I just can’t seem to get the volume right on my usual gaming headset. When I reviewed the Asus ROG Delta S Wireless headset, its earth-shaking output nearly deafened me. The SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7 Wireless, meanwhile, was so quiet at first that I wondered if the Delta S had actually given me hearing loss. That is, until I enabled SteelSeries’ magical Sonar EQ system, at which point my entire world changed for the better.

The Arctis Nova 7 is beautifully solid, with a flexible metal headband and sturdy plastic earcups. Despite its robust exterior, it’s surprisingly lithe and doesn’t weigh too heavily on my head. The all-black design banishes blinding RGB lighting altogether. It feels less gamer-y than a lot of headsets out there, though after years of scorching my retinas with my PC case lighting, I’m generally okay with that.

The moral of Wild Hearts is not “man was the true monster all along,” but it threatened to turn me into one a few hours before I started writing this review. I never imagined I could be one of those horrible rich people who stand over an endangered animal they just slaughtered for sport, a big Joker grin aimed at the camera. But when I finally killed the flying wind tiger that had been stymieing me for hours, I knew I had it in me.

Wild Hearts is a hunting game that pontificates on the delicate balance of nature at every opportunity, but there were more than a few moments where I was ready to raze all of feudal Japan and be done with some of this game’s more tedious fights and aggravating performance problems. At least I can now do the next best thing: wear that dead tiger’s skin as armor to go on a genocidal rampage. Wild Hearts won’t technically allow me to wipe the species from existence, but it’s good to have dreams, right?

Just like Capcom’s Monster Hunter before it, Wild Hearts sets you on the trail of giant beasts that need culling. Each one has the complexity and ferocity of a boss in a Japanese character action game, with a set of telegraphed attacks to learn and a few even more powerful moves to throw at you when they become enraged. The goal in every fight isn’t just to win, but to break specific body parts—usually the face, the tail, the claws or wings. The reward is some sweet, sweet crafting material to use for your next piece of armor or a slightly more powerful weapon.

The line that developer Koei Tecmo is walking here is blatant: You can picture the writers sweating as they try to contort dialogue around the words “hunt” and “monster” while every conversation is about the monsters you need to go out and hunt. The resulting world feels slightly less outright fantasy and slightly more folklore. It’s explicitly set in feudal Japan and sticks with the Japanese words for much of its text: kemono (beasts, not monsters!) for the behemoths you fight; karakuri for the contraptions you build to help on your hunts; tsukumo for the mechanical creatures that serve as your AI companions.

The small cast of characters, like the blacksmith Natsume and the washed up samurai Ujishige you meet in the opening hour, are more subdued than Monster Hunter’s campy anime hunters and buff cat chefs. Wild Hearts is deeply earnest, a change I appreciated at first and then quickly tired of since it results in every character droning on about how they want to protect the town and clumsily confessing their bog-standard NPC backstories. After a while I started taking my headphones off whenever someone started talking.

The more significant difference between the two games is that in Wild Hearts you’re going to find yourself fighting the same monsters many, many times long before you’ve reached the endgame. There just aren’t enough kemono, and it recycles designs far too quickly to keep the grind needed to advance through the armor and weapon trees engaging.

Worthy hunting

Wild Hearts does excel in the moments you’re flying through the air with a claw blade latched into a monster’s back, turning yourself into a projectile Edward Scissorhands, or when you land the third hit in a hammer combo string to crumple a monster’s face in. There are only eight weapons, but the lean arsenal is full of delightful surprises. I loved the bladed wagasa umbrella, which attacks by spinning like a top and powers up when you parry a kemono. It’s the only weapon in the game with a defensive option, which kept me alive and made me look like a cracked Mary Poppins in action.

Then there’s the big gimmick: the karakuri, the traps and tools you build mid-combat with button combos on a controller or a few key taps on mouse and keyboard. At first you’re spawning simple crates to leap off or springs that’ll catapult you towards a monster, but soon you’ll unlock fusions that erect a defensive wall or shoot off a harpoon to stun a monster and deal big damage.

