I tried out
Monster Hunt Wilds due to seeing chatter about it on IRC.
First, I like that the game lets you dress up like a visual kei star.
You also get to pick from a few really gimmicky weapons, like a sword that can transform into an axe, or blowing on a giant tuba to buff the group and then swinging it around like a mace. You can do aerial leaps with a lance like a dragoon from Final Fantasy while also throwing insects at the enemy. There are also dual blades with a grappling hook that lets you do Levi's spin attack from Attack on Titan.
I only saw a few creatures but they looked pretty unique, a giant road monster with a large muscular tongue, and these monkey/lion/bear things.
The story is vaguely interesting with the player being an agent of some sort of government and being sent to spy on this newly discovered territory. One of the female NPCs claims that my weapon techniques are only ever used against monsters, but given the opening flashback where I was meeting with that higher up and being sent on my secret mission, I am skeptical.
My two big complaints thus far has been the performance, and the tutorialization.
I am using a 3070 Ti and it is 2024, and yet somehow games continue to run worse and worse. The game was set to medium graphics setting by default (recommended?) and I didn't turn anything up, and yet I was still getting framedrops, and the game did not look that good outside of the handful of high fidelity cutscenes, or certain menus such as the above tent/equipment screen. The game had massive performance drop when I exitted my first multiplayer mission to the hub and it was populated by other players. Some characters had ridiculous LOD models that were never replaced even after several minutes passed by. Obviously there is the word "beta" being thrown around, but I have heard the "it's just a beta! It will get better!" rhetoric thrown around too many times only for it to not get better.
I spent about an hour and a half playing, most of that time trying to figure out the controls and how to use my weapon, and I still struggle to play correctly. The controls are unintuitive and the UI IMO is not well designed, with you having to constantly glance up at the top right to see the button combinations, which change after every press and then revert to the default if you do not continue a combo after a couple seconds, so that makes it difficult to follow what is going on. I was spoon fed tutorial boxes on how to use the Insect Glaive when I fought the first toad boss, but I have yet to figure out how to repeat that boss fight and get those prompts to appear for my other weapons. I joined a multiplayer quest for the toad boss and the prompts did not appear. Also spent a lot of time puzzled trying to find the item I need to use to scatter the two adds from the second bear boss; tried grabbing everything nearby the boss' location and then throwing it at him and the adds, as well as checking my tent for items, and I am still confused as to what I am supposed to do.
Will keep an eye on it.
