After Monster Hunter: World blew the doors of the series wide open for a huge new audience in 2018 and Monster Hunter Rise gave us high-flying Wirebugs to more quickly zip around in 2021, it makes a lot of sense that Capcom would do whatever it can to welcome that newfound following into the next frontier. That’s exactly what Monster Hunter Wilds does, smoothing out the already excellent process of turning big scary dragons into silly little hats to be faster, more flexible, and less fiddly than ever before. The other side of those Dual Blades, however, is that Wilds is light on any real challenge, even for what I’d expect at launch, never asking me to think hard about my equipment. But while the monsters may not pose much of a threat this time around, smart tweaks to combat still mean the act of carving them up has rarely felt better.

A clear example of how Capcom has tried to better welcome new players is that the campaign in Wilds isn’t just a totally forgettable excuse to kill anything that crosses your path this time. Okay, it’s still mostly that, in that you and the Hunter’s Guild set out to explore yet another “uncharted” land in order to solve some environmental mystery – but while the story itself isn’t particularly fresh, the difference here is that the characters within it are actually pretty great. Whether it’s the excitable engineer Gemma, your empathetic handler Alma, or the total space cadet of a biologist Erik, your team is full of likeable personalities and little character arcs throughout the gorgeously animated cutscenes. That was enough to get me more invested in Wilds’ campaign than I’ve been in any previous Monster Hunter.

The revamped structure of Wilds also means that campaign is significantly shorter than I was expecting. I reached the credits in just 15 hours and didn’t need to go back and fight a single monster twice in that time, getting enough materials from any initial encounters to keep my gear up to snuff and jump right from one mission to the next. When you compare that to the 40+ hours it took to see the end of the story in World, it’s clear that the intent is to allow more people to feel like they “beat” Wilds, and I can certainly appreciate how that shift toward approachability might appeal to folk who have otherwise been intimidated by the series. But as a veteran, I can’t help but be a little disappointed that I literally didn’t get knocked out once in that entire time, and I never hit a skill- or armor-testing wall of a monster who forced me to really think about my equipment more deeply in order to earn the reward of a hard-fought victory.

Avoiding spoilers, there is more to do once you do get past the credits, of course. That’s where the larger changes Wilds makes to the traditional Monster Hunter loop really start to shine. Gone are the days of returning to a separate town between every hunt, then going down the same checklist of tasks before you’re ready for the next one. Pretty much everything you need is out in the field with you and every location is seamlessly connected to the others, from a flaming oil-filled basin to a frigid mountain top, meaning you’re never more than a lickety-split loading screen away from wherever you want to be.

Gone are the days of returning to town between every single hunt.

Systems like cooking that let you prepare yourself for the ensuing hunt are still here, but now those food buffs last a set time after eating and don’t go away until the timer runs out – it doesn’t even tick down while in camp, making a previously repetitive process substantially smoother without removing the depth it added to hunts. Convenient adjustments like this are all over the place in Wilds, and the roaringly successful result is that a vast majority of the friction past games could produce as you start and stop and restart between every encounter has been removed. Now you can just check your map for monster information, jump on your mount, and hunt.

Those untamed expanses can be truly stunning, too. Each area will shift between three weather states with unique conditions depending on where you are. For example, the initial desert landscape starts dusty and washed out before turning into a full-on sandstorm with explosive lightning strikes and then finally giving way to a lush and vibrant period of plenty, while the forest follows a similar pattern but with torrential rain instead. These miniature seasons aren’t terribly impactful to your hunts in practice, but they can affect which monsters will appear, and it’s a true delight to see each hunting ground look dramatically different depending on when you are there. The only exceptions to this are a couple late-game areas that suffered from extremely distracting texture pop-in issues while I was playing on the PS5 Pro’s Balanced option, though things ran great apart from that.