Karakuri can lead to thrilling moments, like using a spring to just dodge a monster’s charge and unleashing your own attack mid-leap, but much of the time it’s frustratingly clunky. I lost count of how many times the game missed one of my button inputs or didn’t place one of my karakuri in the right spot, leaving me with a worthless pile of torches and springs stacked in front of me and an empty resource meter. The system just isn’t reliable enough.

Building feels like the rough draft of a feature that could be great in a sequel, and the same goes for the progression systems. In a game about constantly accruing resources, I was bewildered by how stingy Wild Hearts was with its armor. There are no little steps here to make yourself feel incrementally tougher, just upgrades that give your armor a human or kemono “affinity” which seems woefully underbaked, with a few scattered skills related to either alignment. I expect these skills will pay off for specialized endgame builds, but through much of the campaign they seem far less important than just finding armor that can help you survive a few hits from the right monster.

Every kemono has an elemental affinity and a “Mother Nature got shitfaced” design, like the sapscourge, a sap-covered, pollen-spewing asthmatic nightmare, or the goldshard, a porcupine with giant crystals for spines. Some of the kemono really surprised me in a good way, going beyond their obvious gimmick. The lavaback, a giant flaming gorilla, seems straightforward until he’s enraged—then suddenly he uses his molten arms like stretchy rubber bands to slingshot himself at you feet-first.

The interplay between Wild Hearts’ weapons and kemono is fantastic. Big hits, fast hits, unique karakuri attacks: each matchup feels different and there’s loads to chew on here. There just isn’t nearly enough downtime between reruns. Wild Hearts has 22 kemono, and of those only 15 are unique (including the final boss and a gimmick fight I can’t see myself wanting to repeat many more times). That shallow monster soured me on advancing through the campaign, because each new chapter made me slug through the same monsters—except now they dealt more damage—or variations that didn’t feel significantly distinct.

There’s a thinness to the gear system, too. With so few unique monsters, often the best armor set for fighting a kemono on a new difficulty tier is that kemono’s own armor. If you build the strongest set available to you at any given moment, it’s going to have a couple glaring elemental weaknesses, so more than once I felt like I needed to go on hours-long gear detours to focus on a set of equipment that I knew would be made redundant once I got over a particular difficulty hump. 

With multiplayer hunts available this is less of an issue, but solo Wild Hearts’ gear grind is too slow, too repetitive, and too “chunky,” without a path to step-by-step upgrade older gear to keep it relevant for longer.

The weapon system is better—it’s a giant skill tree, which you can work your way through in any direction you please, without ever losing resources if you take a weapon back to an earlier node on the tree. There’s great potential for endgame theorycrafting here, but for most of the campaign I ended up having some upgrade paths blocked because I hadn’t gone out of my way to fight palette swaps of kemono I was already tired of fighting. Some of the nodes on the tech tree are either misleading or outright mislabeled—they ostensibly show the number of stars (aka difficulty) of the kemono you need to defeat to reveal a node, but the icetusk kemono, for example, is listed as two stars there yet first appears on the world map as a four-star battle. Confusing.

Under performing

There are more weapons and kemono coming to Wild Hearts for free post-launch, and it’s possible a year from now a fattened-up bestiary will make for a much more elegant sense of progression. But right now Wild Hearts’ problems run deeper than too few monsters: Dire PC performance makes me wonder why this game didn’t have a few more months to cook. On an Intel Core i5-13600K and RTX 3070 I rarely got above a consistent 60 fps at 1440p, and turning down the game’s settings had little effect. Some areas in the game run especially poorly—something about the icy fourth zone would tank my framerate down into the 20s. For a PC Gamer colleague with an RTX 3060 Ti, Wild Hearts barely got above an average 30 fps at 1080p.

