Omega Force strikes out once again in the monster-hunting genre with their newest title Wild Hearts, which promises fast-paced combat with a unique building system to hunt huge beasts. Check out whether the game lives up to its title in Game8's review!

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Wild Hearts Review and Score Explanation

Wild Hearts Review Video

Wild Hearts Score Explanation

Wild Hearts Review: Wild Gameplay Held Back by Terrible Performance

Wild Hearts is a great addition to the monster-hunting genre with fluid and fun combat and a helpful building system that manages to be as unobtrusive as possible during hunts. At least, this is what we would’ve said if not for the terrible graphics optimization issues it has on both PC and some consoles.

Fixing this with a post-release patch would’ve been forgivable, if only Wild Hearts didn’t release with the bugs at a price point of $69.99. We suggest waiting for it until the issues get fixed or it goes on sale.

Wild Hearts Full Game Review

Pros of Wild Hearts

Things Wild Hearts Got Right
Fluid Combat and Great Execution of Karakuri Mechanics Optimized Non-Combat Gameplay Enhances Immersive Exploration Beautiful Art Style and Atmosphere Inspired by Medieval Japan Great Amount of Content Plus Promised Free Post-Release Content

Fluid Combat and Great Execution of Karakuri Mechanics

In Wild Hearts, the main draw is the use of machines called karakuri to gain the upper hand against monsters in battle. Before playing the game, though, the first thing that came to mind was “how are they going to pull this off?” Turns out, Omega Force was able to almost perfectly mix both fast-paced combat and building mechanics by optimizing controls for combat and conjuring karakuri.

Fighting in Wild Hearts is fluid and responsive, compared to titles in the Monster Hunter series. You press a button, and your character immediately strikes without any telegraphing. You press the dodge button, and you dodge instantaneously. You won’t see many cases of getting hit while in the middle of an attack animation and then dodging like in other monster-hunting games.

However, hallmarks of Monster Hunter’s combat still remain. You can only cancel your attack animations with certain weapons, and those attacks won’t instantly connect when you strike, so you will still have to deliberately target your opponent. But the flow of battle is fast enough that mistakes are not as punishing as they would usually in a Monster Hunter game.

But don’t take the fluid combat to mean that enemies are easy to beat in Wild Hearts compared to other games. Battles are intense, being a sustained back and forth between you and the kemono in a duel of power and wits. Sure, the bosses telegraph their attacks, but they pack a punch when they manage to hit you, bordering Souls-like levels. The game needs fluid combat and movement, as most of the time fast dodges are your only defense against kemono attacks, and your only means of pursuing them when they try to run away from battle.

Thankfully, the karakuri system is just as fluid as attacking. All you have to do is hold down a button to get ready and press any of the four mapped buttons to conjure a specific Basic Karakuri. In the heat of battle, you have a stack of karakuri you can jump from, fling you in certain directions, and power up your own attacks. The speed at which you build these structures reminds me of Fortnite, but unlike in that game, you can build even more complex Fusion Karakuri by stacking Basic Karakuri on top of each other.

That’s right. No complicated build menus; just press the correct button combo and you’ve got karakuri that explode, shoot harpoons, and smack kemono with a comically large hammer, all in the heat of battle.

Kudos to Koei Tecmo for managing to meld both the combat and karakuri mechanics very well by optimizing the controls of both systems without making them feel simplistic.

Optimized Non-Combat Gameplay Enhances Immersive Exploration

Let’s talk more about the karakuri system for a bit because Wild Hearts also has base-building elements in the form of Dragon Karakuri. These kinds of Karakuri are more permanent structures you can put all around Azuma, provided that there’s a Dragon Pit (the game’s equivalent to a build area node) nearby.

Put up a tent to rest, a bonfire to plan your next hunt, a forge to upgrade your weapons, and even a kemono detection tower to know if your quarry is in a nearby area. Instead of having to go back to the main hub Minato after every hunt on your travels, you can just go back to your personalized camp and resupply there.