The monsters you face on your expeditions are also generally excellent, whether that’s a returning banger like Gore Magala or a flashy newcomer like the flamenco-inspired spider Lala Barina. And while the headliner, Arkveld, is one of my favorites of the bunch thanks to its chain-like appendages, the true stunner has to be Nu Udra: The tentacles of Monster Hunter’s first octopus-like creature can be as unpredictable to contend with as you might expect (especially when they are literally on fire), but the satisfaction of severing every single one over the course of a hunt is second to none.

The feel of fighting any of these monsters is also in a great spot for Wilds. The appeal of Monster Hunter’s fights has always been how it empowers you with flashy moves and hard-hitting attacks, but knowing when to strike and where to stand and how the monster will behave next is just as important as figuring out which buttons to press. These are hulking behemoths with varied and exciting moves of their own, and to some degree you really do have to be a hunter, not just an action hero, to take them down efficiently by learning their ins and outs. That’s true in Wilds too, but combat is also more flexible and forgiving, letting you adjust your footing a little more mid-combo, resulting in fewer moments where a mistimed attack with a long animation had me embarrassingly slicing at the air without losing the careful consideration these chunky strikes require.

Wilds never challenged me with any real threats, even in the endgame.

That philosophy is complemented by the new Focus Mode that makes it a little easier to hone in on specific parts of a monster, and if you put enough punishment on a given limb (or head or flank) it’ll open up a Wound there. In many ways, the combat in Wilds feels like it’s all about Wounds, as they are essentially a resource that is earned and consumed across every fight. You’ll deal more damage to Wounds, but deal enough and they “break,” resetting that spot. Every weapon also has a simple-to-execute Focus Strike that will deal a burst of damage to a Wound and break it right away, so maximizing the amount of time you leave one open and then using that finisher before it closes naturally is an interesting sub-game to manage.

Or, at least, it would be if Wilds ever presented me with a challenge that really asked me to make those considerations. Whether I was playing online with others, solo with the new AI Support Hunters at my side (which are a welcome and surprisingly competent addition), or alone with just my Palico helper, I never had a single mission reach the 20-minute mark, and I have only fainted two times total across dozens of hours. Compare that to something like Kirin in World, which smacked me silly my first couple of attempts and forced me to regroup and craft an armor set around thunder resistance, and it’s hard not to feel like Capcom’s desire to make Wilds a more inviting Monster Hunter sanded off some of the bumps I actually enjoyed in terms of overcoming real threats.

What’s new with the Insect Glaive?

While I can’t speak to every weapon in Wilds, I can dive into the details for my longtime main: The Insect Glaive. In addition to reclaiming the high-flying aerial attacks that were sorely missing from the previews and betas, the Glaive has received a ton of tweaks that make it easier than ever to collect your three essence buffs, keeping you in the ridiculous fun of its jumps and spins for longer.

For starters, your aiming reticle will indicate which color essence is collected from wherever you are pointing at a monster, and holding Triangle to charge your Kinsect before you fire it off will now let it pierce through monster parts and collect every color it hits all at once. Those two changes are massive, as you no longer have to dig through menus to learn that you can only get an orange essence from a monster’s back, and then frustratingly figure out how to sneak your bug past its wings to actually do that.

Another big change is that I found myself moving away from my usual Power Prolonger skill build. That is because the Glaive has a fancy new finisher that consumes all three essences when you use it, while hitting a Wound with a Focus Strike will automatically collect all three for you right away. That makes it ridiculously easy to keep all of your buffs up, consuming and then refreshing them many times per fight. As a result, I almost never reached the end of their durations naturally, so Power Prolonger just didn’t feel relevant at all – and I don’t miss feeling bound to it.

But although it’s great that collecting essences is far simpler now, the trade-off is that the Insect Glaive makes me wish I had a few extra fingers in order to play it properly now. Holding L2 to go into Focus Mode will add Kinsect attacks to your combos, while the red essence unlocks a charge attack when you hold down Circle… which you can also continue to attack through with Triangle. The outcome is that I was essentially always holding down those two buttons, while also needing to move, attack, dodge, have R2 ready for a vault, and somehow adjust the camera. It’s a bit silly, but I can always mess around with the control options in the menu if it ever becomes a true inconvenience.