Wild Hearts ran poorly more often than it ran well, and that’s just baseline performance. I also encountered these issues: 

• Some sound effects triggering on a delay, then stopping altogether, while the music kept playing. I’d have to reload to fix this one
• Dialogue lines occasionally playing on top of one another or fast-forwarding like I had a button held down (I didn’t)
• Once the geometry of the entire world started flickering on and off until I left the area
• UI pop-ups occasionally getting stuck on the screen
• Huge moments of slowdown and frequent stutters, to the point where it felt like I was doing some fights in slow motion (once or twice this was actually a little helpful, to be honest)
• One of the final, high-level kemono had its AI glitch out, so it just sat still while I pummeled it for 10 minutes straight

Wild Hearts simply doesn’t look like a game that should be pushing PCs this hard—while the environments are dense, they’re often simply lit and low-res textures are abundant. Publisher EA says there are plans to address a “CPU bottleneck” and add DLSS and FSR support, but my CPU typically hovered around 40% utilization. Whatever’s wrong here is on the GPU, and this game shouldn’t need DLSS to hit a stable 60 fps. My attempts to play with the internal framerate limiter and the Nvidia Control Panel were unhelpful, and Wild Hearts’ current “upscaling” option turns the game into a low-res, smeary mess. There’s no excuse for releasing an action game that relies on quick reactions with this sort of extremely unreliable performance.

It’s a shame, because Wild Hearts actually lured me into spending hours exploring its environments, setting up karakuri ziplines, finding the ideal spots to set up camps and scavenge resources. There’s reason to exist in these spaces outside of just hunting, a lesson I hope Monster Hunter learns for its next entry.

But again it feels like Wild Hearts shipped with a half-formed idea. Its story and elemental kemono are so focused on nature, yet WIld Hearts makes no effort to convey a real living ecosystem. The monsters never interact with each other (outside a few scripted scenes where the developers are pulling the strings). They don’t eat the smaller animals roaming around. “Hunting” is as simple as pressing a button on a karakuri contraption to reveal where a kemono is on the map. In a neat touch, the zones change throughout the game as elemental kemono bring a deep freeze to a once-sunny beach or set the forest aflame, but the monsters don’t do this themselves; it’s just set dressing for the fight, neatly arranged before you arrive.

If a few of these features were more robust, Wild Hearts might’ve been able to pass as a shrewdly streamlined hunting game. There’s so much less stuff than in Monster Hunter, and in many places there’s excess fat to trim from Capcom’s series without losing the essence of what makes these boss battle hunting games so fun. Wild Hearts makes online play incredibly easy—both for joining a quick hunt, or for playing alongside a friend and progressing the story and sidequests together, with seamless shared progress. It just works. I wish I could say the same for everything else.

The Magma Mini is basically Roccat’s Magma (opens in new tab) full-sized membrane keyboard with everything right of the Enter key sliced off. Its compact design is for gamers who only have a little desk space or simply want more room for bigger, intense mouse sweeps when gaming. 

It has all the same features as its bigger sibling: quiet membrane keys, anti-ghosting tech, and flashy RGB lighting. Another place it shares a similarity is pricing. The Magma sells for $60 (though we’ve seen it on sale for $40 (opens in new tab) in recent weeks), while the Magma Mini retails for a surprising $50. I say surprisingly because I initially thought this 60% keyboard would MSRP for at least $80 based on appearance. 

Another reason you might want to go with a compact keyboard is the ergonomics. The smaller size allows you to position the keyboard in a way that’s most comfortable for you. For gaming, having your hands closer between the mouse and WASD keys gives you a better ergonomic posture.  I’ve known competitive gamers who solely use a tiny keyboard for shooters and a full-size keyboard for work or chatting. Not a bad idea, though it could lead to a very cluttered desk. 

The Magma Mini is a membrane keyboard that will take some getting used to if you’re moving from a mechanical keyboard. The biggest difference is keystrokes are quieter and feel more spongy, so you won’t get that satisfying clickety-clack that comes with some of the best gaming keyboards (opens in new tab). 

What I didn’t realize until my toddler knocked over an entire can of Red Bull on it, was that the keyboard is spill and dustproof. So the Magma Mini might be a good candidate if you need a keyboard for a young and messy gamer.

