For a long time, Monster Hunter was one of those franchises that looked cool, but felt a bit too intimidating for me to actually get into. I dipped my toes into Monster Hunter Tri on the Wii back in the day, but couldn't quite make sense of the oversized weapons, or the monsters that would have to be chased across the map, and never picked it back up after my first couple of hours with it. After that, I didn't really think too much about those games again until Monster Hunter Rise came out on the Switch, and I decided to pick it up on a whim. While I experienced some of the same frustrations that I had my first go around, I decided to be a bit more patient with it, and that patience was rewarded with one of the most memorable gaming experiences I ever had. Since then, I've been itching to play another Monster Hunter game, and now that we're on the verge of the next one, I can happily say that Monster Hunter Wilds has lived up to my expectations.

So let's get this out of the way: if you're new to the Monster Hunter franchise, this is not a particularly easy game to slip into. The game tosses you into your first round of monster wranglin' pretty much right off the bat, and while it does give you a brief window to learn the basics of your preferred weapon, the game otherwise offers very few direct explanations of its mechanics. Instead, you'll end up learning a lot through trial and error, and even having sunk a good amount of time into Rise, and having a general recollection of how certain mechanics worked, it still took a good couple of hours before I settled into a comfortable groove with Wilds. The game asks a lot of you early on, and it's enough that I can imagine it being a little overwhelming to anyone completely unfamiliar with its systems. If you're willing to deal with that learning curve, though, you'll be rewarded with a pretty fun experience as this game is hopelessly addicting.

Like other Monster Hunter entries, this game is largely centered around one activity: hunting down giant monsters. To that end, you're given fourteen different weapon classes to choose from for fighting monsters, with each having their own strengths and weaknesses. You've got the ones like the Great Sword for dealing hefty damage and blocking incoming attacks, but at the cost of losing a lot of your mobility, ranged weapons like the Heavy Bowgun that let you attack from a distance but can leave you vulnerable while recharging ammo, or the Dual Blades which are great for letting you dart around and dodge attacks but do less damage on their own. While some are more optimal for certain kinds of monsters than others, the game is balanced to accommodate for all of them, and you can pretty reliably pick one or two weapon types than feel the most comfortable to your play style and stick with them for the rest of the game without being actively forced to swap between them.

Although bashing away at monsters is usually your most reliable form of offense, you can also use items for creating traps, from making pitfalls for them to fall into, to planting explosives around the area, and they can be pretty helpful in weakening your prey. You'll often need them too, because every giant monster you encounter is a massive wall of health, and each has their own traits or attack patterns that you'll need to figure out as you fight them. Some shoot fire, others can trap you with some kind of webbing or acid, and some can grab you with giant tentacles. Each one can be a puzzle unto itself, and there's enough variety in every new encounter to keep them from feeling repetitive. They can hit deceptively hard, too, and while your only real punishment for fainting in battle is failing a quest if you do so three times in a row, there are few experiences in the game more frustrating than being on your third chance and having a monster on the brink of death, only to fall victim to a stray attack. Even so, the joy of triumphing over a particularly difficult monster encounter is always worth it, and each quest will net you with various monster parts that you can use to make stronger gear and weapons, which all translates into a rewarding game loop.

For veterans of the franchise, this game also comes with a few new core mechanics, and they help to shake up the gameplay in a lot of ways. The one you'll be introduced to immediately is the Hook Slinger, which you'll primarily use for grabbing objects from a distance, but can also be used for other applications like striking at monsters to help lure them towards traps, or even dragging monsters off of high perches and damaging them with any fallen debris. An even bigger feature however, is Focus Mode, which allows you to visibly detect any areas of a monster's body that have been wounded by your repeated attacks. By hitting a wounded area with a Focus Strike, you can dish out a free unstoppable combo for extra damage, and doing so will pretty much always net you a free monster part. You can also sometimes hop onto a monster's back to create some new wounds until your stamina gives out, and while it's not quite as fun as Rise letting you hop onto a monster's back to ride it like a meat mecha, it still feels good when you can successfully pull it off. While hitting wounded areas can often require exact precision, and it can sometimes be annoying to strike at the general area of one and just barely miss it, the satisfaction of landing a successful hit always feels incredible, and can add an extra layer of strategy in how you approach the combat.

Your main mode of transportation for the game, a monster called a Seikret, also comes with a pretty good variety of helpful uses. It can automatically start tracking down any fleeing monsters without having to steer it, which can be useful if you need time to sharpen your weapons or use items. You can still steer them directly if you so desire, but with how tricky some of the maps can be to navigate, it can be a helpful way to save time on hunts and give monsters less time to recover. Your Seikret can also store extra items in its pouch, and most notably of all, it allows you to carry around an additional weapon that can be swapped with whatever you're currently holding by hopping onto it during combat. This gives you plenty of room for experimenting with various weapons if you want to, and can widen your approach to the gameplay pretty significantly. For instance, I sometimes swapped between a lighter weapon like the Dual Blades to create a few wounded areas on a monster before targeting them with a more powerful weapon like the Switch Axe, or shot away at a monster with a ranged weapon like the Heavy Bowgun before closing the distance with a close ranged weapon like the Great Sword. It gives you plenty of opportunities to get creative, and can make each new monster battle all the more exciting.

