Wild Hearts Hands-On Preview: Gorgeous Monster Hunting with Building

ign.com:

I’ve known there are other monster-hunting games out there besides the quintessential Monster Hunter, but none have really grabbed my attention and hooked me quite the same. Perhaps until now. More needs to be seen before I can say for sure, but after playing more than 10 hours of Wild Hearts, I can say this just might be the one. So far, Wild Hearts looks like an exciting mash-up of challenging hunting, crafting, beautiful semi-open-world environments, and snappy building mechanics that makes it stand on its own four legs.

First, some housekeeping - generally, what everyone wants to know: Wild Hearts is set to be released on February 17, 2023 for the PC and next-gen consoles. Yes, crossplay is supported for its three-player co-op – which is huge for a cooperative-focused game like this. That may sound like an odd number - but during the digital presentation, EA Originals executive producer Lewis Harvey said getting two friends together is easier than three, and balancing for four players didn’t work well because of the building mechanics. We already know there are no restrictions to joining friends, too - hop in whenever, regardless of how much of the story you’ve completed.

It sounds like I must have progressed in Wild Hearts a lot, but I got to the “end” of the story content available in this early build fairly quickly. I just wanted to play more, and ended up completing every optional quest there was. The hunt-craft-hunt loop of Wild Hearts isn’t so unfamiliar to me, but the presentation and seamless storytelling were unexpected. This could change down the line, but it seems like you’ll have main story quests that are active in the world, shown in the top left of the screen, separate from optional quests you need to