At home, I type a modest 85 words per minute on my wireless Logitech G915 TKL (opens in new tab). On the Magma Mini, I scored 76 WPM on a typing test (opens in new tab) which is pretty good considering it’s been a while since I’ve done a significant amount of typing on a membrane keyboard. I won’t be a member of the Membrane Mob anytime soon, but I could complete my work by typing this review without too many mistakes.

Using this thing for gaming, it’s not too big of a deal. Like other 60 percenters, the arrow keys are accessible using the function key. However, the Magma requires an extra step if you want to use the arrows. You have to hold down the FN key, left shift, and arrow key, making arrow movement the primary function when you use the keys.

So, whenever I use the keys, I need to hold down FN and the arrow key I want. It’s strange because it’s not quite clear in the instructions on how to do that, so thankfully, Roccat was able to clear that up for me. The arrows are located on the lower right of the keyboard on the left of the right shift key. They are a little easier to reach with my right hand than when they are located on the J, K, L, and I keys, as on some other 60 percenters. 

Keyboards this small are always a pain if you use them for work, so just typing and editing anything long, like an email (or a keyboard review), feels like it takes a little more time than usual since I have to occasionally stop to hunt down a function key to Page Up or Down. Again, if you’re used to working on a 65% or 60%, you know the struggle of knowing it’s a small price to pay for choosing the compact keyboard lifestyle. 

Its 1000Hz polling should be fine for most keyboard and mouse users for gaming; for more hardcore competitive gamers, they might opt for a higher one, like one of those fancy 8000Hz gaming keyboards (such as the Corsair K100 RGB (opens in new tab), which is not cheap). However, it’s debatable whether anything higher than 1,000Hz on a keyboard is much of a difference in performance than on a gaming mouse.

The Mini works well for moving around in first-person shooters. I’ve been trying Marauders, a new extraction shooter like Tarkov in space, and had no issue getting into heated gunfights peeking past crates for the perfect shot.

The striking RGB illumination of the keyboard is backlit across five zones and all controlled on the board itself, which is nice. There isn’t much customization other than turning the lights on or off unless you install AIMO, Roccat’s software that handles all the RGB lighting across all their products.

The Magma Mini’s biggest selling point is still that competitive $50 price point. My favorite 60%, the HyperX Mini X Ducky One 2 collab (opens in new tab), sells for about $99, though that’s a mechanical keyboard. And that’s the thing; the Mini doesn’t feel or look like a budget keyboard.

There are budget mechanical keyboards available for this price, though, and that’s something to consider before you’re swayed by the RGB pretties in the marketing images for the Magma Mini. G.Skill’s KM360 (opens in new tab) is a compact tenkeyless mechanical keyboard that uses genuine Cherry MX Red switches, so it’s not like you have to settle for membrane simply because of the price.

If you’re on a budget and don’t mind typing on a membrane keyboard, or in fact, if you prefer it, the Roccat Magma Mini is not only a good keyboard but a good budget keyboard that can take a bit of a beating. And at $50, I think it’s worth a shot, especially if you’re in the market for a teeny-weeny keyboard.

Reportedly (opens in new tab), however, that’s exactly what some owners of AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs are experiencing. But there’s a catch. Thus far, it seems the really big boosts in performance relate to synthetic tests of ray-tracing performance.

By way of example, one Twitter user claimed a performance uplift from 27.84 fps to 38.17 fps in 3DMark’s DirectX Ray tracing feature set benchmark running on an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT. Another poster saw performance in the same benchmark increase from 31.51 fps to 42.58 fps on an RX 6900 XT.

Real-world results in actual games, however, appear to be generally more modest for now. Some RX 6000 owners have claimed small uplifts in Doom Eternal with ray-tracing enabled. But benchmarks of CyberPunk 2077 with ray-tracing on have shown no change at all.

Broadly, it doesn’t make sense to expect results from synthetic tests of ray-tracing performance to translate into real-world gaming frame rates for several reasons. For starters, the code used in any given test may or may not reflect that used by actual game engines.

