I was able to run the game fine for about 3-4 days and about 17 total hours without issue. However, on Tuesday, October 14th of 2025, they shadow dropped a patch that included ACE, an anti-cheat program, into the game. And now Linux users aside from those on the SteamDeck cannot play the game, myself included. Changing to a GE-Proton version allows the game to open, but is so unstable that it's not worth playing. I understand including anti-cheat to combat bots or hacking. This is not that. I can't and won't recommend a game that specifically says that penguins are not allowed at the table.

Edit from November 1st.
While it is nice for the/a developer to respond, that page is less than helpful. No, linking me an FAQ page, or to a page where I need to enter a UID (which I need to log into the game for), isn't a very good response.

To explain more generally for people, if I want to use GE-Proton, I have to go grab that version specifically and move it to a specific place. It basically represents a community effort to fix a perceived problem. If this was able to be run with Valve's own proton version, I'd be more than happy to change this review. Until that time though, this review will stay negative.

I wanted to like Wild Hearts. The art direction is well put together, it has an intriguing build system, and what look to be interesting monsters to fight. And while it may seem unfair to compare it to it's Monster Hunter competitor, this isn't Omega Force's/Koei Tecmo's first foray into this arena, it's their third (Toukiden and Toukiden 2 being the first two). If you haven't gotten things figured out by this point, you might want to reconsider.

First is weapon depth, the weapons are REALLY not that deep. It's part combat design, part numbers balance, and physical lack of moves to the weapon. Even the simple weapons in monster hunter put the complex weapons to shame, even with the build system to augment it. So there isn't a sense of mastery here. The weapon variety is here, but the depth absolutely is not. I'll address combat design as a separate point, but will say that due to the reliance on last frame dodging, the team has made it so that it's harder to have some of the more nuanced weapons. Finally, even with the Karakuri build system you have maybe 7 moves total. The weapon with the most has 21 or so moves at first glance, but can then be broken down to 5 as 18 of those moves are for all intents and purposes duplicates in function. That's not a lot to play with. And that move variety plagues basically every weapon in the game.

Second is combat design. Some people may like it, but it doesn't work in my opinion due to the developers not understanding two things, telegraphs, and pacing. Telegraphing can range from pretty good, with particularly big attacks being very well telegraphed, to utter crap, with several moves either have very short tell windows, sharing similar tell animations, or both. Lets take Sapscourge, the second monster you fight. He has two moves that are almost identical in startup animation. They both start with the monster bundling sap in it's paws. But one will throw the sap in a scatter pattern in front of it, while the other zooms towards the player for a grab. Besides my personal bugbear with the second move, these moves should NOT have similar startup animations. Now Pacing is just bad. The monsters only have three modes, Turbo, Extra Turbo, and short exhaustion from extra turbo. (Or, base, enraged, and exhausted). The monsters will chain together attacks, not because it's part of the combo, but because one combo ended and now another one is beginning. Add that together with a narrow, close FOV, and a short startup animation, it's easy to loose track of what's going on and what you're moving from next. Enrage just takes that to another level, with some extra spice to the moves. (Extra range, flying, environmental attacks, depends on the monster). There is generally a short window after the monster has enraged where it doesn't do anything, but these are short, maybe 4-6 seconds top. Not enough time to really punish. And there lies the issue, you don't have windows to punish the monster. Some weapons really suffer for this.

Those are my personal design issues with the game, not mentioning the technical issues currently plaguing people. I haven't suffered from those too much since the post launch patch, but I think issues with the game go far beyond "it just needs some time in the oven".

When the game was first released out of beta it was fantastic. Good map design, mechanics worked well, and the customization felt good. Now, it still keeps those things so if that's enough for you then go for it. But I would be remise to not mention the following. The payment model has been gutted to china and back. It started out with players able to choose a variety of ways to get their gun for free. Now you only have two options. Either get the gun for week for ingame currency. Or purchase it forever with real currency. The few imbalances in the game were never really addresed, and the heroes are more powerful than anything you can get for free. Instead of addressing the problems in balance, the developers went and started working on a new game. They also released the game on ps4. I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone who values their money or time.