Monster Hunter Wilds has Game of the Year written all over it

I don’t like Monster Hunter. Despite multiple friends trying to pull me into different iterations of the series, it’s just never been my cup of tea. The graphics have looked good, the mechanics interesting, but it’s never grabbed me. Then I saw Monster Hunter Wilds.

To say the demo of Monster Hunter Wilds I saw at a behind-closed-doors Summer Game Fest preview was impressive would be my understatement of the year. It blew everything else I saw and played out of the water: The enormity of the world and its creatures, the fluidity as we moved from biome to biome seamlessly, and the overwhelming options at your disposal in your pursuit of a beast. In one hunt, I saw a particularly hearty Doshaguma climbed on, sliced, shot, lured into a gigantic sandtrap created by a different monster to thin its herd, baited into a fight with a massive dragon that breathed lightning on the thing, chased into a massive sandstorm that turned day to night, had huge stalactites dropped on its head as it pursued our character through a cave, and finally finished off with the help of other hunters—and throughout, it seemed we’d only scratched the surface of the battles awaiting us in Wilds.

Is it too early to say it will definitely be the game of the year in 2025? Yeah, absolutely. But that doesn’t mean I can’t mark it as my early frontrunner.

The demo itself was relatively short, only lasting about half an hour, but the number of features and options we saw in that time made several hour-long playtests and demos I participated in feel like they were searching to bare corners of their game for anything else to show me. If nothing else, I felt an overwhelming excitement to get my hands on a Monster Hunter game, which is a feeling I’ve honestly never experienced.

We saw customary game hallmarks, like the main hunter base with its famous Palico cooks, gameplay riding on the new mounts, and the dizzying array of weaponry you can take into battle (now completed by a secondary weapon you can switch to). There was also a village of desert dwellers where we could stock up on supplies. The town wasn’t terribly busy, however—as our Capcom representative told us, they were preparing for a sandstorm.

We eventually would run headlong into that sandstorm in the aforementioned hut, but not before staking a good place near the monster’s herd to set up a mobile camp. These camps can be erected quickly out in the fields on Monster Hunter Wilds to serve as spots where you can tinker with your gear and prepare for an impromptu hunt. Just be careful where you place yours. Monsters can destroy them while you’re away.

From there, it was time to go pick a fight with a monster, which we did simply by running up to it in the midst of its herd and hitting it a few times. The action launched a quest for us to pursue right away, without needing to travel to any hub first.

Likewise, once the monster was finally felled and it was time to carve, finishing the mission didn’t bounce us back to the base. We were still out in the field, with many more monsters to potentially go after both near and far away.

The game’s visuals are also stunning, from art direction to pure fidelity. While you might expect a game that’s largely shown off a giant desert and its denizens to be a little one-note in terms of the scenery, that couldn’t be further from the truth in Wilds. There was a lot of sand, yes. But there was also the massive sandstorm that completely changed the world with internal lightning storms. There were glowing, dusty caves and even a surprising pop of vegetation in the wake of the sandstorm, the weather patterns influencing the lay of the land. The world here is huge, and there are many different biomes for you to explore and hunt in.

Between the huge and obviously impressive setpieces and the smaller quality-of-life changes, like the mobile camps and a hook slinger allowing you to collect items on the ground without leaving the back of your galloping mount, Wilds beat the brakes off of my notions of what a Monster Hunter game was or could be.

And if the full Monster Hunter Wilds game is anything like the demo I saw, Capcom will definitely have to make some room on its award shelves.