Do you fancy more Monster Hunter World? Like, a lot more? If the answer is yes – which it very much should be – Monster Hunter Wilds has you covered.
When you’re talking sequels, ‘more of the same’ can really run the gamut. It can be a pejorative, a suggestion that a developer hasn’t changed or done enough, guilty of taking the easy path with a sequel. But it can also be an expression of joy at a developer bloody well going for it, building on what came before in a way that is iterative, but also quietly revelatory. Having seen a half-hour demonstration of an exhilarating new hunt, Monster Hunter Wilds looks like the latter.
In some sense, this is my favourite sort of sequel. There’s not much point in me covering the basic concepts of the game, nor its broad structure – all of this remains unchanged from Monster Hunter World. If you haven’t played that game, you should – it’s nice and cheap now, and it’s worth every penny.. At a glance, in those first stages of its demo, you could even mistake Wilds for some sort of souped-up, max-settings version of World. “Sure looks like more MH,” I find I’ve scribbled in my notebook. But then, as the mission begins, a suite of exciting changes and additions is slowly revealed, one after another. Very quickly, it goes from feeling like more of the same to an epic evolution on what came before.