Giving the hunter-gathering of Monster Hunter the middle finger, Wild Hearts imbues you with the powers of construction branded as the mystical art of “Karakuri”, collecting magical thread allows players to build Fortnite-esque structures mid-battle. It’s a fun-filled onboarding that immediately lets you get to the good stuff – and then things take a turn for the weird. As you climb and slash your way through lavish locales, its sprawling and overgrown world hints at life within a wider civilisation, inviting curiosity in a way that the closed-off hubs of Monster Hunter don’t. Where Monster Hunter bombards you with menus, EA’s take is happy to let its world do the talking, throwing you headfirst into its fantastical setting. Unlike the game it’s unashamedly influenced by, Wild Hearts makes its world feel both mysterious and approachable. The hapless Azumians aren’t having a great time with these skyscraper-sized rapscallions, and it falls to you to sort things out. This realm is ruled by giant mythical beasts known as Kemono, coated in moss and flowers, and these once-peaceful creatures have inexplicably become enraged. I thought Monster Hunter and its ilk just weren’t for me – but then I played EA and Omega Force’s wonderfully weird Wild Hearts.Īn eyebrow-raising collaboration between the publisher of Fifa and the creators of Dynasty Warriors, set in the land of Azuma (inspired by feudal Japan), it’s like a fever dream.

Yet try as I might to heed the call of the hunt, my heroic ambitions are consistently foiled by walls of text and hours of slaying the same embarrassingly tiny lizards.

There’s something undeniably cool about Capcom’s ongoing creature-hunter series Monster Hunter: in our world of mundane capitalism, it offers a return to violent, heroic days of yore, where it’s just you, monsters and a great big sword.

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