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PC|XS|PS5 Wild Hearts

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PC|XS|PS5 Wild Hearts

Unread postby icycalm » 23 Feb 2023 17:40

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https://www.ea.com/games/wild-hearts/wild-hearts

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1938010/WILD_HEARTS

KOEI TECMO wrote:Master ancient tech to hunt down giant beasts.


Didn't put in a lot of effort into the Steam description. Also weird that EA is publishing a Koei Tecmo title...

Apparently the game has horrible performance issues, at least on PC, and it's getting review-bombed on Steam because of them, but I managed to find a couple of reviews that analyze the game instead of just dumping on it. That said, they're still very negative. There ARE some positive opinions, but it's mainly guys just saying "great game" instead of analyzing anything, so they're probably just stupid.

Karakuri Gameplay Deep-Dive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF1XXhRfSV4

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You can see this first guy is smart because he calls the game a "third person bossfight game". You rarely see such understanding of genre among gamers. It's so rare, that anyone that displays it can be basically assumed to be a genius.

https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/765 ... ed/1938010

Bags.wav wrote:Here's a review not talking about the performance issues, horrible though they may be. I'm going to talk about the gameplay as a MH and Souls veteran, and the problems I have with it, to give you an idea of if you want to try it out on any device. I'm going to reference MH mechanics a lot as a comparison.

Compared to other third person bossfight games previously mentioned, (and Dauntless and God Eater) the fights aren't balanced at all. The fights are very fast paced and your ability to react is actually more limited than other games, despite the extra tools you have available in Wild Hearts.

The audio/visual cues are hard to read, every monster has one or more moves that come out very quickly with very little visual windup and hard to hear, or missing, audio cue; the hitboxes are baaaaaad. The camera is also awful. MH's lock on always sucked and it does here too. With the bigger enemies it's difficult to see what it's doing and read the aforementioned cues.

Your fundamental ability to dodge is also worse overall. With your weapon drawn it's almost useless, especially with certain slower weapons. They overcompensate for this by making sheathing/unsheathing your weapon faster, and giving the player a cartoonishly long power slide when you sprint and dodge with your weapon sheathed. Every single monster has attacks that cannot be dodged with your weapon out, AND come out too quickly to use one of your buildings to avoid.

Anyone who completed MHworld will know about the Nergigante divebomb. You had to sheathe your weapon, sprint faced away from the monster, and hit the dodge button to do a leap which granted you invincibility frames to avoid basically being one shot by that special move. At least with nergigante, it had a cool buildup throughout the fight and you knew what to do, and he gave you time to do it.

The monsters in this game have attacks in their normal pattern that will deal heavy damage, come out quick, be missing significant cues, have a bad hitbox, and dodging them with the short roll doesn't cut it. A lot of these moves are lock on until the last moment, even timing that correctly however, the hitbox is big enough that again, the short dodge roll with your weapon out is NOT enough to avoid it.

And when you get hit In MH there's different levels of hit animations, some of which can be 'canceled' with the dodge button. If you get knocked gently you can dodge out to avoid being combo'd, or when you get knocked all the way down you can get up with a roll to reposition OR choose to stay down longer for invincibility frames.

Well in this game monsters just combo you. If there are invincibility frames in certain damage animations, I haven't noticed, because you can get smacked back to back repeatedly. And pressing the dodge button to see if you can cancel these the same way has yielded me very unreliable results. Sometimes I can dodge out and sometimes I can't. There's no readability in the damage animations because I can't tell the difference between what I CAN roll out of, and what I cannot. AND the knockdown/recovery/obvious damage window states the monster goes into, are the shortest in any game I've ever played.

I played the crit draw greatsword in a lot of MH games, I'm super familiar with the get in get out style of fighting a boss, but in this game it feels like I'm just managing the bullcrap instead of having a proper fight. The mh games are usually well balanced enough it feels like a dance, a back and forth of opportunity, action, reaction. In this game i'm just mad every 2.5 seconds at what I have to do to deal with the enemies attacks.

I'm going to keep playing for the SOLE reason that I haven't unlocked all the weapons yet, which I think it's stupid to have them locked from the early part, as in these types of games a lot of players specifically use ONE kind of weapon, you should have them all available. And maybe, maybe, trying the other weapons will give me the edge to make this game tolerable.

TLDR: Camera bad, hitbox bad, audio/visual cues bad, dodge bad, balance bad.


Edit: In all of this I meant: compared to MH which has better cues and balance, WH is worse. Doesn't mean I just cried and gave up, I can still beat the monsters, it's just these issues give me enough frustration that I don't find the experience comparable or as rewarding as the proper bossfight dance I felt in MH, and that's why I honestly don't recommend it as a 1:1 for the obvious many MH players that will come to this game exclusively for the similarity. It's different enough to be jarring and a less solid experience.

Call me bad if you want but I don't think I'm wrong and just crying for pointing out that these aspects are worse. Dauntless and God eater have the same problems with missing cues, readability issues, short down states and high damage quick windup moves. I still beat those too and I'm gonna play through WH as well.

The point is that yes I believe it's a design issue. The difference in the dodge between sheathed and unsheathed has been mentioned by other reviewers too, not just me. I believe 100% they did that on purpose because they knew it was necessary, and I also believe it shouldn't be.

These things I talked about should have been tweaked differently and had more time spent on them, and if anything I think the performance issues point out that they should have put more work into this game either way. But if you just wanna call me bad, okay. I'm still gonna beat the game eventually.

