Hey, we're back with another episode of "Before You Buy," that show where we give you some straight up gameplay and our first impressions of the latest games releasing.
and today on G20 GAMING, it's "Wild Hearts."
I got a lot of fun stuff to say about this game, and it is, for the most part, very positive, but in order to say any of it I gotta set this up a little bit, okay? So "Monster Hunter: World" was basically a streamlining of what was a pretty niche series, and it was a runaway success, showed that there was a ton of crossover appeal in this little niche genre that it had created, so obviously other people are trying to make games in this genre, right? Totally understandable.
That's how genres start. Remember when we used to call 'em Doom clones?If you don't remember that, that's okay. I'm just an old bird, that's all. So Omega Force actually brings us "Wild Hearts" and let me tell you why this is interesting to me. Obviously, they're the folks responsible for "Dynasty Warriors." They're a developer that I really like, and when I did the "Before You Buy" for "Dynasty Warriors 9," I was pretty savage about it, and for good reason.
Their output since that game has generally been pretty good, and this game, perhaps more surprising in terms of us getting a "Monster Hunter" style game from the "Dynasty Warriors" guys, is that it's published by Electronic Arts. That's not the most hopeful sounding statement either. And the other thing is the "Dynasty Warriors" series isn't exactly known for innovation again, and when they tried innovation, put the game into an open world, it was real bad.
So really all we had to go off of with "Wild Hearts" was what is still a pretty impressive debut trailer. I wasn't really sure what this was gonna be. I had fairly low expectations. I didn't want to get emotionally invested and be hurt once again by one of these damn games, but "Wild Hearts" far surpassed them. This game is not just a dry copy of "Monster Hunter." It's legitimately innovative and builds on the genre in a lot of interesting ways. That being said, this one's got some graphical issues and they are a, they're a task to get past 'cause the game can look rough.
Even on PS5, there's parts where the game looks worse than anything from not just "Monster Hunter: World," but "Monster Hunter: Rise" on Switch, both in terms of visuals and frame rate. Like, there's way too much stuttering and slowdown, even with the game set to performance mode on PS5. In my experience, the graphics and performance are by far the game's biggest issues, but we will go into that in a little more detail later. First, let's talk about what this game even is.
So let's start with the story, which is not the primary focus of "Monster Hunter" nor is it the primary focus of "Wild Hearts." This one's set in medieval Japan. You play as a hunter who eventually resides in a central village and takes on missions to get rid of these gigantic beasts called Kimono, these rampaging monsters that are fusion between animal and nature itself. That's basically it. Simple, and I'll give it credit for not wasting a bunch of time on explanations that I probably already understand.
Game starts up immediately when you turn it on, there's not really even an opening cut scene. Once you actually get into the meat of the gameplay, you do meet some long-winded characters who are gonna talk a lot, but at the end of the day, they all want the same thing: dead monsters and lots of them. That's the core gameplay loop too. You explore four different regions, collect resources, hunt down gigantic, sometimes really hard beasts either solo or cooperatively.
It's a tried and true formula. The game doesn't deviate much from the setup. Again, in terms of what this is fundamentally, it sticks pretty closely to the "Monster Hunter" formula. Like, there's even a plot point about a giant monster that's gonna destroy the village. You have to stop it in a gimmicky siege battle. If you played "World Arise," you know what I'm talking about and what to expect here.
So you start the game, design your character with some pretty good character creation options. There's a pretty fair amount of depth, and then you're free to start hunting. You go out, kill monsters, get materials from them, use those to craft more powerful weapons and armor, you rinse, you repeat. Just like in "Monster Hunter," you don't improve your character by leveling up. Your stats are dependent on the equipment that you're wearing and they've done something that I like right here.
You are able to freely roll back weapons upgrades, and take the weapon down a different upgrade path if you want and you get back all of the materials that you originally used, which is super forgiving, and honestly, a welcome change. There's nine total weapons in the game, four of them are locked until you get further in the game. I like that because it gives you time to get accustomed to each weapon.
