Monster Hunter Wilds thrives on spectacle

In my first few hours with Monster Hunter Wilds, I fought against a gigantic spider in waters that were as red as blood and dodged the onslaught of a twisting dragon amid a desert storm, complete with powerful strikes of lightning terrorizing the ground around me. I went up against sandworms and giant apes and a poisonous bug that could inflate itself while causing a cascade of explosions in the ground below. Each battle felt monumental — and the scale only increased the more I played.

This focus on spectacle is what sets Wilds apart. The game is the follow-up to Monster Hunter World, which shook up the series with a larger, more open world and catapulted it from Japanese phenomenon to global blockbuster. World went on to become Capcom’s bestselling game ever, no small feat for the company behind Resident Evil and Street Fighter. Instead of changing things up once again, Wilds ups the ante and makes its monster battles feel bigger than ever.

The MonHun games are all built around a specific gameplay cycle. You prepare for a hunt by getting your gear in order, you head out and study your target, and then you spend a long time slowly whittling down the health of a giant monster before killing it. Once it’s dead, you carve some pieces off the creature and head back home to forge new armor with it and start the cycle all over again, only more powerful this time. Also, you have a giant talking cat that serves as your assistant.

Wilds follows this same structure but moves it to a new, mostly uninhabited locale known as the Forbidden Lands. There’s a story about helping a young boy whose village was decimated and following a particularly dangerous creature known as The White Wraith. Mostly, though, the story is just an excuse to take on increasingly challenging hunts across this surprisingly diverse landscape.

There are a few new details to Wilds. A targeting system lets you really focus on a particular part of a monster’s body in battle, so you can open up a wound and hack away at it to cause lots of damage. You can also store a second weapon type on your mount, opening more options in combat, since weapons greatly determine your playstyle. And of course, there are new monsters and items and locations. You start out in a barren desert, but the Forbidden Lands eventually opens up to include locales like a lush jungle teeming with wildlife and a volcanic oil field that looks ripped out of a postapocalyptic future.

What’s really different this time around, though, is how massive and cinematic the battles feel. You’ve always fought against giant beasts in MonHun — that’s kind of the whole point — but here, more care has been put toward the backdrop. The action set pieces are ripped right out of a blockbuster movie, and they all have their own feel. That could mean the almost horror-like sensation of that spider swiping at you while your vision is filled with red or facing off against a beast during a dramatic downpour with the wind creating huge waves crashing down all around you. These moments can be terrifying, thrilling, or exciting — and often all three at the same time.

In a lot of ways, Wilds represents the MonHun team slowly perfecting its more modern formula. It in no way represents a dramatic change, which means it can still be a little rigid in places, particularly when it comes to futzing with menus to use all of the various items at your disposal. More than once, I accidentally whipped out my portable barbecue in the middle of a tense conflict because I hit the wrong button. But for the most part, this is the most accessible MonHun to date, and one that builds on the open-world foundation laid down by World, including more seamless transitions between areas that makes it feel like one big, cohesive place.

Even in its first real competition with 2023’s Wild Hearts, which infused monster hunting with Fortnite-like building, Wilds shows that there’s still nothing quite like the thrill of a hunt in MonHun. They can be exhausting and challenging and, at times, frustrating; my thumb remains sore from all of the rolling and dodging I’ve done over the past week. But it’s also immensely satisfying to actually pull off taking down one of its massive beasts, a combined sense of relief and joy that few other experiences can replicate. Wilds doesn’t change any of that — it makes it feel even bigger.

_{Monster Hunter Wilds launches February 28th on PC, PS5, and Xbox.}