Wild Hearts Hands-On Preview: Heart Failure

The monster-hunting genre greats are exemplary titles that come a little less often than we'd like: Monster Hunter is the king of them all, but gems like Toukiden pop up here and there and tide us over until the next great hunt is available.

Wild Hearts, a collaboration between Koei Tecmo's Omega Force and Electronic Arts by way of EA Originals, aims to be the next in line to take the crown.

Newsweek was able to go hands-on with Wild Hearts during a brief alpha period, and unfortunately, this preview session revealed a frustrating truth: Right now, this is hardly the game that's ready to swoop in and steal the show from Monster Hunter and its brethren.

Though with an extensive amount of improvements and polish, it could be a viable alternative for those who have exhausted everything available to them in the Monster Hunter and Toukiden universes.

A Monstrous Endeavor

Wild Hearts is a set in small province of a fictional vision of feudal Japan known as Azuma, where monsters called kemono roam. They may be majestic, but they're becoming a threat to the world's local ecosystem. They're massive beasts that do as they please, forcing the native species out of their habitats and leaving destruction in their wake. Thus, your monster hunter, customizable to your liking in a decently robust character creator, is tasked with eliminating them partly as a service and as a well-paying gig. ​​

From top to bottom, it's hard not to compare Wild Hearts to Monster Hunter Rise, from its setup to its characters and its aesthetic, which leaks into the game's every pore. It's difficult to see how Capcom is allowing the two games to coexist with this in mind, which is likely why the Karakuri tech structures came about.

This is essentially a crafting system that allows you to build things on the fly, a la Fortnite, specifically boxes that allow you to jump from them, or bulwarks that seek to dampen some of the potential damage you'll take from a charging kemono. Alternatively, you can build other structures at camps that let you customize equipment, rest up and otherwise complete other objectives.

As such, you spend much of your time seeking out your next hunt, building structures with the Karakuri in your base camp, collecting crafting materials and heading out once again to complete main and side story quests. As you finish additional objectives, you'll earn more building abilities, master the variety of weapons at your disposal like the parasol-esque Wagasa or the Karakuri Katana, my personal weapon of choice.

Building Disappointment

I had no issue using the Karakuri to build, and tossing up a stack of boxes in the middle of combat is simple enough, even if you end up using up too many materials while fighting kemono and have to waste time seeking more out. What I found annoying was actually using the boxes in practice. Jumping from the height of one to three boxes and trying to land hits on kemono when your character seems to jump straight down instead of outward just isn't very fun.

That means half the jumps you might make (which you cannot maneuver from in mid-air) don't land, and instead you spend much of your time with the already fiddly controls trying to jump back on the box. Or the kemono knocks you over and stuns you, destroys your boxes and you have to start all over.

You may even be stunned in the process, which can be resolved by rapidly tapping buttons—but this takes far longer than it should, leaving you open and vulnerable in the meantime. For that reason, I stuck to traditional combat where I could, but Wild Hearts really wants you to use the Karakuri, even to your detriment.

Some elements of Wild Hearts appear to be trying something new, and if the game is vastly improved when it's time to hit the market, it could act as a fun option for fans of the genre. It certainly isn't my cup of tea as-is, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be in the future when I've had a chance to try the finalized version.

Broken Hearts

However, I'd be remiss not to mention the myriad concerns I had with my time in Wild Hearts that contributed to these feelings. Alpha builds are obviously never indicative of a final product. When it comes to early hands-on previews, it's always understood that there will be hiccups, glitches and frustrations that will almost certainly be patched out upon release.

I experienced inexplicable slowdown during simple traversal as well as an overall inability to hit 30fps as I made attempts to explore. During hunts, the game periodically slowed to a crawl and turned into an outright slide show, where I'd swing my blade and see the next few frames after a lengthy pause. Despite a variety of fixes, trips to the options menu and restarts, this never changed throughout the entirety of the preview.

My time with Wild Hearts was also meant to include co-op play, which the game does support, in addition to crossplay for three-player multiplayer co-op. However, the in-game menu would never let me scroll down through the available list of players (all added for me ahead of time in the pre-made build) to access the person I wanted to invite. It would instead start back at the beginning of the list so that I could never scroll down to the player in question. Thus I could not invite them in-game or within Origin. These issues and more may seem small when isolated, but when they all come together, they make for a dismal experience.

I've seen plenty of demos that were more than a little rough around the edges, and that's to be expected and forgiven in early development cycles. But with about four months to go until release, some of these problems and gameplay design decisions are more than a little concerning. It has me wondering if there's even enough time to further polish what's there, or if Omega Force may seriously need to consider a delay to refine Wild Hearts into the product it truly wants to be.

Wild Hearts is due out on Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5 and PC on February 17, 2023.