But perhaps even more significant, ray-tracing only makes up a small proportion of the rendering pipeline for any current game. There’s much more going on and a 40% boost in one pipeline element isn’t going to automatically translate into an overall 40% boost in frame rate.

Anyway, given AMD’s current shortfall in ray-tracing performance, not only with the older RX 6000 series but also the latest RX 7000 boards versus Nvidia’s RTX 30 (opens in new tab) and RTX 40 (opens in new tab) series graphics, every little helps. That said, for now it is unclear whether the new RX 7000 GPUs, including the Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX (opens in new tab) are even getting the same synthetic uplift. Watch this space. 

For the record, below is the list of official benefits from the Adrenalin Edition Driver 23.2.1 release, and you can read more from the original AMD source here.

• Up to 4% increase in performance for Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered @ 4k, using AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 on the Radeon️ RX 6950XT GPU, versus the previous software driver version 22.11.2
  
• Up to 3% increase in performance for Sniper Elite 5 @ 4k, using AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 on the Radeon️ RX 6950XT GPU, versus the previous software driver version 22.11.2
  
• Up to 6% increase in performance for Shadow of the Tomb Raider @ 4k, using AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 on the Radeon️ RX 6950XT GPU, versus the previous software driver version 22.11.2
  
• Up to 7% increase in performance for Quake II RTX @ 4k, using AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 on the Radeon️ RX 6950XT GPU, versus the previous software driver version 22.11.2
  
• Up to 4% increase in performance for Hitman 3 @ 4k, using AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 on the Radeon️ RX 6950XT GPU, versus the previous software driver version 22.11.2
  
• Up to 6% increase in performance for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy @ 4k, using AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 on the Radeon️ RX 6950XT GPU, versus the previous software driver version 22.11.2
  
• Up to 19% increase in performance for F1 2022 @ 4k, using AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 on the Radeon️ RX 6950XT GPU, versus the previous software driver version 22.11.2
  
• Up to 9% increase in performance for DOOM Eternal @ 4k, using AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 on the Radeon️ RX 6950XT GPU, versus the previous software driver version 22.11.2
  
• Up to 4% increase in performance for Borderlands 3 @ 4k, using AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 on the Radeon️ RX 6950XT GPU, versus the previous software driver version 22.11.2
  
• Up to 4% increase in performance for Hogwarts Legacy @ 4K using AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 on the Radeon️ RX 6950 XT and Radeon 7900 XTX, versus the previous software driver version (22.11.2 for 6950 XT, 23.1.2 for 7900 XTX)

Last year, I’d only really had the opportunity to tinker around in Dredge’s starting area of Greater Marrow. This time, I spent a significant number of hours with its other four main islands, each with its own unique quirks, quests and fish to catch—some critters more ugly and mutated than others.

The deep below

It turns out Greater Marrow really eases you into the game gently. It gives you several in-game days to become accustomed to the loop of setting sail to fishing spots, catching very normal sea critters and tetrising them into your tiled inventory around your rods, engines and other bits you’ve fished up. Moving around and fishing causes the time to tick along, while docking at ports or staying still stops the minutes from flowing. The days do move frighteningly fast out on the water, though, and sometimes it felt like I’d barely experienced sunlight before the terrors of nighttime were already upon me.

Once those first few days are up, the darkness becomes a terrifying foe. A panic meter slowly increases during the later hours, made worse by poor lighting or dreamt-up delusions that plague my poor fisherman. Shadowy boats begin barreling towards me at breakneck speed, rocks manifest out of nowhere, and tentacles rise from the depths below to drag me down. Being in a highly panicked state is a dangerous game in Dredge—but the rewards for staying out after dark are all-too tempting.  

Fish that don’t appear during the daytime are up for grabs, some of them worth a pretty penny. Money is a vital part of Dredge, and it’s something I struggled for in the early hours of the game. Your inventory has various slots that can be held by fish or dedicated to different bits of boating equipment. Rods, engines, lighting and nets will all cost you, with different rods and nets capable of catching different types of fish. If you’re accident-prone and constantly damaging your boat, you’ll need money to fix that up too.

