Wild Hearts - Review

Wild Hearts is an all-new game genre for developer Koei Tecmo, which takes their skills in the action space and applies them to monster slaying. If you have seen anything on videogames over the past 15 years, then Monster Hunter will have popped up at some point and it is hard to separate the two at times, but Wild Hearts does reach beyond what the current genre leader does. Do those changes make for a fun and inviting game or is it just more of the same in the end?

The story in Wild Hearts is fairly simple, beasts known as Kemono are ravaging the land and the small town of Minato is the only remaining human settlement in the region. The people living there have some hunters who can go out and tackle the smaller ones, but the larger and more ferocious ones, they are too much to handle, so enter you. Your character is a hunter from another land, the reasons why are yours to choose, but soon after your arrival, you come face to face with a Deathstalker. Name aside, after wiping the floor with you and leaving you for dead, a mysterious stranger appears and saves your life, by implanting a Karakuri. The stranger then directs you to head to Minato and leaves, giving you only one option, to push forward. However before you can arrive, you stumble across a young girl who is knocked out on the ground and before you can render aid, you are attacked by a Ragetail.

The story unfolds at a decent pace, with the monsters getting progressively harder with each hunt. Where the story comes alive is with the characters that live in Minato, from the fisherman to the scientist and beyond. They all have a personality that makes them interesting to engage with and while your millage will vary on some of them, unlike Monster Hunter, they feel like they could be in the real world. The basic gist of the gameplay loop is speaking with someone in town, get a quest to obtain materials or kill a Kemono and then return to town victorious. Depending on how much you care about the characters, the hunts you go on can be entertaining in their reasons or just another item to cross off the list and while I found most of the characters to be enjoyable, there are some that were less than fun to interact with.

Thankfully, on the actual hunting side things it is a lot more entertaining, at least for the most part. The game is broken up into 5 main areas, with Minato being one of them and the remaining all having a theme. The first area that you spend time in, is mostly trees and mountains and contains a few basic Kemono, the Ragetail, the Sapscourge and Kingtusk. The first time you tackle a Ragetail, it will prove to be a challenge, but as the game requires you to battle them pretty consistently for parts, after a while you can take one down without too much effort. When you first encounter a new Kemono, you are given a star ranking for it, 1 star beasts are things like the Ragetail, for 2 stars you have the Spineglider and they go up from there. The problem with the rankings is that there is no way for you to determine your skill level against them, meaning that when you first encounter the 3 star Lavaback, the game won’t let you know if you are ill-prepared.

This is perhaps one of the games greatest issues, the difficulty can spike from simple to insane in the space of encountering a new Kemono. The first time you encounter any new Kemono, there is going to be a time when you have to learn the attacks, in order for you to survive and have a chance at fighting back. The problem is that some attacks are designed to utterly destroy you and while you do learn by seeing them, the balance between what is a good attack and what is a bad one, is never in your favour. One could make the argument that as these beasts are massive, some quite literally the size of mountains, that being one hit by them, does make some sense. The counterpoint to that however is that this is a game and punishing the player the first time that they encounter a new beast, does not promote fun or a reason to keep playing. The games other issue is that you will have to battle them over and over again, if you want to get the parts to level up your gear.

That makes a good segue into talking about gear, there are two basic groups that you need to focus on, your weapons and your armour. Each has subspecialities, but for the most part you can just focus on the basics and you will do well enough. There are 8 different weapon types available to players and while I did try out ones like the bow, I found myself going back to the default katana weapon. The reason why is simple, I spent so long working with it, before I got forged a new weapon, that it didn’t feel right to fight with anything else. That is a doubled edge sword, pun not intended, as there are some Kemono, like the Amaterasu that spends most of its time in the sky and you really can’t do much with a sword there. Each weapon has an upgrade tree, that lets you increase its stats, apply extra damage modifiers and so on. As you get into the higher upgrade options, you will find that you can get extra perks attached, which can help you out later on. The downside is that if you swap your weapon, the new weapons are not auto-levelled to match your previous one, so you have to upgrade them to match. You can undo upgrades to your other weapons, to reclaim materials, but when you swap back you have to add them back on, it’s a nice option but not one that is suitable for those swapping weapons frequently.