Things do ramp up a little bit in the post-game, but even there I’ve only really had to worry about upgrading my armor or falling behind in damage once or twice during the content that’s available at launch – and that includes against the tougher Tempered versions of monsters. After the 15 hours it took to beat the campaign, I only had to spend another 15 to finish every side quest (that wasn’t about catching fish), and just five more after that before I had the best armor set and weapon I wanted and a pretty solid suite of skill-boosting Decorations. To be fair, I still have plenty more equipment I could grind for, but my usual desire to get the top-tier weapon of each element type and put together specialized outfits for certain challenging fights just isn’t here this time – because those fights aren’t here to drive it. If I could already kill what is currently the hardest monster in Wilds quickly and without issue the very first time I encountered it, what am I supposed to be grinding for except the sake of it?

I think a lot of this comes down to raw numbers that could hypothetically be tweaked in one of the many patches to come, but some of what makes things easier seems baked into the bones of Wilds. For example, nearly every time you Focus Strike a Wound, the monster gets locked into a short-but-substantial-enough stagger animation that provides a moment of advantage, and you’ll be breaking Wounds a lot, so those add up. Meanwhile, on the crafting side of things, my hunt for the best armor was way shorter than I ever expected because materials that are usually super rare can sometimes show up as guaranteed rewards when looking at the monster list on your map – and that version of that hunt can even then be saved and repeated up to three more times, letting you farm what is supposed to be the hardest-to-find item like it was a simple hide. That is excitingly convenient, but it’s also what brought that loot chase to an almost trivially fast end.

The easier tuning will probably get more people through the door.

I imagine this difficulty tuning will get a lot more people through the front door, but it also means that where my past three Monster Hunter reviews wrapped up around the 50- to 60-hour mark while I still had plenty more I was excited to do, I started losing steam with Wilds before I even hit 40. (Even my time reviewing of Wilds Hearts lasted longer than this.) Although, don’t get me wrong: there’s still a healthy chunk of game here by almost any standard, and it has absolutely been some of the most fun I’ve had with the series.

I’m also sure longtime fans will be reading this going, “Well, we just have to wait for updates/G-Rank/etc. for the real challenge.” But Capcom’s own update roadmap has left me wary of how long that might take: There’s only one new monster announced for all of Spring, and then only one currently listed for Summer after that. In contrast, Rise also felt slight at launch, but got six new monsters just one month later, and then three more a month after that. Wilds already feels like it needs endgame threats like Monster Hunter’s formidable Elder Dragons to really push its limits, and if instead it only ends up getting one returning monster in the first three-ish months after launch, this could be an impatient wait for its inevitable Iceborne- or Sunbreak-style expansion.

That all said, Wilds deserves credit for being one of the most customizable games I have played – not just in the Monster Hunter series, but anywhere. You can swap between two weapons on the fly while hunting, there’s a huge host of accessibility features, you can adjust the size of or turn off individual elements on your UI, you have more control than ever over your menus and radial wheels, and you can alter the look of minutiae like your mount, chat stickers, and even fast-travel tents to a surprising degree. As a crowning touch, you can finally wear any version of each armor set, essentially doubling the cosmetic options previously available as you get into the all-important fashion side of things toward the end.

Partying up online has also been made more robust, letting you run around each map with your friends (including through cross-play) and seamlessly flow from hunt to hunt, still getting full mission rewards without having to regroup at camp between each fight. And even if you’re largely planning to play solo, there are quality-of-life changes here for you, too – that could be the previously mentioned Support Hunters that fill empty spots in your party when you fire an SOS Flare (before being replaced by any real people who eventually answer the call), but also the inclusion of an “Online Single-Player” option that lets you fire Flares to get help but still pause the action entirely before you do. (That’s a trick we can hope FromSoftware learns for the next Souls game.)