Monster Hunter Wilds review – prepare for the most epic fight of your life
After riding through a desert storm on a feathered steed, dust and rain whipping around you, you arrive at a mountain pass where purple crystals frost the walls. The weather still rages outside, but it's calm within the cavern that lies at the end of the path. You can tell, from the environment, what kind of creature lives here: the Rey Dau, a horned wyvern that commands the elements.
You've seen it before, when it appeared unexpectedly while you were out on another expedition, descending from lightning-streaked skies to sink its claws into an unfortunate pack of shaggy, lion-like creatures. You weren't strong enough to face it then, but you are now. Hopefully.
The fight that ensues is nail-biting. You have to pull out every trick you know to wear it down, trying to dive out of the path of powerful bolts of electricity, as well as the wyvern's horns and teeth. You fire your grappling hook at a rocky outcrop hanging from the ceiling, bringing it down on the creature. You whistle for your mount, leaping from its back on to the dragon's head, clinging on and stabbing with a dagger as it tries to smash you against the walls. You are sent flying, you are fried, you are stomped upon, but you cling on and keep fighting, chugging restorative potions at every opportunity.
Then an even bigger predator appears from nowhere, takes the monster you've just fought desperately for 25 minutes in its jaws and tosses it around like a rag doll. Take a good look at it: that's what you'll be fighting next.
Monster Hunter Wilds' 15-hour story is a series of escalating epic battles against ever bigger and more ferocious creatures. It does not let up for a second. Within a few hours, you will have fought an awful giant spider, a sinuous sand-dragon and a disgusting, overgrown oil-chicken. Later, you will face a furious fire-ape and a dragon that shoots lightning from its face, plus particularly nasty and dangerous versions of beasts from the previous 20 years' worth of Monster Hunter games. It's quite literally all killer, no filler, a far cry from the slow and ponderous older games, in which you had to spend hours gathering mushrooms and fighting raptors before you got anywhere near a wyvern.
The battles are relentlessly awesome; when a monster fell, I would let out a breath that I didn't even realise I had be holding in. No game has ever made me feel like Monster Hunter does, with the possible exception of Dark Souls and its brethren. The adrenaline of these fights, the peerless, perfectly balanced feel of the oversized weapons and the sheer viciousness and majesty of the creatures makes this game feel incomparably thrilling, even though I have been playing it in some form since I was a teenager. And it is just so much better-looking than it was back then: not just the monsters, but also their huge natural habitats, which ripple and teem with life.
I must admit that towards the end of Wilds' story I felt some disappointment start to creep in. I had enjoyed nearly every one of these creature clashes, which are wrapped in dramatic, beautifully rendered cutscenes that spin a cool-looking if rather insubstantial story. But I hadn't had much of a challenge. Admittedly, I have a lot of experience with these games, but I am used to getting eaten or torn to bits a few times by a new monster before I conquer it; in the entirety of Wilds' campaign, I was knocked out only twice.
It turns out, however, that Wilds' story is essentially a 15-hour interactive tutorial on what makes Monster Hunter awesome, a rollercoaster of fighting thrills presumably designed to sell newcomers on the concept and give veterans a taste of the scale and visual splendour that Capcom's modern game engine has brought to their favourite series. The real fun starts afterwards.
After taking on the biggest, baddest creature I had ever seen, in the final quest of the story, I was dumped back into a base camp in the jungle and sent out to capture a small, fire-spitting raptor. I was immediately humbled; embarrassingly, it knocked me out, because I had become lazy.
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Monster Hunter isn't just about waving an enormous lance around; it's also about studying your quarry, learning its weaknesses, scouring its environment for useful plants and materials used to make potions, tools and arrow-coatings that will give you an edge in a fight. It's about teaming up with other hunters, complementing each other's play styles, as more experienced players help the rookies through. Being a friend's Monster Hunter mentor is one of the most rewarding multiplayer gaming experiences out there.
This game can't be reduced to a series of fights. It is a world, an ecosystem, a community of players. You are part hunter, part nature researcher. Wilds leans too far towards frictionless fun in its story, but once I was free to explore more I started to feel more connected to the habitat. Instead of being guided by the nose – or by my ostrich-dino steed – from battle to battle I was climbing up into the canopy and scouting for creatures, getting my binoculars out, discovering hidden corners for campsites and underwater caves full of useful materials. I found I had to switch weapons more frequently, upgrade my armour, reacquaint myself with the baffling array of jewels and doodads that gave my hunter useful extra skills.
You could pick Wilds up as a newcomer and have a tremendous time playing through the story. You could stop there and it would still be worth the price of admission. But I will be playing it for a long time yet.
Monster Hunter Wilds is out on 28 February; £59.99
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