The more exotic stuff comes later, but all the basic starting weapons feel pretty good to use. They have nearly as much depth as the weapons in "Monster Hunter," and yes, they are absolutely as satisfying. For the sake of it, I went with the Nadachi, which is the closest weapon to just being a "Monster Hunter" weapon, but there are some unique things that don't just directly map onto the other game, like the Bladed Wagasa, an umbrella covered in pointy parts that give you a lot of vertical options. Overall, the combat's a little faster, slightly less impactful, but overall I gotta say I really enjoyed it.
Feels like a cross between, like, a character action game and "Monster Hunter." You dodge and you got some pretty forgiving invincibility frames and just in some way it has that ever so slightly more "DMC" or "Bayonetta" sprinkle in there It's not much because it really basically works out to be very similar to "Monster Hunter," but we end up without some of the fiddly bits, like weapons sharpness, which is not my favorite thing in the world. Deteriorating weapons, okay, I love "Breath of the Wild," but the hell it unleashed on us in normalizing deteriorating weapons.
Just, I'm super glad it's not in this game, even though sharpness isn't a one-to-one analog with deteriorating weapons from "Breath of the Wild," Still, like that it's not here. But now I want to talk about something that really is standout about this game. It's something that you get introduced to real quick after you start the game, and it's called the Karakuri system. It's a little bit "Fortnite," a little bit "Death Stranding" and it's awesome. With the press of a button, you can summon various objects to assist you in battle, the most basic being, like, a simple box which you can stack up three high, use as a makeshift ladder, makes it easier to climb walls or jump into the air to perform some kind of downward attack.
But you can call on jump pads, fires that make your attacks more powerful and even a "Breath of the Wild"-style glider. All this stuff you can call on demand, whenever you want, in battle or out. Those aren't the only objects you can summon either. There's the regular Karakuri, and then there's the Dragon Karakuri that you can place, which is where the "Death Stranding" comparisons start to make a lot of sense. What makes these things so interesting is that each zone you go to basically starts off as a blank slate.
As you explore, you find these glowing control points. They make it so you can place down more stuff in the area and these include, like, tents, stuff you can use for fast travel, fires, where you select missions, crafting stations for food, for equipment, et cetera. The fun thing about this stuff is that you build it. It's not just automatically there when you open a new campsite. You directly control where it goes. You're not just building basic utility structures either.
There's more interesting buildables, like zip lines, air boosters, cannons, stuff like that that you can place, and they make getting around the environment legitimately easier and faster. It's actually cool and rewarding. It's a system that encourages you to engage in the world in a little more of an active way. Like, when you first enter a new region, it's empty, but by the time you fully explored it, there's zip lines all over, jump pads, cannons, all that kind of stuff, and it doesn't disappear. Like, it's persistent. You put it there and it stays there.
So if you want, you can turn the damn place into one of the islands in "Sonic Frontiers." Just don't go overboard and make Chaos Island. That's unnecessary. The basic Karakuri stuff is kind of limited, and then you start to learn combos, like stacking six blocks to create, like, a bastion that blocks enemies attacks and stuns them. You stack three jump pads, you create a hammer that damages and interrupts enemy attacks. You combine six fires,
you make a flare gun, and you can stun flying enemies with it. It probably sounds a little difficult to do on the fly, and giving it a bit of a "Fortnite" comparison can maybe make it sound daunting, but I actually found it pretty easy, and sometimes the building stuff in "Fortnite" I couldn't really keep up with, but I feel pretty at home here with this.
The button combos are pretty intuitive, and the game automatically stacks objects. So building six boxes next to each other is as simple as standing in place and calling in six boxes. They automatically form together, so keeps the process nice and simple. You also don't need to do it to beat a monster. You can do perfectly well slashing away at a beast and ignoring this, but as a mostly solo player, I really liked how all these buildables evened the playing field.
