Wild Hearts review: We’ve got Monster Hunter at home…

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Every single time I started to like Wild Hearts, the game almost instantly did something to make me put my controller down in frustration and walk away. Yet, the next day, I’d come back genuinely excited to play more. Whether I’d ripped off my headset in disgust after clipping through a rock and eating a face full of a monster’s super-charged rage attack – ending a 25+ minute hunt in the most unceremonious way possible – or just had the most exhilarating encounter with some ancient God-bird that was threatening my hometown, there’s little consistency to the Wild Hearts experience.

In Monster Hunter, the series Wild Hearts is so egregiously moulded from, Capcom has iterated and iterated on its killer central formula. Go out, hunt, make cool stuff from what you kill, go out, hunt more stuff, make even cooler gear. It’s gaming catnip, and modern Monster Hunter games (notably World and Rise) have polished this formula like a precious stone; this core conceit glitters and shines, with all the inclusions buffed out. Wild Hearts has a lot to learn, and a lot of iterating to do.

But that doesn’t mean this is a bad game. I can’t stop playing it, even though at times I think I hate it. The camera hugs your character’s ass too close, meaning all the cool overpowered attacks you do feel weird and inhibited. The lock-on mechanism is bad – terrible, in fact – so when a monster leaps up to punish your whiffed combo (that’ll happen a lot) you lose sight of them and will have a hard time dodging them when they finally unleash their payloads. There’s more of a focus on aerial combat, but it all feels loose and flighty, so sometimes your attacks will pop up damage numbers even if they don’t feel like they connect.

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