This does two things: it doesn’t break the pacing of the game and reinforces the gameplay loop of “Hunt > Unlock karakuri > Develop weapons and armor > Hunt some more”. The Dragon Karakuri allows you to do all of that in the wilderness, without having to go back to town at any point except for story missions. It also helps that every time you face a boss, you get just enough materials to unlock something new, be it a new weapon variant or piece of armor. At least now the forge is just right around the corner, and progression feels fast.

You will want to spend more time in the wilderness anyway. Though Wild Hearts opted for the “different biomes and a hub city” approach Monster Hunter World with its exploration, these biomes are still vast, with their own unique features.

Each of the game’s four biomes represents the seasons of Summer, Spring, Winter, and Fall. You’ll get to walk through abandoned villages overrun by plantlife, admire the leaf-covered pagodas of the Harvest Canyon, walk along the coral-covered beaches of the Spirit Isle, and gaze at the frozen desolation of an old fortress. These areas have many avenues to ambush kemono with the use of your karakuri, as well as points of interest you’ll want to spend time just staring at.

So with the non-combat gameplay already shifted outside of the hub city, the devs have made sure you get to spend a lot of time out in the wilderness like a true hunter, upping the immersion factor. You might not want to go back to civilization afterward.

Beautiful Art Style and Atmosphere Inspired by Medieval Japan

The art style of Wild Hearts is something I can only call “Medieval Japanese Post-Apocalypse”. Everything is overrun with roots, drenched in water, covered in snow, and ruined beyond repair. Meanwhile, hulking tigers, boars covered in leaves, flaming peacocks, and water-spitting flying squirrels roam the landscape. But the game still manages to feel a bit more serene than a post-apocalypse and captures Medieval Japan quite nicely. At least the one we’re used to seeing in movies. Of course, the music helps a ton, but the design of the locales is also a big contributor to building this atmosphere.

You’ve got Japanese-style homes with lacquer roofs, wooden temples, wide Atakabune boats beached on the sand, sakura trees, stone Buddha statues, and staircases that seem to go on and on. These features would either be covered in plant life, leaves, sand, or snow, and the kemono that live among them almost meld into the environment as well.

The design of the hub town, Minato, is no slouch either. You’ve got traditional Japanese architecture, mixed with the gears of giant karakuri, giving it all a steampunk vibe. The town is alive with the chatter of vendors tending to their stalls, fishermen hauling in their catch, and random people going about their business.

The level of detail in these places already proves that the developers put a lot of care into designing the game, but they’re not done yet.

The kemono you face off against are a bit few for a monster hunting title (20 all in all), but all of them are designed with artistry in mind. The Ragetail is covered in flowers and makes a giant tree grow out of the ground as an AoE attack, the Deathstalker surrounds itself in frozen waves of water, and the Spineglider conjures spires of corals from where it can launch devastating aerial attacks.

Sure, these are just monsters you’re supposed to fight. They are as beautiful as they are menacing, though. I would take the developers’ words in a recent Reddit AMA that they focused on the quality of the kemono when creating them rather than quantity. It shows in the design of the monsters, at least.

I already mentioned that the music contributes to Wild Hearts’ overall vibe, and that’s because it, too, leans heavily on its medieval Japanese inspirations. A shamisen strums in quiet moments, giving a sense of serenity as you tread in search of prey. Once you spot your target kemono, the strums pick up, mixing with the sound of Kokyus. It’s impressive how the soundtrack manages to stick to sounding traditional, while still driving home the sense of tension in fights.

Good Amount of Content Plus Promised Free Post-Release Content

Wild Hearts is a long game. Taking into account the grind and the exploration, it may take you between 8 to 12 hours just to get out of Chapter 1. The chapters afterward are almost just as long. Of course, this is par the course with any monster-hunting game, since most of the game will be padded by grinding. There are around 20 kemono to hunt, with a good portion of them being recolored versions of previous kemono. Still, they offer good enough variation to tide you over until the post-release content comes out.

