Wild Hearts

Has there ever been a game where you play as a monster hunter? Of course. Omega Force, mostly known for their Warriors games, is now setting out the bait once ...

The developers have promised that DLC is on the way in the coming months with more kemono and karakuri, and it’s all going to be free with no paid updates in the plans (not yet, at least), so even after you’ve finished the base game, there’ll be more to bring you back to Azuma. That also doesn’t keep it from being a solid effort anyway, and for those who would like a little more of a story to dig into, Wild Hearts might still be the preferred way to go. On the other hand, the addition of karakuri is a forced attempt at complexity. The villagers are happy to put you to work and get you to bail them out of their predicament by hunting down kemono for fun and profit. Though you take on the role of a typical customizable silent protagonist, your character is not lacking in personality. But you don’t need to carefully and meticulously curate a pack of tools that you carry around, and crafting items is simplified without sacrificing depth. Its difficulty isn’t at Souls-like levels, but Wild Hearts still offers plenty of challenge, and while crafting better gear can go a long way in tough battles, at the end of the day, your success is dependent on you honing your skill. The kemono are literally and figuratively the meat of the Wild Hearts experience. The difference here is your character is a master of utilizing special devices called karakuri that aid you in performing powerful attacks on the beasts. While you have a variety of standard weapons, each with its own quirks, the karakuri are vital to taking kemono down, and forsaking use of the devices might prove to be an exercise in futility. As you explore, you’ll come across remnants of settlements, beaten down by the elements and overgrown by nature. As you proceed through the game and learn more, it can be interesting to see how new devices perform against kemono both old and new.

Wild Hearts is the Monster Hunter series' latest competition - but does it hold its own or does it falter under its own beasts.

The first instance of questionable visuals came whenever it was raining, the rain, mixed with the already stuttery gameplay made it extremely challenging to see and left us worried about the rest of the experience. On more than one occasion, despite pressing the right buttons to recover, we found ourselves pinned between a glitching tree and the beast, unable to recover quickly enough to avoid attacks, and often the killing blow. While this was exciting and really proved the might of these creatures, such an endless chase and unleash of attacks often began feeling repetitive and lacked that skill-based fighting we were looking for. Solo fighting is long-winded, challenging, often overwhelming, and just feels unnatural for the game’s mechanics. It can often be rather overwhelming having to fight monsters while building structures to avoid their attacks, but once mastered, this is a fantastic fighting feat, perfect for planned attacks and strategic avoidance. The heavily inspired gameplay is often regarded as either the main selling point or the primary reason for Wild Hearts’ demise.

'Wild Hearts' is an overt riff on Monster Hunter, but its biggest deviation is an out-there reinterpretation of a fundamental 'Fortnite' mechanic.

With a flick of the wrist, you can conjure three climbable boxes that let you leap into the sky to then come crashing down on your foes. Wild Hearts has a faint whiff of forgettable recent experiments like Anthem and Outriders, which also emphasize online co-op with three-person squads. Or maybe you build a trap that springs an enormous hammer to bonk the Kemono on its head. Even if that makes it feel like Wild Hearts is chasing trends, what it ultimately achieves does feel like a balanced marriage of things that work. And it makes sense considering Wild Hearts is a collaboration between EA and Koei Tecmo, which is Nioh’s publisher in Japan. Outside of the core gameplay loop, however, Wild Hearts stands out as a visually breathtaking hunting game inspired by Feudal Japan that leans into photorealism. [campfire](https://www.inverse.com/article/46559-how-s-mores-were-created-girl-scouts-america-campfire-treat) out of thin air. You track Kemono through various biomes, they interact with the environments in chaotic ways, and each battle phase ends with the Kemono running away. You play as an anonymous stranger in a new land tasked with restoring balance to the land of Azuma. Eventually, you slay the beast and harvest its bones and stuff for resources. (Imagine the Pokémon The hulking, [rat-like](https://www.inverse.com/science/inverse-daily-041122) Kemono lunges for me with gnashing teeth, misses, and darts away.

The Omega Force division of Koei Tecmo is primarily known for Dynasty Warriors, the wild power fantasy series that sees players effortlessly taking out hundreds ...

"[Crossplay] was actually quite a significant decision for us, and it was one of the toughest things we actually had to work with in development," Edagawa said. Beyond that, Hirata said Koei Tecmo wants Wild Hearts to be a new core franchise for the studio. Wild Hearts is a fresh start in the genre for Omega Force, and the directors have high hopes for the game beyond this week's launch. We wanted to make sure the Kemono were really strong and really difficult to beat, because we wanted the players to feel the sense that it was a challenging endeavor. But trying to find that right balance between the actual strength of the Kemono versus the strength of the players was the hardest balance to figure out." The Karakuri crafting system came about when Edagawa and Hirata realized the beasts were too difficult for players to defeat.

The Shack crew was lucky enough to get early access to Wild Hearts and we want to take you for a hunt.

[link your Twitch and Amazon accounts](http://www.shacknews.com/article/104272/how-to-get-twitch-prime-by-linking-an-amazon-prime-account) if you want to give us some of Bezos’ bucks. And remember, you get a free sub if you This upcoming title from EA and Koei-Tecmo puts players in the boots of a hunter tasked with taking out some massive beasts and that’s just what we’re going to do!

In a new interview with IGN, Wild Hearts' developers talk about managing the new monster hunting game's difficulty, crossplay, microtransactions, and more.

"[Crossplay] was actually quite a significant decision for us, and it was one of the toughest things we actually had to work with in development," Edagawa said. Wild Hearts is a fresh start in the genre for Omega Force, and the directors have high hopes for the game beyond this week's launch. We wanted to make sure the Kemono were really strong and really difficult to beat, because we wanted the players to feel the sense that it was a challenging endeavor. But trying to find that right balance between the actual strength of the Kemono versus the strength of the players was the hardest balance to figure out." The Karakuri crafting system came about when Edagawa and Hirata realized the beasts were too difficult for players to defeat. Players will be able to take advantage of the new Karakuri crafting system, which gives players the power to instantly construct objects during the heat of battle.

No strangers to the monster-hunting genre, the co-directors of Wild Hearts explain their globally-focussed approach to the genre.

‘I hope that people appreciate the level of detail in there. Perhaps that’s the secret formula to creating a captivating world to hunt monsters in. They want to be more in control of their own learning, and we teach them by letting them explore and learn on their own”. ‘Thinking back on it, it would have been quite dynamic and really interesting to see something like that happen,’ said Hirata. and so we had feedback from these user tests on a very regular basis, and that really fed back into our development process. Of course, another major difference with Omega Force’s latest outing into the genre is in its publishing partners. He and fellow co-director Takuto Edagawa spoke to GamesHub via a translator in the week prior to the game’s release. Hirata continued, ‘Sometimes you’re choosing life, but at the same time, you’re also consciously choosing to kill or take away that life as well. But according to the directors, the game isn’t solely about your ability to take these giant beasts down. In Toukiden, the player is tasked with fighting huge demons and monsters from Japanese mythology. Toukiden did quite well in its home market, on a portable console that only Japan seemed to really love, the PlayStation Vita, where it was [the highest-selling game on the console](https://www.famitsu.com/news/201311/01042596.html) for the country in 2013. I think that we were a lot more conscious of it this time around,’ he said.