Wild Hearts gets the full digitalfoundry tech review treatment:
Developed by Japanese studio Omega Force, Wild Hearts is an entirely new action RPG with more than just a passing resemblance to Capcom's Monster Hunter series. There's no disguising Wild Hearts' inspiration here: you accept missions, track down colossal beasts roaming the land and you battle through day and night, alone or in online co-op, until your target is slain.
Shadows are also problematic. On PS5, Series X and especially Series S, you'll notice global shadow maps are missing entirely at times for certain elements in the scene. Even ambient occlusion disengages on PS5, Series X and S occasionally, all of which means that fields of flowers go unshaded. They're raw, and don't blend properly into the scene, creating a visual clash - a stark contrast, a disconnect between the geometry, materials, and these transparent elements.
Meanwhile, there's also a performance mode on PS5 and Series X. This is my recommendation for play, just for sheer playability - even though it comes at a cost of a native 1080p resolution. The caveat is that cutscenes still lock at 30fps in the performance mode, and they continue rendering at 1080p regardless. It's hardly the next-gen dream but for an action RPG, I'd prioritise 60fps all the way. Otherwise, settings between the modes are the same.
The second issue concerns dialled back ambient occlusion on Series X. You may have spotted it in the shots above, but Series X has cutbacks in ambient shading in specific spots, stripping the scene of some much-needed depth. Be it around the opening woodland tutorial, or even the shrine interiors, shading is at times removed entirely on Series X for objects - creating a visibly lighter appearance - while for other areas it's maintained.
We didn't spend much time with the PC version owing to massively obtrusive stutter that typically sits within a 100-200ms window even on an RTX 4090 machines paired with a Core i9 12900K and fast DDR5. Omega Force has promised performance updates are coming though, alongside DLSS and FSR support - so there is hope on the horizon for PC. Sadly though, it's difficult to fathom how the developer thought the PC version was fit to ship at launch.
The 30fps cap on Series S has the same issue. Frame-times bounce up and down and it never feels especially smooth in motion. The real sting in the tail is that 30fps is really all you've got on this 4TF machine: one mode at 30fps with no alternatives. So, stacking on top of the long list of visual downgrades, having uneven frame-pacing makes Wild Hearts on Series S even harder to recommend. And it's a shame, because the actual stability of the frame-rate is largely on-point.
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