Monster Hunter Wilds

Released at the end of February 2025 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, Monster Hunter Wilds is Capcom's most accessible entry and its least demanding. Those two facts are the same fact.

Two decades of clutter, mostly swept up

Monster Hunter has always had a strange bargain at its centre. The premise is simple enough to fit in the title — track a huge animal, hit it until it stops, wear its parts — but the systems wrapped around that premise have grown ridiculous. Elemental weaknesses, augmentations, buff stacking, cooking that measurably changes your performance, inventories full of baffling items with names like a joke. Even veterans open a browser regularly.

Monster Hunter: World started pulling that back in 2018. Wilds goes a great deal further: almost nothing here is untouched, from how you travel to how you eat to how much friction sits between you and the next hunt. The result is the cleanest this series has ever played. It's also, in the same motion, the least demanding, and whether that trade is good depends entirely on what you came for.

The combat is the best it has been

Whatever else has been sanded down, the fighting hasn't. The changes to combat are smart rather than generous — faster to get into, more flexible in how you approach a monster, and crucially less fiddly in the moments where the old games made you fight the controls as much as the animal. Landing a hammer or a greatsword on something enormous has rarely felt this good, and that's the thing the entire series exists to deliver.

What's missing is the resistance. You're rarely pushed into rethinking your equipment, and the hunts don't escalate the way they used to. For newcomers that's a soft landing. For anyone who has played these games for years it removes the part where you discover you've brought the wrong setup and have to adapt — which is a genuine loss, not just a difficulty preference.

The campaign is shorter, and better for it

The story is still broadly an excuse to go somewhere new, but the characters carry it in a way Monster Hunter has never managed before. Your team — an excitable engineer, a handler with an actual personality, a biologist who is entirely elsewhere — has arcs and a reason to be on screen. It made the campaign more engaging than any previous entry, and it's a shorter one, running to credits in the region of fifteen hours without forcing a repeat fight.

The pulse

Reception has been warm with a consistent caveat, which is a fair reflection of the game. The combat gets near-universal praise — best-in-class monster fighting compensating for a wilderness that's a touch too streamlined is the argument in one line. The criticism is where the streamlining bites: it's too easy too often, the campaign ends before you've really had to learn a monster, and the post-launch grind takes a while to become the thing veterans come back for. There's also a technical note people keep raising independently of the design, and it's a real one — this is temperamental software, with PC stability issues and crashes noted at launch.

Should you play it

Yes, and if you've bounced off Monster Hunter before because it felt like homework, this is the entry that finally asks you to just play it. The fights are outstanding and the onboarding has never been kinder.

Hold off if you play these games for the wall — for the hunt that punishes greed and the loadout you got wrong. Wilds will not give you that in anything like the quantity you're used to, and the post-game is where it eventually starts to. And check the current state of the PC version before committing, because stability complaints have dogged it since release.