If I feel differently about it later then yeah I'll come back and admit I was bad.


https://steamcommunity.com/id/JehtStarr ... ed/1938010

Sol wrote:I really wanted to like this game, so I fought against the performance issues and played until after the Deathstalker/Ice Wolf monster at the 4th area. From what I've experienced, fixing performance won't save this game. I won't mention these in this review as they are supposedly being fixed, and I believe the game has bigger things to worry about.

The Karakuri system is really cool in concept, but is frequently janky in practice. To build larger devices (like the funny hammer) you have to place multiple smaller objects in a configuration. However the placement is grid based, and sometimes even standing still, you can stack two objects, but the final piece is placed to the side, failing to complete the build. Building these combinations while under attack or moving is essentially impossible, with slight camera movements causing basic Karakuri to be placed outside of the configuration.

Interacting with Karakuri is also clunky. For example, the torch Karakuri causes you to do a short dash forwards and perform a melee attack when you enter a radius around it. The animation can't be cancelled, and sometimes if you walk directly towards the torch, the dash attack animation will end with you still in the torches radius, forcing you to attack again. Combined with the above problem of Karakuri grid placement often getting misaligned, you can end up in situations where you accidentally just place a torch alone and get stun-locked by the attack animation it forces you into.

Monster diversity is basically non-existent. Each area has around 4-5 monsters that can appear there. Monsters start being repeated as re-skins as soon as the 3rd area, and by the 4th area all but one of the monsters is a re-skin. After completing the main quest in the 4th area, my next main quest was to return there and fight a "Mighty Kingtusk". This monster wasn't even a re-skin (although a re-skin of the Kingtusk is present in the area as well), it is simply the same enemy from the first area with inflated stats. In total, the game has "21" monsters, however 7 of them are re-skins, so there is only 14 unique fights (And one of those is basically a dollar store Zorah Magdaros you just hold down the attack button against). The monsters don't also really "do" anything. They mostly just stand around waiting for you to come and beat them up. I know they CAN sleep, but I think I only say this twice in my entire playtime, both times being the same monster in the same place. Monsters don't interact with each other at all outside of scripted encounters which try to replicate turf wars from Monster Hunter. Large monsters don't interact with small monsters, small monsters don't interact with each other, and all will just run at you and attack you with no context for each other, and can't actually damage each other at all (Why are these lizards and mice teaming up against me when there is a giant boar 50x their size stomping around?)

The story of the game is not at all engaging, to the point where I thought it was actually bugged. Upon being introduced to the city hub area, there as a cutscene and a time skip, after which you are already "well acquainted" with everyone in the town. There's no development of your role in the town through gameplay and you are never given a reason to care about anyone. You just walk around with people you've never met before saying it's good to see you again and how important you are. Sidequests mostly boil down to a couple generic lines of dialogue about a family member or something, and end in "Anyway, go kill Sapscourge again."

The gear system is pretty tragic, with weapon skills being almost exclusively garbage like "+2% crit damage" or something to that effect. Armour is for the most part the same, with the majority of the gear sets I unlocked having no skills attached at all. There isn't very much diversity in armour sets, with many of the individual sets being tied to multiple monsters (and remember there is only 21 monsters). The Human/Kemono path system is interesting, with some armour being able to be modified to be more human or monster like, affecting a balance gauge that can unlock skills based on how far you're tipped towards either side. The system isn't fleshed out very much, with the majority of the armour not being modifiable, and sets that do allow it usually don't let you modify every piece. The skills requiring these paths are few and far between, usually don't do anything particularly interesting, and are often the only skill on a piece of gear. As such, skills being locked behind these paths comes off as arbitrarily locking you out of your gear skills, as opposed to a nice bonus for following a certain path.

The freedom of movement and different movement options are awesome, but come with their own problems. Flying around frequently gets you stuck on invisible walls, has you walking on the air or clipping you through scenery. These issues get progressively worse in each area, with the 4th map being difficult to tell where you can and can't walk at all.

The weapons are actually really fun for the most part, if not balanced really poorly, with some weapons being just objectively worse than others. Additionally, you don't unlock every weapon right away. There are 8 weapon types, with 3 (Cannon, Clawblade and Staff) locked until the end of the first chapter of the story (And there are only 4 chapters). As such, if you want to use one of those 3, you have to play with a different weapon for the first several hours of the game.

Overall, this game isn't worth $70. I'd struggle to recommend it even at half price. Even if the performance issues get fixed, the game is largely a shallow experience that struggles to prop itself up with just the Karakuri and cool weapons. I'd like to hope this game gets the No Man's Sky treatment and becomes the Monster Hunter competitor I was hoping it would be, but with EA at the wheel I'm not holding my breath.

TL;DR: Just buy MHW lol
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icycalm
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Unread postby icycalm » 23 Feb 2023 17:42

There are also some good comments posted under these reviews for those wishing to read further (makes sense that the best comments will be posted under the best reviews). Here's one under the second review:

Nocchi wrote:Note I need to add: MHWorld had 27 UNIQUE monsters on launch. Not only were they very different from one another, but they were also well integrated into the already lively environment through hunting cycles, territorial marking, interactions with one another and lore. Heck, even the tiny toads would start anxiously shaking when big monster are around and most people don’t even notice that.

Wild Hearts is incredibly barren and the monsters have barely any identity beyond looks and attacks.

Combat is also incredibly light to the point it reminds me more of DMC than a hunting game which usually have fairly weighted combat. The only good thing is the building. Wild Hearts feels more like competition for dauntless than MonHun and at that point isn’t worth more than 20 bucks. Let’s hope it’ll get the no man’s sky treatment, but I doubt it with EA publishing it.
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icycalm
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