Wild Hearts Hands-On Preview: Gorgeous Monster Hunting with Building

Completing these unlocks more optional quests, grants points to unlock new building abilities, and rewards those sweet sweet mats to upgrade your equipment, which is an easy-to-understand, streamlined process. This has me worried about the longevity of Wild Hearts, but may be music to others’ ears who prefer less grindy, less min-maxy experiences. This might also change as the game progresses – I was only able to fight three monsters and unlock four different upgrades, after all.

There are eight totally different weapon types to master; ranging in technical difficulty from very easy to grasp, like the Karakuri Katana; to simple yet demanding of skill, like the parasol-like Wagasa; to requiring both understanding and skill, like the bow. There’s a mechanical bear friend to help you learn the ropes, but these tutorials are pretty bare bones and left me to put two-and-two together to discover how to best use the weapon.

Generally, Wild Hearts’ combat feels good and leads to plenty of hype moments. There was a bit of jank in the build I played, especially with the camera and targeting. It tends to come with fighting big, agile creatures in games in general, and there’s some feedback I’d like to be a bit more “crunchy” and obvious, but learning the systems and how to out-maneuver the bit of jank is just part of the genre at this point. There’s more to Wild Hearts than just wielding huge weapons against giant animals so you can make new pants, though – you can build stuff on the fly mid-combat.

This Karakuri mechanic really sets Wild Hearts apart from anything else in the genre, to my knowledge. (No, Fortnite is not in this genre.) With Karakuri, I could do things like build crates in an instant to leap off of and deal devastating attacks, or build springs to dash away in place of a dodge when my stamina was low. The third “basic” Karakuri I unlocked is the torch, which, once erected, allowed me to coat my weapon in flames or deal a satisfying fire attack to the vulnerable, plant-based Kemono.

Building Karakuri in certain ways leads to entirely new structures. If I built six crates in a rectangle formation, it would create a Bulwark. This large wall stopped the Kingtusk in its tracks and hilariously flinged it away – if I built it correctly. I’ll eventually develop the skill to do this under pressure, but the loss of six-plus Karakuri at once with no payoff can be a ruinous setback. See, building Karakuri requires thread, which is usually overabundant, but it had run scarce in the area we fought in. You can climb any Kemono and attack weak points to replenish these materials, but I frustratingly failed to reach the only remaining spots. Unable to build, avoiding the monstrous beast’s attacks became very difficult, especially with the katana’s kit. I got knocked around an embarrassing amount before finally claiming victory.

Despite the difficulty I described in this instance, I did only “die” one time, and I never failed a quest. I also can’t help but blame my own inexperience with Wild Hearts at that point, and that frustrating (near) failure made figuring out what did work all the more rewarding. I slayed the Kingtusk in much less than half the time with the parasol-like Wagasa, since I could rely on parrying instead of trying to i-frame my way through a wall of fleshy vines.

Outside of combat, you’ll need to use Karakuri to get around. Luckily, the things you build are persistent. Meaning, once you build something, it’s in your world for good. At least, until Kemono (or you) destroy it. There’s another class of Karakuri, too, called “dragon Karakuri.” This category includes structures you’d likely want to be more permanent, like a hunter’s tent, which allows you to rest; or a flying vine, which lets you set up giant zip lines to get around better. Once the dragon Karakuri are built, you can always destroy them to free up the resources they originally used, but finding them again was a bit tricky since they weren’t marked on the large map.

Though I was able to explore almost every nook and cranny of Wild Heart’s first “hunting ground,” Hanagasumi Hill, there’s still more to do. Exploring is a reward in itself – some of those nooks are breathtaking, the type of scenery you call a friend in just to show. But, there are plenty more reasons to investigate thoroughly. The aforementioned dragon veins are especially important (and very loosely tied to fast travel), but there are also cooking ingredients to make stat-boosting meals and resources needed to upgrade weapons and armor. There’s even a collectible in the form of 50 Tsukumo. Finding the first one unlocks a small round robot hunting companion, and each one after that leads to unlocking more and more buffs for it. Plus, the adorable robot friends stack up around camp to keep you company. I found more secrets, too, but I’ll leave those as a mystery for now.

Wild Hearts Screenshots