Review: Wild Hearts is a solid, if flawed, take on the monster hunting genre
It doesn’t require an archeological dig to see that Wild Hearts is EA and Koei Tecmo’s attempt to dine on some of that lucrative Monster Hunter dollar.
However, even though this new IP is mostly standing on the shoulders of Capcom’s giant beast, it does offer some original ideas of its own.
These new concepts, however, while welcome, don’t often work perfectly, and it’s this combined with the game’s other limitations that make Wild Hearts merely a good Monster Hunter alternative rather than a viable first choice.
Set in a fantasy world inspired by feudal Japan, Wild Hearts revolves around ‘kemono’, enormous beasts which have been infused with nature and have mutated into powerful monsters as a result.
It’s up to the player to hunt down these kemono, partly to help the people of Minato, a small village the player encounters not long into the game which serves as your central hub between hunts.
The kemono themselves are fairly well-designed, if not quite as imaginative as those in Monster Hunter. The majority of them can easily be related to real-world creatures – there’s a rat one, a pig one, a gorilla one etc.
While there’s clearly been quite a bit of work put into making them look particularly ferocious, put them side-by-side with some of the more weird and wonderful creations in Capcom’s series and it does feel rather on the safe side.
This doesn’t matter if battling them is fun, and for the most part there’s some satisfying combat to be had. It feels a little slower than Monster Hunter and there isn’t quite the same feel every time you land a blow, but there’s still gratification in toppling one of the big guys and getting a load of hits in while numbers fly out of it.
Most of the battles are fairly formulaic, with scripted
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