What you need to know
- Monster Hunter Wilds, the latest entry in Capcom's action-hunting Monster Hunter franchise, has received its fourth weapon overview trailer, and this one is about the Gunlance.
- The Gunlance is a weapon that mixes heavy melee attacks with armor-piercing explosions, and it has gotten a lot of new moves that extenuate its explosive playstyle.
- Monster Hunter Wilds is scheduled to release in 2025 on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC via Steam.
Capcom, the creators of the upcoming highly-anticipated action-hunting title Monster Hunter Wilds, has released the latest installment of its weapon overview trailer series. Today's trailer focuses on one of my personal weapon types in the Monster Hunter series, the Gunlance. This beast of a weapon type is designed to crush enemies with heavy attacks with a long-reaching lance and then blow them up with close-range Shelling explosion attacks using the weapon's built-in cannon.
What makes the Gunlance's Shelling attacks special is that they can bypass the defense values of a monster's hide to inflict a fixed amount of damage on an enemy monster. You can also charge up the Shelling attacks to deal more damage and potentially stagger monsters to knock them down. This makes Gunlances an ideal weapon type for taking on beasts with heavily armored bodies that regular melee weapons like Great Sword and Insect Glaive can't pierce through.
In addition, each Gunlance has one of three unique Shelling types that can drastically alter their playstyle:
- Normal-Shelling Type: Equips the Gunlance with five shells so it has more ammo to fire multiple shots in a row and synergizes with the weapon's Full-Burst attack, which unloads all shells simultaneously for massive burst damage.
- Long-Shelling Type: Equips the Gunlance with three shells and increases the blast range and radius of the Charged-Shelling shots.
- Wide-Shelling Type: Equips the Gunlance with two shells but its regular Shelling shots have the highest damage output compared to Normal and Long Gunlances. Wide Gunlances are best suited for mixing Shelling attacks with melee attack combos.
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Other highlights of the Gunlance's repertoire of explosive attacks include the Wyrmstake Cannon which fires a rocket-propelled stake that drills itself into a monster before exploding. And the Wyvern's Fire, which fires a gigantic explosion so powerful it sends the user and the enemy target flying backward due to the sheer force of the blast.
The Gunlance also comes with a huge shield that can block a monster's strongest attacks to help players survive during battle and to compensate for the Gunlance's major weakness of burdening the user with slow movement speed due to its hefty weight. However, that mobility issue may be a thing of the past as Gunlance has received a ton of upgrades in Monster Hunter Wilds to help overcome its slow movement speed while giving players new combustive techniques with which to destroy monsters.
These new gameplay additions include but are not limited to:
- Blocking attacks at the right time with the shield will reduce knockback and allow players to immediately activate the Full-Burst attack.
- Quick side-step dodges while firing shells so you can evade incoming attacks while damaging enemies at the same time.
- The Gunlance now has new Flamethrower attacks that lead into the Wyrmstake Cannon attack.
- Charged-Shelling shots can now be powered up so much that the recoil will send the player character flying backwards but the trade-off is that you will deal even more damage.
- New combo attacks that allow you to fire a Wyrmstake Cannon, activate the flamethrower, and then reload the Gunlance's ammo to fire a second Wyrmstake Cannon immediately afterwards.
- The new Focus Strike will turn the Gunlance into a drill that digs into a monster's weak spots and wounds.
- A new move where you shove the Gunlance into a monster's jaw to fire a Charged-Shelling shot inside their skull.
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The amount of new tools Gunlance has in Monster Hunter Wilds blows my mind
Out of all the gameplay weapon overview trailers released for Monster Hunter Wilds thus far, this one is my absolute favorite. Gunlance looks more brutal, mobile, and bombastic than in previous games, and the new moves are just a sight to behold.
It's like they took inspiration from Monster Hunter Frontier's (a Japanese-exclusive Monster Hunter MMO game that ran from 2010 to 2019) version of the Gunlance and applied some of its mechanics into Monster Hunter Wild's rendition of the Gunlance to get rid of its mobility issues and expand its move-set with a wider variety of explosions to make it more fun than ever.
2025 cannot come soon enough as I want to play this upcoming PC title now so I can get my hands on this new and improved Gunlance and reduce monsters to dust with these awesome new moves.
Monster Hunter Wilds, the next-gen successor to one of Capcom's best Xbox games and best PC games, Monster Hunter World, is scheduled to launch on February 28, 2025 for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC via Steam.