New equipment isn’t just bought, though. It has to be earned. Research parts can be fished up or given through completing quests which are then pumped into unlocking new bits of gear. There are also materials like cloth, wood and metal to find that can be used to increase inventory size and unlock more slots for each fishing tool. I really enjoyed the process of upgrading my vessel and sailing around to find materials. Most of it I was able to do naturally as I hunted out fish or explored shipwrecks, rarely having to go out of my way to grind for resources.

But why even do all this? What’s the point of it all, to fish and be haunted by your own thoughts? Thankfully, I was able to get a better grasp on the narrative and the mysteries that lie within. The bulk of Dredge’s narrative centres around obtaining relics for a rather shady-looking collector, a quest which points me in the direction of the game’s different zones. I would often end up sailing to a new area, completing quests that would help me obtain the relic, to then return.

Finding a relic imbues me with new and useful abilities, but using them has a price.They do a decent amount of damage to my panic meter, slowly stripping away at my poor fisherman’s emotional state. Some, like the ability to make your ship zoom ahead at a faster speed, also affect your ship by making the engine overheat.

Panic button

Despite their downsides, these abilities come in real handy as I’m exploring Dredge’s other islands for the first time. I’ve set sail for Gale Cliffs, the second area in the game. I have my haste ability to hand which I use to quickly traverse the waters. It’s relatively safe to use in the daytime, bar having to mind my engine’s temperature. It’s also rather helpful for the zone’s biggest roadblock, a giant pain-in-the-ass monster with red eyes that emerges between the cliff’s pathways. He’s fast and doesn’t leave you alone until he’s either hit you—damaging your hull and equipment, causing you to lose items—or until you’re safely out of the winding maze of the cliffs.

I actually became quite frustrated with Gale Cliffs in the end. While haste helped, it made my attempts to explore really annoying. Each island has its own foes and problems to deal with, but this awful slithering monster often felt more unfair than the other hazards. There are abilities that can help deal with him, but they’re not handed to you until after you’ve had to spend a good chunk of time being bothered by them. I began to get stuck in the loop of exploring a very small area, returning to the safety of a dock before nightfall and sleeping through the dark. It became a little repetitive, but I found once I reached other islands I fared much better.

Annoying giant monsters aren’t the only otherworldly creatures you have to deal with, either. Not every fish you’ll reel up from the waters is of your standard variety. Twisted aberrations occasionally emerge with freakish alterations to the real-world critters we know and love. Mackerels with several glassy eyes that stare into my soul. Perch with no eyes at all, instead baring teeth through rotting scales. The designs are unsettling in the way watching someone pop a pimple is—I hate it, but I can’t look away. Filling out my encyclopedia with each fish and its mutations was something I really took to, occasionally forgoing my quests altogether just to find the next weirdest thing in the sea.

Exploring around for these strange critters alerted me to how many neat things Dredge has stuffed into its various corners. Shipwrecks and bottle messages scatter the seas, each telling a tale. The wrecks often have items or remnants that further feed into the narrative and some of the bottle messages are truly unnerving bits of world-building. I even came across a dog looking for a home, and some strange cultists that demanded I bring them different types of fish.

I’m about 15 hours in and I’m still tinkering around in Dredge’s final area. I even started a new playthrough to see how quickly I could get around again, finding a weird desire to replay from the beginning and do things more efficiently. That doesn’t even particularly matter—as far as I’m aware, Dredge has no time limit. I’m on day 64 on my original playthrough and there’s been nothing to indicate that I’m doing it wrong by taking my time. But it’s such a simple game to begin sinking time into that it lends itself to replayability, doing things faster and better than before. 

Dredge is a near-perfect blend of spooky happenings and chilled-out fishing. It’s gorgeous to boot, and even if you’re not particularly horror-inclined like me, its sinister undercurrent is so much fun to delve deeper into. I can’t wait to finish putting together the pieces of its mysterious narrative and uncover more weird secrets stuffed into every cove, island and canal.