Now I have gotten all this way without mentioning the Karakuri, the building system that lets you engage beasts in unique ways and also add customised parts to the world. The quickest way I can explain it is that it feels like the Fortnite building system, a few button presses is all it takes and you are good to go. When not in battle, the Karakuri can be used to build towers to find monsters, camps to allow for fast travel and even ziplines to help you get around faster. Each portion of the map you are on, has a Dragonvein and you need to activate them in order to have the ability to build items in those regions. Each one also has multiple tiers and you can easily run out of space to build more than a few things, unless you upgrade them. When in combat there are no restrictions like that in how much you can build, just as long as you have enough threads to use. You can obtain them before entering into battle and your little buddy that you can bring in with you, will also supply them throughout the fight. The same items you use out of battle, have different impacts in a fight like the crate Karakuri, normally used to climb up, in battle they give you a place to leap from to unleash a devastating attack. As you progress through the game, you will unlock more and more complex Karakuri and eventually start to be able to blend them. The problem though is that your thread count indicator is quite small on the screen and when you are focused on attacking or defending against the Kemono, finding you are out of threads can undo your plans.

As I mentioned the thread count indicator is quite small, but it kind of fits with the games minimalistic UI that they are using. The game has the Witcher 3 style compass at the top of the screen, showing key locations or Kemono if you have found them. Beyond that you will have your mission displayed and occasionally button controls, but for the most part the game is the star. The visuals themselves are very interesting, as it takes the Feudal Japan setting and imbues it with a sense of Fantasy, kind of like Dragons in London. While Minato is the only town with people living in it, there are destroyed towns that dot the landscape, ships that have been wrecked and more, which all helps make the world feel lived in. The game is bright and there are some locations you encounter, like when fighting the Kingtusk, that will make you want to stop and say wow, though maybe make sure the Kemono is not going to wreck you first.

Just like the world, the Kemono are also beautifully designed, taking familiar looking animals that we know and blending them with nature. The Ragetail is basically a rat with a plant for its tail and as the fights with the creature get further along, you will see more of the nature come out. The same applies to all and seeing just how crazy the designs can get, is something of a treat. Character customisation is a little different, your armour sets are built to presets and you can then modify them with human or Kemono alignments. The issue I found is that your characters underlying build, is constantly at war with the armour you have selected, which leads to a lot of clipping. Something that I forgot to mention, until now of course, is that character customisation is a thing and the options are fairly deep. There is no restriction on gender or attachments, meaning you can create a female shape, make the chest as large as you want and then apply a big beard and bass filled male voice. You can also customise each aspect of your characters face, hair, scars, tattoos and more, so making someone you want is likely going to be an easy thing.

Where the games presentation fails though, at least for me, is in how empty each of the locations feel. There are times when you will be running around and you might see the occasional small Kemono, but more often than not, you get nothing. Sure you will see the larger Kemono running about, sometimes fighting each other, but beyond that the world is sort of devoid of life. Don’t get me wrong the game looks amazing, but it’s a very shiny bucket right now, nice outside, not a lot inside.

The games audio offers up a pretty incredible soundtrack, complete with modern takes on classic Japanese music. The voice acting is also very well done, both in English and Japanese, with it helping make the characters feel like real people. There is an issue that I encountered a few times, when fights against the big Kemono took a while, the game would often cut out the sounds from the beasts, as if it had no idea what to do. It wasn’t just a roar here or there, but rather no audio at all from them and it left me with just the music. Most of the time I was too focused on the fighting to really care, but it was still something that became annoying when it did occur.

Wild Hearts is a solid take on the monster hunting genre and while comparisons to the king of the space are always going to happen, the inclusion of the Karakuri system gives this a step up. The games biggest issue is that there is no way of knowing how ready you are for a fight and given that some of them can run you up 30 minutes of time, getting destroyed and losing all progress is a big setback. The other issue is that the grind to ensure all your weapons are ready for you, or even just helping people out, can make the game feel like its light on content. However when you are entering new areas or engaging in fights against new Kemono, the game really shines, the problem is those moments do run out and you are left with repeating things. Wild Hearts is a great game and if the developers can keep the content coming, adding new Kemono to the experience, it could be one to keep you coming back for more.