HANDS-ON: Monster Hunter Wilds is shaping up to be the series’ best yet

It’s often difficult when previewing a game in its early stages, because inevitably, performance issues will rear their head. The further away a game is from release, the more glitches, stutters or crashes you’ll likely encounter, and it’s up to the developer to (hopefully) remedy them before launch.

The 90 minutes we spent playing Monster Hunter Wilds – which was made playable for the first ever time at Gamescom – was one such instance where a pre-release build was absolutely riddled with issues.

Given that Monster Hunter is one of Capcom’s most important series, however, and given that Wilds promises to be the most ambitious entry to date, with a release still likely some way off, we have to give it the benefit of the doubt for now and focus on the positives. Thankfully, there are loads of them, and despite the ropey performance at this stage, we still had an absolute blast.

Capcom’s demo at Gamescom consisted of two separate parts – the first is an intro and tutorial which teaches the player the ropes via a rather cinematic battle, but it’s the second where the game’s new mechanics were best demonstrated.

The aim in this mission is to hunt down and kill a Doshaguma, a new monster which looks like an enormous bear with massive fangs. When we arrived on the scene it turned out there were a few of them, but it’s the alpha we were tasked with taking out.

If you want to go in all guns blazing (or, indeed, all swords swinging) then you can, but you’d be risking a swift death given the size of the monsters, all of whom come at you when you attack the alpha. Instead, you can throw some dung first, which makes some of the other Doshaguma wander off, evening the odds a little more.

Shortly after combat started, the game’s new damage system came to the fore. The general attacking controls are the same but as you continue to hurt a monster, weak spots start forming on its body.

These weak spots turn a bright red, almost like giant welts, and if you focus your attacks on those areas, they’ll eventually burst, doing more damage to the monster than usual. By targeting specific parts of the body, then, instead of just wildly swinging in an attempt to make contact anywhere, you’ll be able to take the beast out more efficiently.

“That’s all well and good,” you may be thinking, “but targeting specific body parts in Monster Hunter is easier said than done.”

Luckily, Capcom’s thought of that too, which is where the new Focus mode comes into play. By holding down the L2 button, players can bring up a crosshair, which lets you aim the camera exactly where you want your hit to go. Obviously, given that this is Monster Hunter, you still have to take things into account, like how long it takes you to perform your attack, but in general, it allows for far more accuracy, allowing you to focus your attention on these new weak spots.

“By targeting specific parts of the body, then, instead of just wildly swinging in an attempt to make contact anywhere, you’ll be able to take the beast out more efficiently.”

Also new to the game is the Seikret, a large bird-like creature that looks a bit like a far more vicious Chocobo. Your Seikret is your mount for Monster Hunter Wilds, allowing you to traverse its open world at a faster speed.

This is particularly useful this time around because Wilds has an entirely open world instead of a bunch of smaller areas, meaning it’s possible to seamlessly travel from one biome to your village, then off to another biome without any loading times. That’s the idea, at least – I didn’t get to experience much of this in the demo because of the specific task set.

The Seikret doesn’t just run fast, it also has storage for a second weapon. This means you no longer have to return to a base camp to swap your weapon out for another one, you can now bring another one with you and swap between them any time you jump onto your mount.

This isn’t just useful for variety – some of the weapons also work well with the Seikret itself. For my demo, we opted to go with a two-handed Great Sword, that trusty ‘powerful but slow’ beauty that has served us well in Monster Hunter’s past. However, we then chose a Light Bowgun as the secondary weapon, and here’s the kicker – you can fire ranged weapons while riding your mount.

This meant that we could get in close and lay into the Doshaguma, then as our companions started doing damage to it – if you don’t like online multiplayer this time, you can fire a flare gun to have AI teammates join you – we could hop on my Seikret and have it run around the monster as we fired our Light Bowgun at it, almost like an on-rails shooter.

The whole experience was fantastic, and the only real downer was the aforementioned performance. We’ve never seen dynamic resolution drop so drastically – at one point, we were in a cave where lots of action was going on, and everything got almost comically blurry and pixelated.

Again, though, this is the sort of thing that Capcom has time to remedy, and almost certainly will. It’s the new features that will ultimately define Monster Hunter Wilds when it’s released sometime next year, and based on this early look, it would take an unforeseen disaster of Zorah Magdaros proportions to prevent it from becoming a series high point.