I thought, like, they were a good addition to the strategy. You unlock more of them as you hunt monsters and earn points. You spend them in the Kara kuri menu, which doesn't just give you new stuff to build. It also just straight up upgrades, like, stuff like healing items you can carry, you can carry more, which is good obviously. That's another really welcome quality of life feature here. You don't have to craft potions. You can start off each hunt with healing maxed out, and there's a lot of items scattered around the world that you can use to top off your health.
At first, the amount of thread that you have to generate Karakuri is pretty limited, but as you collect these little things called Socomo out in the open world, your supply gets bigger and they give you items that can be used to upgrade how many you can carry. The Socomo are basically this game's version of the Pouchoes from "Monster Hunter." They're hunting companions
that can distract monsters, do a little damage, heal you, and they can be pretty invaluable during particularly tough hunts. That's all you really need to know to understand the mechanics, but the real star of the show are the monsters themselves, the Kimono.
They're all these bizarre hybrids of rocks and plants, like a rat with a flower blossom for a tail, or like a bore that's huge and made of rock. The first ones you fight start off at a more recognizable size, but some of these guys are absolutely massive. The variety of shapes that make every single Kimono fight you have, like, memorable even for, like, even, like, fairly easy ones. There's so many of them too. In just a few hours from the start, you will have fought probably around 10 of these beasts and they're all extremely different.
There's goofy ones like a Tanooki, not that difficult, but then there's ones like this volcanic monkey, increasingly aggressive and challenging, and it keeps going right on that trajectory. Like, it's important that a game like this gets the monsters right, and "Wild Hearts" hardcore delivers on this. Every single creature is packed with personality, requires different strategies and just feels like its own unique thing within the world.
Each one of 'em has weaknesses you can exploit, parts you can break off like tusks and tails, and you can even climb on them, and I would say it's maybe a slightly jankier version of what you could do in "Dragon's Dogma." Like, the monsters are a blast to fight. And then you throw in all of the quality of life stuff that this game puts in on top of what you would call the "Monster Hunter" formula, this is an addictive loop that you definitely want to keep doing. Like, just being able to select a hunt from the map rather than having to go to a quest board every single time, it's a huge breath of fresh air.
And there's so much to like about this game, and it makes the performance and graphics issues such a huge shame. I've primarily played this on PS5, but you probably wouldn't notice that I was playing on a Next Gen system by the footage that we're watching here. The game constantly stutters. There's noticeable pop in almost all the time, and certain environments look barren and straight up crappy. Like, also anywhere where there's snow, it just looks terrible, like "GTA Remastered" rain levels of bad. It's bizarre, though, because there's parts of the game that look beyond fantastic, but just as many look outright bad. It's not how a Next Gen game should look or run at all, and it might be worth giving a pass if it was just the graphics and it ran fine, but the frame rate is just not acceptable for an action game like this. And I took a few minutes to test the PC version.
It's not a lot better, maybe even worse. Like, there's constant stuttering, it makes the game borderline unplayable on the platform, and it's not like the graphics are amazing or anything. Like, even on max setting, I was still seeing a lot of weird pop in.It sucks that I can't really recommend playing the PC version as it is right now. The PS5 version, not thatgreat, but at least playable.
And if you're able to overlook the performance issues and some pretty rough graphics at times, and for the most part I wanna say that I am, there is a really good game here. Like, "Wild Hearts" is a more streamlined and accessible game than what it's trying to emulate. But the Karakuri system adds in this tactical depth and, like, creativity that gives the game a total identity of its own. The monsters are fantastic, they're varied, they're exciting to fight, and the quality of life improvements make this a much more modern-feeling game in general. Like, it's fantastic, I love this game but if you need it to be 60 frames per second, you're not gonna get what you need here.
I do have a feeling that over some time, they're gonna be able to fix some of these issues, because seriously, at times it feels like this is running like a Switch game and that makes no sense at all. Still, wow, this is, and I don't say this lightly, because with all of those issues I'm still wanting to assert this game is a hell of a game. I'm optimistic for patches, let's just say that. What do you think though?