izigame.me

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.