Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance review — a bigger hunt, with sharper teeth
Ascendance adds a genuinely great new locale and monster roster, but its story pacing and endgame grind keep it just shy of essential.
The first hour tells you everything
Ascendance doesn't ease you in. Within ten minutes of loading your save, you're dropped into a sandstorm-choked canyon while a new apex predator — a burrowing, armor-plated nightmare the game calls the Duneglider — tears through the terrain beneath your feet. It's a deliberate statement: this expansion wants you to feel small again.
That's the right instinct for a Monster Hunter expansion. The base game's endgame had settled into a comfortable rhythm, and Ascendance's job is to break that rhythm without breaking the game. Mostly, it succeeds.
What works
The new locale is the star
The Sunken Reach is the best map Capcom has built in years. It's a tiered, tidal landscape where water levels shift between hunts, opening and closing routes and changing which monsters spawn where. You'll learn its geography the way you learned the Ancient Forest — by getting lost, then getting comfortable, then getting cocky. The verticality is used well: there are ledges that reward wirebug-style traversal without making the ground level feel like an afterthought.
The monster roster earns its price
Ascendance adds fourteen new large monsters and brings back a handful of fan favorites with reworked movesets. The standouts are the Duneglider, a genuinely unsettling ambush predator that punishes greedy positioning, and the Glacierine, a slow, deliberate fight that plays almost like a puzzle. The returning monsters aren't just ported in — several have new phases and tells that will catch veterans off guard.
Combat refinements that matter
The Focus Mode system from the base game gets a meaningful tune-up. Hitstop is punchier, wound-breaking feels more deliberate, and the new Momentum mechanic rewards aggressive play without turning every hunt into a damage race. Weapon balance is improved across the board; the lance and gunlance in particular feel like they finally got the attention they deserved.
Multiplayer is smoother
Cross-play remains intact, and the new Hunt Board system makes it easier to find and join sessions without the menu gymnastics of the base game. Drop-in co-op during story quests is now allowed, which is a small change with a big quality-of-life impact.
What doesn't
The story overstays its welcome
Ascendance's narrative is more ambitious than the base game's — there's a new settlement, a new cast, and a mystery about the Sunken Reach's ecology. The problem is pacing. The first several hours are heavy on cutscenes and escort quests, and the expansion keeps interrupting hunts with dialogue you can't skip. Monster Hunter stories are usually background noise; here, the game seems to think you're here for the plot. You're not. You're here to hit a dinosaur with a giant hammer.
The endgame grind is still a grind
Once you finish the story, Ascendance opens up a new Anomaly-style investigation system with its own progression track. It's fine. It's also very familiar. If you bounced off the base game's endgame loop, this won't win you back. The new Augment system adds another layer of crafting RNG that will delight min-maxers and frustrate everyone else.
Performance is uneven
On PC, Ascendance runs well in the new locale but stutters in the hub town and during some of the larger multiplayer hunts. A day-one patch is planned, but as of review, it's not a flawless experience. Console versions hold up better, though the base PS5 version shows its age in dense scenes.
Not enough new weapons
No new weapon types. That's a disappointment for an expansion at this price, even if the existing fourteen are better balanced than ever.
Who it's for
- Monster Hunter veterans who finished the base game's endgame and want a reason to come back: this is an easy recommendation. The new monsters and locale are worth the price of entry alone.
- Players who bounced off the base game's story pacing: Ascendance won't fix that. It doubles down on the things that slowed the base game down.
- Newcomers: don't start here. Play the base game first. Ascendance assumes you know the systems and the vocabulary, and it doesn't hold your hand.
- Solo players: the expansion is perfectly playable alone, but the new monsters are tuned for groups. Expect longer hunts and more frustration on the hardest fights.
Value for money
Ascendance retails at the standard expansion price, and for that you get a substantial new locale, fourteen new monsters, a new story campaign, and an endgame system that will keep dedicated players busy for dozens of hours. If you measure value in hours-per-dollar and you're already invested in Wilds, it's a solid deal. If you're on the fence, wait for a sale — the story pacing issues are real, and the endgame won't convert skeptics.
Score: 8/10
Ascendance is a confident, well-built expansion that understands what makes Monster Hunter work. It stumbles when it tries to be a story-driven RPG, and its endgame is more of the same, but the hunts themselves are among the best in the series. For fans, that's enough.
What to do next
If you're picking up Ascendance, spend your first hour in the Sunken Reach without a quest active — just explore the tidal routes and learn the map before the game starts throwing apex monsters at you. If you're new to Wilds entirely, start with the base game's low-rank campaign and don't touch the expansion until you've cleared the main story. And if you're still on the fence, watch a few hunts of the Duneglider and Glacierine on YouTube — if those fights don't excite you, the rest of the expansion won't either.