One of my few complaints about Rise was that the main single player campaign was largely forgettable, and I'm happy to say that Wilds is largely an improvement in that respect. The story follows your character created Hunter, as you investigate a territory known as the Forbidden Lands in order to help a young boy named Nata return to his homeland and track down a mysterious monster known as the White Wraith that attacked his people. Along the way, you'll travel across the game's various biomes, learning how the people of each region operate within the ecosystems they live in, and discovering more about the White Wraith's origins. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it goes a long way in helping to make all your various monster encounters feel more organic, and the last couple of hours of the campaign have enough dramatic twists to make the experience feel memorable. Your primary companions, Alma, a researcher who hands out your quests, and Gemma, a blacksmith who forges all of your gear, are also pretty likeable, and have just enough personality to avoid sinking into the background as you travel around new regions. It's also nice that your player created character is fully voiced, and while they aren't given a ton of personality, having them verbally interact with the other characters does at least help in making your character feel like a genuine part of the game's environment. While the linear nature of the main story means that you'll largely be on the rails for most of it, it's solid enough for that to avoid feeling like too much of a restriction, and while the game opens up more after the credits roll, you're still given enough freedom within the main campaign to let yourself get lost exploring each area you arrive in.

Of course, one of the most integral parts to the Monster Hunter experience is its multiplayer components, and they largely run pretty smoothly. You can hop into a player lobby right from the start screen, and by talking to Alma (who will always follow you whenever you're doing quests or exploring the area), you can hop between single and multiplayer modes without too much of a wait, as well as set up or join in on online quests. The game also features a handy new multiplayer feature in the form of SOS Flares, which you can fire off in the middle of battle to seek help from other players. If no other players are available, you'll receive a few NPCs to assist you until someone's available, and they'll swap in and out without any notable lag. Even without the multiplayer component though, the SOS Flares can serve as a way to make monster encounters a little easier, as the NPC Hunters can be pretty helpful on their own, and their assistance won't take away from any of the rewards you'll receive at the end of each quest.

Visually the game looks fantastic and what it sometimes lacks in raw graphics, it more than makes up for in environmental design. Each of the game's large biomes looks gorgeous, and you'll often find smaller monsters simply wandering around in their natural habitats or larger ones occasionally fighting over territory. It's clear that a lot of care has been put into making the ecosystems of each region feel as authentic as possible, and it adds a lot to the game's overall presentation. The designs of the monsters themselves are also pretty varied and I was particularly impressed by the designs of monsters like the Laia Barina, a giant spider whose back resembles a rose, or the Hirabami, a giant flying serpent whose tail can grab at you like a claw. Their distinct looks helped add to the memorability of each encounter with them and the game has a great balance of new monsters and classic staples like the Rathian or Yian Kut-Ku. About my only complaint with the game's look is that the gap in quality between how the human character models look in cutscenes versus in engine and sometimes be a little noticeable at points, but on the whole it's a fantastic looking game.

For as much as it impressed in terms of both looks and gameplay though, it's not entirely without its speed bumps. While the ability to have your Seikret store extra items for you is certainly useful, the act of actually accessing those extra items can sometimes be a bit of a pain, as there's no way of quickly swapping between the items you have on hand and what's in your Seikret's storage. This can be a problem, as the game doesn't pause when you're going through your item slots and I had at least one or two instances where I was scrambling to get out a specific item the game was asking of me while trying not to get hit by a stray monster attack. Speaking of pausing, it's also not not possible to pause the game while you're in an online lobby, even if you're primarily doing the main campaign and aren't actively questing or interacting with other players. This isn't much of an issue in and of itself, but since the online lobbies function as the recommended game mode and can only be toggled on and off by talking to a character instead of quickly selecting a menu option, it did result in at least one instance where I exited out of the game for a couple of minutes only to come back and find that my character had fallen victim to whatever monster I was in the middle of fighting, and it's something to keep in mind while playing. Moments like these were thankfully pretty rare, and the game lacks any permanent consequences that would have made them result in any major setbacks, but they were enough of an issue to be a bit of a sore spot with an otherwise solid game.

Lastly, the game comes loaded with a few accessibility features, including accommodations for color blindness, arachnophobia, video and audio accessibility and motion sickness, and can thankfully be toggled on and off pretty easily. However, at least as far as the PS version went, I couldn't find a simple way of alternating the control scheme and changing some of the button configurations. I found that pretty frustrating early on, since I wanted to flip around a couple of the commands for sheathing and attacking with weapons, and while I eventually adjusted to the game's controls, it was a bit weird to see such a feature missing despite some of the other solid accessibility options.

Despite those couple of hiccups though, I had a really good time returning to the world of Monster Hunter. Between its presentation and its combat, there's a lot to like about this game, and while it does have a fairly steep learning curve, it does a great job of rewarding your patience, and it's pretty easy to get addicted to it once it does. On the whole, Monster Hunter Wilds feels like a fantastic evolution of the Monster Hunter formula, and while none of its innovations do too much to fundamentally change much of the core experience, sometimes there's nothing wrong with just getting a bigger version of what's come before.