Monster Hunter Wilds Review

The Forbidden Lands are the series' best environmental idea since seamless maps. Weather cycles turn a placid basin into a lightning storm and pull whole herds across the map, so returning to a region at a different hour genuinely changes who is there and what they are doing. The Seikret mount solves the old problem of walking to the fight, the focus mode makes wound targeting readable without dumbing the weapons down, and the new movesets are the smoothest the combat has ever felt.

The cost is friction. Monsters in the base rotation die too fast to teach you anything, the story insists on interrupting hunts with cutscenes for the first fifteen hours, and the endgame at launch was thinner than World's. The PC version shipped CPU bound and stuttering badly enough that player reviews turned openly hostile, and the patches took months. Under the complaints there is a great Monster Hunter waiting for its expansion to give it teeth.