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RECOMMENDED ONLY IF YOU HAVE A VERY POWERFUL RIG FOR NOW. There are serious performance issues which is why it is getting review bombed. You can make it better by doing the following
NVIDIA Control Panel > Add Wild Hearts > Set power management mode to high performance > set threaded optimization to Off > Set Max Frame Rate to 60 FPS (Yes, even if you have a higher refresh monitor, just for now!)
In game > Change sound to 5.1/7.1
EDIT: Added the 60 FPS in NVIDIA control panel fix. This made a huge difference for me and noticeably improved the performance.
It's a very good game. It takes the monster hunter formula and puts a new twist on it. The combat feels a bit more arcade y and floaty than Monster Hunter however the fast pace is welcome in my opinion. You don't need to sheathe your weapon to be able to move around effectively for example. Items, while still present, have been streamlined and are not as prevalent, letting you focus on combat.
UPDATE / SOME ADDITIONAL POINTS AFTER 70 HOURS
+ All of the weapons feel viable and none stand out as head and shoulders above the rest (Some are MUCH easier to do well with, like the claw blade, but everything is viable)
+ The building system is fairly well done. I have spent a good amount of time building nice looking "bases" on each of the available areas. This is entirely optional though and you could just do the bare minimum (camps to spawn at and towers to find monsters) and be perfectly fine. I have also seen a lot of people comparing it to Fortnite which is inaccurate, it's not the same as well.
+ Fairly good variety of starting skills and different weapon upgrade paths which let you build the way you want to. Want to focus on mainly using karakuri? You can put skills toward that. Want to focus more on your own combat ability? You can.
+ Movement feels great after getting used to it. Coming from monster hunter, I originally found it a bit "janky" and floaty, but after a couple hours I was hooked. You can do some really cool things with the buildables and pull off some moves that will make you feel like a badass.
+ Although the lineup is relatively small for now, each monster feels unique and has different quirks / attacks you need to learn how to counter.
- I was a bit disappointed to see reskinned versions of monsters right off the bat. I can understand rolling them out as future updates or for events, but at release it was a bit surprising.
- Monster attacks can feel a bit "cheap" at times. For instance, there is a particular boss later in the game that has a ground wave type AOE attack that knocks you back if it hits you. The problem is, if you let it hit you the wrong way, you can get chain hit over and over and lose a LOT of health and may very well die. Also monsters generally hit very hard and sometimes the follow up attacks feel a bit quick. You can easily go from full health to dead and feel like you had no opportunity to get away after the first hit due to being "stunlocked". Part of it is a skill issue yes, but it does feel a bit cheap at times.
- Some weapons feel a bit overly formulaic in the way you are meant to attack with them. The bow is a good example. The gimmick of the weapon is that you "mark" the target with your horizontal arrow shots, and then use a charged vertical arrow shot to detonate the marks and cause a large damage spike all at once. The issue is, this pattern gets very repetitive, and while you don't HAVE to do that, the damage without using this is very low. It feels like there is only one "correct" way to use a lot of the weapons. I would like to see a bit more variety in how you can choose to use the weapons. Not all weapons are like this, thankfully. And it won't bother everybody, but I did find it to be an issue for me.
- As of this update (Feb 23rd 2023) the performance is still very poor. A patch came out already which, as far as I can tell, did little or nothing to help and actually made things worse for some people.
I'm having a blast with it thus far. I will update the review as I get further.