The grind is at the heart of Wild Hearts’ gameplay loop since you’ll need to keep killing kemono to get their material and forge new armor and weapons. There are eight weapons with around 200 variations in this game, along with dozens of armor pieces all lovingly crafted. That’s on top of all the ornaments you can put on your character when you finally get to the town of Minato.

Just grinding out these pieces can already be a treat for completionists, but there’s also a good amount of post-game content after the ending. According to an AMA on Reddit by Wild Hearts’ Executive Producer, there’s even more post-release content coming in the future for the low low price of free.

Though, then again, the price tag of $70 might have you thinking that the extra money will pay for the “free” post-release content. Hopefully what they’ll release in the future is worth the extra cash.

Cons of Wild Hearts

Things That Wild Hearts Can Improve
Performance Issues Plague Both PC and Xbox Average Story and English Dub Might Turn Off Casual Players Better to Play the Game With Friends Hasn’t Sufficiently Set Itself Apart From Other MH Clones

Performance Issues Plague Both PC and Xbox Series S

Great gameplay can only do so much if the performance of your game is terrible. As our team tested the game out on the PC, our entire playthrough was plagued with framerate drops, graphics stutters, and glitches despite our hardware being in mid to high range. That’s why we were forced to play the game on low settings, but even this did not stop the lag spikes during boss battles (which resulted in the shedding of many salty tears).

We checked online and saw that multiple users reported the same issues we had on the PC version. Lag spikes, framerate instability, and flickering textures galore. Not even consoles seemed to be safe with at least one report saying that the game’s beta playtesters complained of jaggy and low-resolution textures, plus being only able to play the game at 30 fps on the Series S.

This strikes me as yet another episode of devs releasing an unpolished product with horrible optimization issues and banking on patches to fix the problem… eventually. Despite charging full price for their game.

This sadly appears to be the standard for games these days, and games that are good to play out of the box are becoming fewer and farther between. Imagine the disappointment of somebody who has spent $70 on this game and is forced to drop it after an unbearable three hours trying to beat the Lavaback on low settings while still getting lag spikes.

Free post-release content sounds good, but Wild Hearts shouldn’t have been running this horribly at launch with its current price tag. While we think that the performance issues will get patched eventually (there’s already a patch slated for performance, if it’s not already fixed by the time you are reading this), it’s still disappointing that an otherwise great game even had these issues in the first place. If you’re a game dev planning to charge a price that’s higher than most AAA games out there, at least make it our money’s worth and fix the performance bugs before launch.

If you’re playing Wild Hearts on the PS5 or Xbox Series X though, well, uh… good for you, then. These platforms will have a much better time running the game. However, the game running well on only half of the platforms it is released for is not a good ratio.

Average Story and English Dub Might Turn Off Casual Players

Of course, with the likes of the Monster Hunter games having almost no plot or a thinly-veiled excuse for a plot, I’m certain that most people don’t play monster-hunting games for the story. To its credit, Wild Hearts tries to have a story, that being that the nameless hunter must hunt kemono to save the town of Minato from their encroachment. In premise the story is practically identical to Monster Hunter, but the story is given more of an emphasis in Wild Hearts.

This type of story will work for people who are already fans of the monster-hunting genre. This may even be seen as a welcome change in that the game has an actual story for once. But here lies a problem: an average story can only make so many new people play games in the monster-hunting genre.

Without spoiling much, let’s just say the story manages to tie up most of its threads by the end. But that’s like making the selling point of your restaurant “the food won’t make you sick”. It’s the bare minimum. But who knows, maybe people can still look past this because the game does have great gameplay. That’s fine.

But as someone who likes to have good stories in his games, I can only hope that the post-release content (or a DLC) will include a more gripping story than what we got in the base game.

Also, another thing that sounds like a personal nitpick, but maybe some of you will agree with me. The English dub is atrocious. Sure, most of the time it’s your Shogun Total War 2-tier English with the fake Japanese accent. That’s okay with me; most games with a medieval Japanese setting have it. It’s just like that.

