel like the natural evolution from Palamutes in Monster Hunter Rise. The difference is that Seikrets can automatically navigate players to a destination, giving them time to sharpen their weapons, use items, or even collect resources from a distance with the hook slinger. Changes like this feel a lot like Capcom took a deep look at what players begrudgingly had to do to enjoy Monster Hunter and found ways to make those tasks less arduous. Look, before Monster Hunter: World, players had to use paintballs to mark their targets to track where they ran off on the map. Monster Hunter: World added scoutflies to make that process more streamlined, and now players can just mount their Seikret and have it take them there. Whether or not you like that largely comes down to personal preference, but the good news is that no one is forcing you to use a Seikret. If you want to walk to your destination as you did in Monster Hunter: World, the game isn’t going to stop you from doing that.

Tri-ing to Run

The same applies to several other changes in Monster Hunter Wilds. As much as I hate getting involved with the discussion about the game’s difficulty, the truth is, veterans will find Monster Hunter Wilds to be easier. I hardly had to upgrade any equipment to complete the entire story, which took me around 11 hours to roll credits while watching all the cutscenes and reading all the dialogue. A fellow contributor to FullCleared completed it in just over seven hours while skipping all the cutscenes. This is, however, taking advantage of the new AI companions that can join your party and fulfilling certain roles. These companions aren’t just extra bodies to act as decoys. They will tank, heal, place traps, and use flash pods when you’re in danger. Sometimes, they are quite honestly better than the average online player. If you prefer the game to be more difficult, then don’t use the AI companions by not firing your flare and leaving your Palico behind at camp.

The biggest change affecting Monster Hunter Wilds’ difficulty is Focus Mode and the new wound system. Since I mainly use Bow, the new Focus Mode didn’t really apply to me. However, my friends who play melee say it makes a significant difference in their experience, allowing them to aim their attacks more effectively during battle. The wounds system, however, is the game-changer. Certain areas of the monsters become wounds that players can target, and breaking them triggers a minor stagger effect, deals extra damage, and gives unique bonuses depending on your weapon type. With how much breaking wounds can interrupt the monster’s attacks, it almost feels a bit like abusing flash pods in Monster Hunter: World. If there is a series of wounds that can be quickly destroyed, not only is the monster sustaining a high amount of damage, but it is also doing very little to fight back. A lot of the combat is balanced around opening and destroying wounds, but this is less frequent with certain monsters.

Overall, the discussion about difficulty is an interesting one. Since the release of Monster Hunter: World in 2018, Soulslike games have become much more common. Nowadays, more action RPGs place a heavy focus on precision dodging and parrying, better training players to observe boss tells and being patient before attacking. It’s not just FromSoftware titles either, games like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Lies of P, Stellar Blade, and Black Myth: Wukong are among the few in recent years that have really trained players to be better at Monster Hunter. Also, there’s a lot of muscle memory that goes into playing Monster Hunter, and learning all that you can from playing Monster Hunter: World and Monster Hunter Rise naturally makes Monster Hunter Wilds feel easier. If you’re new to the franchise, though, how difficult the game feels largely depends on your experience with other action RPGs. If you regularly play Soulslike games, you’ll adapt to Monster Hunter fairly quickly.

All that said, I find the current content in Monster Hunter Wilds noticeably easier than in Monster Hunter: World and Monster Hunter Rise. Having reached HR 68, I’m more than comfortable taking on any of the hunts. But even after hundreds of hours of playing Monster Hunter: World, I dreaded having to fight Teostra and would occasionally still cart—basically dying and getting sent back to camp, if you’re new to the series. If I had to pinpoint a main reason why the difficulty feels easier, it’s that the monsters’ movements seem more predictable than in previous games. This could be partly due to experience, but there are also more indicators now that a devastating attack is heading your way. Still, the game’s difficulty doesn’t affect my enjoyment, but I know others feel differently. In a way, Monster Hunter Wilds just feels like any other Monster Hunter game; we’re all just better players now.

Honed Edge

Other changes worth mentioning for Monster Hunter veterans include the overall streamlining of how the item pouch works. Organizing the loadout is a bit easier once you figure out the updated UI, and now, instead of having to open a box before embarking on a hunt for free supplies—which also had to be split among party members—they are now automatically added as supply items on the Seikret. It’s not a significant change, but it feels nice not having to check the box on the way out to a hunt. In addition, the Seikret can also hold a second weapon for your hunter, meaning players can swap to a different weapon in the middle of a hunt. I haven’t spent much time with weapon swapping just yet, but I’m interested to see how the dynamics play out later on.

Meals can now also be cooked from anywhere with the Portable BBQ Grill, with the buffs being time-based instead of mission-based. Unlike the permanent camps that can be unlocked in Monster Hunter: World and Monster Hunter Rise, Monster Hunter Wilds uses pop-up camps that can actually be destroyed by monsters. It’s an interesting mechanic that makes the open-world design feel more alive, but ultimately, I rarely used fast travel since the Seikret is so convenient, so I can’t really speak much about the pop-up camps. It feels a bit like an underbaked idea, possibly inspired by Wild Hearts. Material retrieval replaces the farming box from Monster Hunter: World and the Argosy in Monster Hunter Rise, where players can select which collectibles they want, receiving a certain amount for free over time.

