Wild Hearts is squaring up to Capcom’s indomitable hunting series, and in many ways it comes up short. But it does have its strengths.
The hunting genre has exploded in popularity over the past few years. Monster Hunter World and its ludicrous sales figures proved that – in making the genre more accessible – Capcom could wrangle a massive audience for this once-niche genre. And now other developers and publishers have really started to take notice.
That includes Dynasty Warriors developer, Omega Force, and publisher Electronic Arts (and its more experimental EA Originals imprint). The developer, of course, is no stranger to the genre: 10 years ago, it released the doomed PSP/PS Vita series Toukiden: The Age of Demons – a game that played well enough and did a lot right, but could never find an audience amongst the minute number of people that actually bothered buying a Vita in the West.
But now, a decade later, the developer is emerging from the Dynasty Warriors salt mines once again to take on one of the strongest brands in gaming: Monster Hunter. Ask anyone that likes the Capcom series, and they’ll probably tell you that it’s nigh-perfect as it is – in gameplay, in world-building, in combat, and more recently in quality of life, Monster Hunter as a series gets nearly everything right. Nearly.
“Monster Hunter is a grand scale game, and something incredible that Capcom has built,” says Koei Tecmo director Takuto Edagawa in an interview with VG247, “and it’s something we did look to as we developed our own game.
