Recent reviews by Zulban

I had much more to say but I was over 7,500 characters over the limit so I had to cut out half the review. Oh well.
TLDR: If you enjoy the Monster Hunter franchise you should buy this game (with the caveat that you either use the benchmark tool to see how well it runs on your computer, or get it on console. Crossplay means you can play with Steam friends if that's a factor for you). If you do not like the Monster Hunter franchise do not buy this game, since nothing in the new iteration will convince you to change your mind. If you are somehow so-so about the series I'd say wait for a sale. If you liked Monster Hunter: Rise but weren't much of a fan of Monster Hunter: World or older games in the franchise then you'll still probably like this game but wish it had more Rise 'flavor' to it. If you played World or Rise after the Iceborne/Sunbreak expansions were released, keep in mind this is the 'base' game including low/high rank, without the G-rank expansion "true end game" content and difficulty released yet.
This review is going to assume you understand the basic premise of the series. To frame the perspective this is written in, I have been playing these games since sometime around 2013-2014 starting with Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate on the 3DS, so I was somewhat late to the series but early enough to experience how the older games played and watch the series evolve into what it is today. I am also one of those people that couldn't really get into Rise/Sunbreak the way I could the older games or even World (which isn't to say Rise is bad, it just wasn't to my tastes).

Monster Hunter: Wilds, the first entry in the sixth 'generation' of the franchise, proudly takes two steps forward, drunkenly stumbles to the side and flirts with mobile gaming for a moment, before shuffling backwards a step. It is a great entry to the franchise with some puzzling design decisions and some features which veterans of the series might feel detracts from the 'hunting' experience, making the game feel more like "Monster Fighter" rather than "Monster Hunter." With that said, "Monster Fighting" in this game is excellent and has never been better, so if you don't care about the 'preparation and hunting' elements from previous games then you likely won't miss their absence here.

There is a Giant Crown Gammoth in the room that needs to be discussed first. Monster Hunter: Wilds is poorly optimized... or... optimized strangely at the very least. This game apparently relies very heavily on your CPU instead of your GPU for your framerate. You can check your performance tab in task manager or use other performance tools while running the benchmark to see this. My CPU was between 70-100% utilization whereas my GPU was around 30% utilization no matter if I ran with Ultra settings or Low settings. I have an i7-11700K and a GTX 3070 TI which aren't the latest and greatest but aren't necessarily super dated either and depending on what's going on in the game I get around 40-65 FPS. The strange thing is that in most 'unoptimized' games I play the computer's fans will kick into overdrive and I can feel the computer getting warm, but that's not the case with this game. Again, I recommend running the benchmark tool and pay special attention to the non-cutscene portion to get a feel for how the game runs for you. I play on medium-high settings at 1440p (with DLSS on so probably not even technically at that resolution most of the time) and I'm personally fine with the framerates I'm getting... but I'm also fairly accustomed to playing games like ARMA where a double digit framerate is considered an achievement. Naturally, I would definitely appreciate being able to get a steady 60... I can only hope that by the time the G-rank expansion comes around that dream has become a reality.

Now I don't have much to say about the combat in this game that I haven't already. It's really good and incredibly satisfying, the kind of stuff you'll be pursing your lips in satisfaction as your brain is bombarded with True Charged Slashes of dopamine. If that's all you want out of this game then there's no reason to read further, just buy it already and have fun.

I will still play Monster Hunter and enjoy it until the day it adds some kind of auto-play mechanic like a cheap Korean MMO, which it already has a tiny little bit of. I've even seen people complaining on forums that they wanted such features to be added, and I cannot help but shake my head. It is my belief that Monster Hunter is a niche game that isn't necessarily for everyone, and the more they attempt to appeal to more people by stripping things away the less niche it become, the less Monster Hunter it becomes... For those who know: I am a mint ice cream person, but they are adding more and more chocolate and taking away the mint to the point where there's just mint pieces in chocolate ice cream. It's still great ice cream but it's not the mint chocolate chip that I once knew and loved.

