I’m gonna be honest: I wasn’t expecting to like this game so much, at least the bit I played on the beta. As someone who has been playing since Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate on the 3DS, not all of the changes in Monster Hunter: World hit the spot for me. Like, obviously the bigger maps were awesome, and the removal of paintballs was also welcome (after replaying the hunts on the old ones, you would start memorizing where monsters were and stop using paintballs anyway), but the weapons moveset and the combat overall felt different, closer to an action game than the old “dance” we had to learn to fight monsters.

Of course, this doesn’t make it a bad game, it’s just that I didn’t enjoy it as much as Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate or Monster Hunter Generations. It’s my personal opinion, not a critique.

In any case, Monster Hunter Rise kinda fixed it for me. It is a “faster” game to play — and I never really enjoyed Monster Hunter complex stories, to be honest, always preferred the old “something weird is happening in our village, call a hunter to investigate” — but the combat feels a bit closer to the old experience I enjoyed. It’s a subtle thing, but there is something slightly different on the timing of everything that feels better, for me, in Rise. So it’s not like I’m a hater of the new games and rant about how “the old games were much better yadda-yadda”, as I very much enjoy Rise and think it’s the best entry to the series so far (although I did play Portable 3rd for a bit and enjoyed it way more than 4U and Gen, weirdly enough).

Well, I think Wilds could be even better.

Putting aside that the beta is a beta and things could change until release, the combat felt even better than Rise — again, for me — having a nice mix of fluidity and strategy. The open map is everything a Monster Hunter fan would want, and the seamless quest start and finish really fit well into the ethos the game is trying to bring, which seems to be a mix of dynamic exploration and, well, monster hunting. It feels like an updated version of the Expeditions from 4U, but now fully featured and integrated as the main loop instead of an “optional” side activity.

Now, it’s worth mentioning that I played only with my main weapon, my beloved Gunlance, and it felt awesome, so I have no idea if the experience was the same for the rest. However, the change to Wyvern’s Fire was a bit of a letdown, as the old system of “use and wait for the cooldown while the weapon vents heat” was way cooler than “attack to fill these two meters” — but it’s not as if Wyvern’s Fire has that much use amidst the expanding roll of combos Gunlance has been getting since World.

One of the greatest things about this game is that mounting is finally taking a backseat, as it was becoming very stale and boring — again, for me — after so many iterations trying to force players to use it to be able to hunt in an optimal way. I also didn’t use Focus Mode that much because, honestly, it’s pretty easy to see where a monster is wounded — at least on the ones that were available in the beta — and old fans are used to the visual cues the developers implement. It’s one of the things that I love about this series: how stuff isn’t just floating icons in a UI, but have actual physicality in the world. It’s all in the small details.

Before, I wasn’t hyped by Wilds, thinking it would be just a rehash of World in new clothing and with bigger maps, but that opinion changed pretty quickly and I’ll probably buy it at launch, depending on whether or not my PC will be able to run the game smoothly. In the case of the beta, it was played on 720p with medium quality but, again, it’s a beta — and my PC is already 6 years old too — so we’ll see about that.

In any case, the beta should’ve lasted longer because, as an adult, having only a weekend to play something isn’t that much time. I hope Capcom releases a proper demo in the coming months, prior to the launch, because I definitely want to explore Wilds a bit more before giving another Monster Hunter game more 500 hours of my life.