But to pepper the English script with Japanese words… God. Who knew that such a small addition could add a whole new level of cringe? I regretted setting the voices to English almost immediately when Natsume started talking to me. Do yourself a favor and switch it to Japanese voices with English subtitles. Or Spanish voices. Or the French dub. Just anything but the English dub, please.

Better to Play the Game With Friends

Just like in Monster Hunter, those who play Wild Hearts on single-player get to have AI companions. They’re called “Tsukumo”, and they operate just like the Palicoes of old by giving you heals, chucking stuff at the kemono, replenishing your karakuri thread, or just acting as bait so you have time to heal before stepping into the fray again.

Now, I’m not saying the Tsukumo are bad in any way. They’re just as useful as Palicoes are in battle, and you’ll need the help. What I’m saying is that you’re still better off playing Wild Hearts with friends because they can also build karakuri in your world making them infinitely more useful to have around than Tsukumo.

With the right coordination and teamwork, you can box in a kemono with karakuri after karakuri, spamming jump attacks, pounders, and fireworks on it until it goes down.

Problem is, you’re now missing out on what could be a potentially good time if you’re just playing single-player. If you don’t have friends to play with (or are not willing to play with randos), then tough luck. Hopefully, Wild Hearts goes the way of Sunbreak and puts in AI Hunters with you, though that’s a long shot.

Hasn’t Sufficiently Set Itself Apart From Other MH Clones

The Tsukumo are not the only things that WH seems to have borrowed from MH. As one of our team members put it, Wild Hearts is more or less “a more streamlined version of Monster Hunter World.” I agree with that statement. The combat, the grinding, and the exploration all come from MH World in particular, and even the UI and how you go around gathering materials from the world. The devs just trimmed out the fat from the control scheme and optimized it by having all of the facilities you need out in the wild with you, even the food.

Having played MH World myself, what I can say is that Wild Hearts generally does the gameplay better, though the only thing that sets it apart from that game is its Japanese skin. Considering that MH Rise also has a medieval Japanese aesthetic, the differences blur even more. Now you may think that the karakuri system is very unique, but our team found these contraptions similar to the spells a player can use in yet another MH clone called Soul Sacrifice for the PS Vita. The Pounder Karakuri functions similarly to the Golems in that game, for example.

So it seems to us that Wild Hearts still has a way to go to actually differentiate itself from the pack. Especially if it’s asking for $70 in exchange for the experience it offers.

Wild Hearts Overview & Premise

In the eastern region of Azuma, huge beasts called “kemono” rule the land. Humans were once able to resist the encroachment of these monsters by using the ancient technology of “karakuri”. But its secrets were lost to time, and the humans of Azuma lost more and more land to the kemono, which alter the landscape with their terrifying powers over nature.

You play as a nameless Hunter – people tasked with slaying kemono. You journeyed to Azuma in search of monsters to fight, almost losing your life in the process. But the mysterious musician known as Mujina has given you the power to control karakuri, and once again humanity has the means to take the fight back against the monsters that had forced them out of their homes in times of old.

Wild Hearts is a Monster Hunting Roleplaying Game developed by Omega Force and published by Electronic Arts under its EA Originals label. It is another title in a substantial list of clones of the famous Monster Hunter series, but with a medieval Japanese aesthetic. Players get to hunt powerful kemono in different biomes modeled according to the seasons while gathering resources, developing their campsites, and upgrading their weapons and armor.

The main pull of the game is the use of karakuri in battle. The karakuri allow you to put up different structures that let you do jump attacks against kemono, dodge, fly and even give your weapons a nifty flame attack. Later on, though, you get to combine these karakuri into even more complex forms that will either protect you from attacks or lay down the hurt on enemies. With the right timing, karakuri can help you turn the tables on kemono, who have access to their own field-altering abilities and attacks.

