Six hours with Monster Hunter Wilds: tons of great evolutions for long-time fans, but newcomers be wary

Monster Hunter is , arriving with a whole suite of changes and franchise firsts that set Monster Hunter Wilds apart from its predecessors – making for possibly the most accessible, crowd-pleasing and newbie-friendly entry in the series to date.

But Capcom have to pull off a delicate trapeze act here. On the one hand, it’s trying to appeal to athe kind of player whose comfort zone encompasses the sanitised MonHun Lite experience offered by the likes of Horizon Zero Whatever, but for whom OG Monster Hunter has always seemed a bit obtuse. The benefits of doing this are obvious – new blood, bigger audience, Capcom stays winning.

On the other, there’s a fiercely loyal and vocal following here who quite like that obtuseness, . Monster Hunter is gleefully unlike anything else out there. Coveting a new audience risks alienating the existing one, and so Monster Hunter always seems to find itself in a place where it wants to try new things and borrow ideas from its contemporaries, all while retaining every painstaking beat of the core loop, lest it cop that most withering of accusations: ‘dumbing down’.