One major change to the core experience is the more open-world design. All maps are now connected, even though I found myself fast traveling to a hub and riding the Seikret from there to the target. Still, this design gives players the option to freely roam the map and hunt whatever is available, instead of selecting a specific mission or investigation. All these changes create a new routine in Monster Hunter Wilds. Instead of eating a meal, signing up for a mission on the board, and embarking, you now cook whenever you need to and ride the Seikret to the active target. When roaming the open world with no mission selected, a mission will start when engaging with a monster. This also helps dictate which monster AI companions will attack. Overall, the open world did not feel as game-changing as I had hoped. The map, for the most part, still feels broken up into separate areas and biomes.

Hunter’s High

Unfortunately, due to how the open world impacts missions, joining a multiplayer game with friends has become more complicated than ever. Somehow, the team managed to make it even more cumbersome and tedious to play with others. It’s a bit easier if you’re all in the same Squad, since you can just join the Squad room instead of creating a private room; however, you still need to send players a Link Party request, ensure they’re on your friends list, and then, once they’re in your Link Party, you can send an Environment Link request if you want to roam the open world together. If you’re just picking targets instead of missions or investigations, you’ll have to send the Environment Link request every time you go back to a hub—at least, that was our experience. This became so annoying that we just stuck with investigations, since posting those allowed everyone to join them and depart immediately.

To make this experience even more frustrating, it’s all buried in a convoluted menu system. Even when you get a notification that someone has sent you an invitation, it doesn’t automatically take you to that specific menu option. Instead, you’ll still have to navigate your way to Invitation List in the menu to find the pending invite. It’s so strange that the team that worked so hard to streamline the actual gameplay experience in Monster Hunter Wilds didn’t bother creating a better shortcut for when you get an invitation to join a mission. The same goes for trying to pick up or turn in a quest. You’ll have to scroll through the map to find where the NPC is, and sometimes, they’ll be inaccessible due to a certain weather event. It’s unclear why the game didn’t make it easier to figure out where you need to go to complete a mission.

Considering how long the Monster Hunter series has been around and the massive improvements made to accessibility and streamlining the player’s experience, it’s a complete shock that Monster Hunter Wilds has inexplicably made it even more frustrating to navigate through endless menus to find what you need. I completely understand how this experience can be both overwhelming and frustrating for a new player, because a veteran like me still scratches their head wondering why something seems to be so needlessly complex.

Felyne Fine

As someone who has collectively spent nearly 1,000 hours with the Monster Hunter franchise over the years, it may seem that I’m a bit disappointed in Monster Hunter Wilds. The fact is, I play Monster Hunter games because they offer a co-op experience that very few games do, and a gameplay loop that feels immensely satisfying as you get better at the game. It’s one of the few games that manages to level you up, as a player, rather than your character. Sure, gear plays an important role and bigger numbers will always be better, but Monster Hunter is one of the very few franchises in gaming where you’ll continuously improve as a player and notice those improvements. After spending dozens of hours hunting certain monsters, you’ll go from 15-minute hunt times to 10-minute hunt times to possibly five-minute hunt times. It’s extremely gratifying once you have some level of mastery with your weapon of choice.

Because of that, despite all the issues I ran into on PC, Monster Hunter Wilds will inevitably be one of my favorite games ever. I received my review key late Wednesday afternoon and by Sunday morning, I had spent over 40 hours in the game. As I mentioned earlier, I really had to force myself to stop playing to write this review, and even now, I feel like I rushed through this to go back to playing. It says a lot about the core gameplay, the variety of monsters and the overall improvements to the general experience. I’m personally in favor of many of the quality-of-life improvements, and feel like the soul of a Monster Hunter game is more than present in Monster Hunter Wilds. In fact, I’d argue it’s shining brighter than ever, because there are clearly more people interested in the franchise than ever before.

I’m not letting Capcom off the hook for the performance on PC though. There have been moments I’ve been so frustrated with the crashes that I considered buying a copy on PlayStation and starting over. Then again, that’s also a testament to how fun of a game it is, that I wouldn’t hesitate having to repeat those 40 hours. This time though, I would skip all the cutscenes and dialogue, because frankly, the story’s attempt at a more serious tone with emotional moments and dramatic characters completely falls flat. But no one should be playing a Monster Hunter game for its story because that would just be a disappointment. You play Monster Hunter Wilds because it’s one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences out there, even when it’s plagued with technical issues.

Monster Hunter Wilds official release date was February 28, 2025 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. This review is based on a retail code provided by Capcom on PC. While FullCleared has affiliate partnerships, these do not influence our editorial content. We may, however, earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links.

Monster Hunter Wilds Review Gallery (possible spoilers!)

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