With your skills and the power of karakuri, will you hunt the kemono and tame a world gone wild?

Who Should Play Wild Hearts?

Wild Hearts is Recommended if You Enjoy:

• Monster Hunter World / Monster Hunter Rise
• Other "MH Clones" like Toukiden and God Eater
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• Nioh
• Sekiro

The monster-hunting genre isn’t exactly known for its accessibility to new players, due to intimidating mechanics and combat. But Wild Hearts has managed to simplify these elements enough for casual players to pick it up easily and learn how games in the genre work.

Is Wild Hearts Worth It?

Wait for Wild Hearts To Get Patched First (Unless You’re Playing on PS5 or Xbox Series X)

For now, we’ll say that PC players should wait out Wild Hearts until most of its performance issues are fixed. It has a solid foundation of good gameplay and a near-perfect implementation of the karakuri system, so it’s still a good game despite the performance issues.

We just hope that Omega Force and Koei Tecmo do not fall into the same trap as other game developers seem to have fallen into when it comes to releasing unoptimized, buggy games on launch and patching them out later. It’s a bad habit that appears to have become more common with other releases like Cyberpunk 2077.

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Wild Hearts Trailer

How Wild Hearts Matches Up to Recently-Released Games

Games That Came Out Recently	Pros	Cons
Atomic Heart	Wild Hearts deals more with preparing for a hunt and making sure you have the right tools to take on your enemies, on top of taking place in an open world. Atomic Heart is a first-person shooter that doesn’t require much preparation and is more focused on getting into action quickly.	Since Atomic Heart lets you get into action quickly, some players may like its fast-paced gameplay better than the careful thinking you’ll need to do whenever you’re facing enemies in Wild Hearts.
Hogwarts Legacy	Though both Wild Hearts and Hogwarts Legacy are Role-Playing Games, Wild Hearts is more focused on battling large wild animals while Hogwarts Legacy is more focused on using magic.	Hogwarts Legacy is more fantastical than Wild Hearts, however. Also, fans of the Harry Potter series will definitely like it more than Wild Hearts.
Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty	Wild Hearts may appeal to more audiences because it is inspired by Japanese history and mythology, while Wo Long is more focused on Chinese literature and history.	But Wo Long’s combat can be as deep, if not deeper than Wild Hearts because of its spirit gauge. It’s just as fast-paced as well, without needing the pre-hunt preparation you need to do in Wild Hearts.

How Wild Hearts Matches Up to Similar Games

Games Similar to Wild Hearts	Pros	Cons
Monster Hunter World	Wild Hearts is much more mobile than Monster Hunter World, and it has the Karakuri mechanic that spices up gameplay (plus a more polished way to use items).	But Monster Hunter has more complex gameplay than Wild Hearts, which will appeal to more hardcore fans of monster hunting games.
God Eater 3	Wild Hearts’ gameplay is a bit more complex than God Eater 3, with the Karakuri system in place.	God Eater 3’s aesthetic may appeal more to audiences than Wild Hearts because of its anime aesthetic.
Dauntless	Wild Heart’s aesthetic and gameplay is more unique than Dauntless, which looks closer to Fortnite.	Dauntless might be a better entry-level game for those getting into the monster hunting genre compared to Wild Hearts.

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Wild Hearts Product Information

Title	WILD HEARTS
Release Date	February 16, 2023
Developer	Koei Tecmo, Omega Force
Supported Platforms	PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Genre	Hunting Role Playing Game
Number of Players	1 to 3
ESRB Rating	Teen
Official Website	https://www.ea.com/games/wild-hearts/wild-hearts

Michael Mendoza Ab..

Reviews video games by day, tries to write novels by night. He's a sucker for open-world games (Bethesda Fallout titles, Mount and Blade Bannerlord, Grand Theft Auto), CRPGs (Planescape: Torment, Disco Elysium), and First-Person Shooters (Call of Duty, Battlefield, and immersive sims like Bioshock..