Monster Hunter as a franchise is practically known for the story mostly being an excuse for you to progress through the ranks and hunt harder and harder monsters to the point where NPCs weren't even given proper names in the older titles. Just as in previous games I felt the story here was perfectly serviceable but it didn't really stand out like I think the writers were hoping it would. Personally I'm much more interested in the world of Monster Hunter, or the 'lore' as it were, but Wilds is definitely focused more on individual characters and the theme of people coexisting in an ecosystem with monsters. It also tries to give the spotlight to the societies that exist within the Forbidden Lands but it almost feels like they were trying to rush through those parts for fear of the player becoming bored from not Monster Fighting for 5 minutes. As with Dragon's Dogma 2, it feels like the writing team wanted to do so much more but for one reason or another are being hamstrung. I did like certain aspects near/at the end of Low Rank but I don't want to spoil anything.

There's also huge missed opportunities, namely the fact that you and your handler and smithy are essentially a single squad (referred to as a Unit) within a battalion (referring to The Expedition as a whole), but apart from one other unit you hardly ever hear about what the other units are doing, what their objectives are, or anything of the sort. In fact, during one cutscene your smithy specifically asks the hunter of another unit what their objective is but she replies to the effect of "each unit has their own duties and objectives", but she purposefully does not elaborate at all on any specifics. I suspected she and her unit may have had some kind of special secret assignment that even you are to be kept in the dark about and would potentially lead to a big reveal or twist... but this just isn't the case. Yes, you are the protagonist, but it's as if the other units are sitting around twiddling their thumbs while you and the other aforementioned unit are doing all the work.

Capcom is basically sitting on a gold mine and isn't taking advantage of it for whatever reason. In Monster Hunter World: Iceborne you had a personal house you could invite people to and Capcom had some paid cosmetic DLC available to make your house nice and snazzy to look at... but that was it. If someone from Capcom reads this: in the expansion for Wilds re-introduce the customizable player house, but make it the gathering hub too. It would be pretty sweet for squads to have their own cool hangout spot they could initiate quests from, not to mention content creators and other communities who would love to have a personalized 'gathering hub/house' for their lobbies.

First off some comparisons to a few other games. Tunic. Toki Tori 2+. Fez. Environmental Station Alpha. Rain World (vaguely).
If you enjoyed the games on that list then Animal Well will very likely be your kind of game. (I had more to list but by the time I went to list them I had forgotten their names).

Animal Well is one of those games that comes in layers. On the surface it's a 'metroidvania' style puzzle platformer where you obtain items that allow you to solve puzzles and progress through the map and open up areas that you didn't have the tools to open before. As far as the surface level gameplay is concerned Animal Well is extremely competent and will give you a decent enough challenge without ever getting into the more hidden and obscure stuff all the way up to the ending credits. The tone of the game ranges from lighthearted to outright terrifying at certain moments, but for the most part a majority of the game is pretty ambient and subdued with most dangers coming in the form of environmental hazards. Those few moments of terror are quite profound and memorable due to how infrequent and well presented they are.

The second layer of the game is finding collectible eggs hidden throughout the map and finding the 'true' ending. There are 64* of these and I was able to find 58 of them on my own, plus 4 more with hints, and 2 I had to explicitly look up the locations of. I don't consider myself a super sleuth but finding these eggs was quite enjoyable and some of them are pretty deviously hidden or require you to use your tools in surprising ways or even obtain new ones that aren't needed to reach the end credits.

Beyond this there are some very obscure puzzles, largely involving finding secret rabbits. I was able to find 3 of these on my own but the rest of them will really test your puzzle solving abilities. If you enjoy solving meta puzzles then this game will provide that.

Of course, there's yet another layer. Speedrunning rewards and puzzles that will require you to use knowledge outside of the game to solve, the kind of "ARG" style puzzles. These aren't my kind of thing and most of them have been solved at the time of posting so if you want to solve them for yourself be wary of online searches. Even so I found it fun to follow a guide and see what the results were for myself (except for the speedrunning stuff, that just isn't my kind of thing).

Overall, I was quite happy with my playthrough of Animal Well, which lasted roughly 10-12 hours including searching for eggs as I went. If you're just trying to reach the end credits you can probably get through it quicker than that on your first playthrough but in my opinion you're not getting the most out of the game if that's your main goal. After the credits you can still continue your savegame to explore the map so don't worry about that, but you do get 3 save files in total just in case.

*There's a 65th. Naturally.

What is a Warframe's greatest nemesis?











A doorframe.