Perhaps this is why Omega Forces monster battler is so welcoming to newcomers.
Wild Hearts is the perfect entry point for anyone who has ever dreamed of being a Monster Hunter Liker.
A bombastic, brilliant good time thats held back by frequent, frustrating performance issues on PC.
Wild Hearts is all about killing monsters, or hunting them if you will.
Battles follow a strict loop.
There is a rhythm to combat, a balance and a beat in your dance of death.
This will, of course, all sound very familiar to anyone whos played Monster Hunter before.
Structurally the two are near identical, but why fix what isnt broken?
Yes, you will hunt the same monster multiple times.
It will attack you with the same moves.
You will get knocked down again, again, and again.
Above all else, your goal here is mastery.
Not a cool new pair of boots, or a hat made out of a raccoons face.
The ability to predict what a monster will do next, and counter it without taking a hit.
That was the joy of Monster Hunter, and it can be found just as easily in Wild Hearts.
Of course, things arent entirely the same.
These trinkets serve as your special moves and allow you to both counter and deal damage to Kemono.
A spring carries you safely out of the path of a charging monster.
A tiny helicopter lets you glide gracefully above the chaos before plunging your sword into a creatures exposed brain.
Whacking a big pig with a hammer made me laugh throughout my entire time with the game.
The simple joke of a huge wooden mallet bonking an unsuspecting creature on the noggin never gets old.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bombastic combat shares similarities with the developers hack-and-slash seriesDynasty Warriors.
I dont think this is a bad thing, mind.
It speaks to the games commitment to serve as the best introduction to lower case monster hunting to date.
The same cant be said for the games story, which probably could have benefited from being scaled back.
The fact youre infrequently presented with a dialogue choice is laughable.
Then, of course, there are the tech issues.
Hitting a consistent frame rate - even on high end hardware - is impossible.
The game stutters constantly.
Motion blur and depth of field, enabled by default, actively make the game look worse.
Even with the stuttering though, I adored my time with Wild Hearts.
This is a fierce competitor to Monster Hunter and a great starting point for newcomers to the genre.
