Wild Hearts hands-on preview – EA takes on Monster Hunter

metro.co.uk:

EA has teamed up with the makers of Dynasty Warriors to create a brand new franchise that mixes elements of Monster Hunter and Fortnite.

Given it’s one of the most popular franchises ever in Japan, there have been many Monster Hunter clones over the years. None of them have ever been made by Western companies though, for the simple reason that until 2018’s Monster Hunter: World the series has never been a major hit outside its home country. Even so, if any Western publisher was going to try and copy it you wouldn’t really expect it to be EA.

Announced out of the blue last month, Wild Hearts is a partnership with Koei Tecmo for the EA Originals label, which is usually used for indie titles such as It Takes Two and Sea Of Solitude. It’s always good to see Western and Japanese companies working together but the immediate concern with Wild Hearts is that rather than Ninja Gaiden and Nioh maker Team Ninja, Koei Tecmo has instead put Dynasty Warriors developer Omega Force to work on the game.

Omega Force are not known for their technical competence, to put things mildly, but having already gone hands-on with the game this is poised to be a major milestone for the studio and potentially the most compelling Monster Hunter rival so far.

Hunting games don’t generally have much appeal in normal video game circles but that’s essentially what Monster Hunter, and by association, Wild Hearts is. You enter the beautiful land of Azuma as a boar hunter, before learning to craft ingenious mechanisms to help take down dangerous predators called Kemono beasts. The world is made up of four areas in a fantasy version of feudal Japan, which represent one of each of the four seasons, with are accessed from the central hub city of Minato.

The game