As a die-hard Monster Hunter fan, I want to give Wild Hearts a better chance. This is an excellent action game in which you can fight giant giants with incredibly powerful and sometimes unusual weapons. Wild monster attacks force you to use Karakuri’s unique gameplay system to defend yourself. It has a lot of potential and I wish I liked it a lot more, but unfortunately the constant performance issues make these fights feel like they’re dragging through a swamp when they should be fast-paced and action-packed.
It’s a shame because what I’ve played so far feels as fresh as the first time I played Monster Hunter World. You play as a nameless hunter who arrives in the Azuma region only to fall in battle with an ice wolf, one of the many Wildhearts or “Kemono” monsters. When your hunter is dying, the masked man seems to put something inside him that allows him to use long-forgotten karakuri, an ancient technology that hunters of yore used to control beasts.
It’s too bad because basically playing Wild Hearts so far feels as new to me as the first time I played Monster Hunter World. You play as a nameless hunter who arrives in the Azuma region only to fall in battle with an ice wolf. When your hunter is dying, the masked man seems to put something inside him that allows him to use long-forgotten karakuri, an ancient technology that hunters of yore used to control beasts.
Going downstairs on my first hunt, I understand the scope of this open-world game. The first area of the four maps is a colorful jungle where nature has reclaimed long-abandoned buildings and monsters roam free. Wild Hearts makes a surprising first impression here; the colorful flora dances in the wind and the majestic animals graze in the sun. All of the larger monsters have an ethereal, exalted quality that their Monster Hunter Rise equivalents lack. Even when I fight my first monster, a grassy mouse named Ragetail with a flower bud on its tail, I feel like I’m fighting gods instead of mere beasts.
The excitement quickly dissipates when I discover the game’s biggest problem, at least on PC: the constant performance drop. In my experience, Wild Hearts struggles to get above 20fps while in combat, and other random frame rate drops make it hard to react. Anticipating an incoming attack is part of the fun of an action game, but when an enemy’s movement is a slideshow, it’s just stressful and frustrating.
And it’s not just the frame rate. In my case, I’m running the game with an Nvidia 3080 Ti, i7-7700K and 32GB DDR4 and other issues range from random screen tearing to frequent texture popups. With Wild Hearts’ fairly high system requirements, it’s perhaps not surprising that those using older hardware would struggle, but in my experience as someone sticking to the recommended specs, the Wild Hearts PC port is a disaster.
Timing with weapon attacks is vital in games like Monster Hunter, and that’s especially true for the Wild Hearts unlockable weapons that appear shortly after my first hunt. I immediately replaced a boring katana with a stunningly beautiful umbrella, as its jagged edges and fast movement suit my preferred play style. However, the key for this weapon to deal noticeable damage to a monster is its parry ability, which requires precise timing. Due to the low frame rate of the game, I soon found that it was almost impossible to parry in a real monster fight, so I prefer to use a hammer instead. It also takes precise timing to get maximum damage, but I can handle it despite the performance issues.
Like in Monster Hunter, each monster in Wild Hearts has two states. Their enraged forms can use a wider range of attacks, making them temporarily more dangerous, but you can avoid some of them by using Karakuri cleverly. This is the basic mechanic of the game, which allows you to build structures from wires obtained by breaking rocks or cutting down trees. You can avoid certain Karakuri attacks that are harder to dodge, such as building a huge wall that an attacking Fang Fang can crash into. With a pleasant thud, the wall stops and sends the giant boar flying, but even this large pig can’t fly, so it falls with a soothing thud, leaving it vulnerable to further attacks.
Activating the Dragon Pit that you find next to the marked camping spots can help you establish outposts. So if you pass out, you won’t have far to go. It also allows you to set up other devices in the local area, such as a zip line, to help you with quick map navigation. Setting up bases, shortcuts, and structures to counter monster attacks takes some time for Monster Hunter fans, but it will eventually become second nature.
It is possible to fail these fights by falling three times in battle, just like in Monster Hunter, although there is no predetermined time limit. I can also resummon monsters I’ve killed on the world map at any time, but that adds a 60 minute time limit that Monster Hunter fans will know. I can even ask two other hunters to help me, but I haven’t tried multiplayer yet because I’m sure the game will be even more difficult with another player running, especially when it comes to Wild Hearts crossplay.
I have a lot more to see in Hearts of the Wild before I give it a rating, but as it stands, I don’t enjoy the challenge. Frame rate issues and graphical glitches make this RPG impossible on PC, and it’s not just me; other PCGamesN colleagues and PC reviewers on the internet found the same thing. I desperately hope that the Day 1 patch fixes these issues as the game has so much promise. While some experienced hunters may need to be retrained, there are lots of fun new ideas that make hunting in Wild Hearts quite different. But in its current state, we cannot recommend it.
Source : PC Gamesn
