The Wild Bastards are all dead. Worse still, their corpses have been scattered across the galaxy, hidden away behind a multitude of evil robot cowboys and hordes of insidious giant insects. Which is a problem. Thankfully, it’s a problem that the two remaining Wild Bastards, Casino and Spider Rosa, are more than happy to solve; especially if it means blowing away thousands of cyborg outlaws in a cavalcade of bullets. Our two plucky bastards must roam the galaxy in a sentient spaceship, recovering and resuscitating their deceased posse as they go, until the gang are assembled and ready to take on big bad puritanical magnate Jebediah Chaste.
How best to describe the innovative gameplay experience that Wild Bastards offers? A Turn-Based Rogue-like First Person Shooter doesn’t quite cut it, but it’s close enough. The turn-based bit plays out like a board game, where you guide the good ship Drifter around a galaxy filled with randomised planets. At the end of each galaxy, you’ll rescue a member of the Wild Bastards to add to your burgeoning crew. Encounter a planet on your travels and you’ll descend to the surface with a small team of Bastards. Here’s the second turn-based bit, as you guide each of your three duos around the procedurally generated environment: gathering loot, temporary buffs, and permanent level-ups. It’s best not to dawdle to find everything though, as one of Jebediah’s family (think rock-hard bosses) will be loitering on the planet-surface to chase you down.
You enter the first-person action element when you encounter a moving gang or roadblock on your travels. Your two outlaws, who you can instantly switch between, run and shoot their way around a small environment, having to wipe out the set number of critters they meet. The action is solid and slick; the enemy refuses to meet you head-on and instead opts for cowering behind cover and shooting you in the back whenever they can. As such, it plays out like a deadly version of hide-and-seek rather than an out-and-out shoot‘em up, and is all the more tense because of it.
If your entire cadre of Bastards are incapacitated, the roguelike portion of the game kicks in. At this point the Drifter rewinds time to the start of the galaxy – not to the start of the game, thankfully – losing all of the perks you gathered in the process. Fortunately, all the infamy you have earned through killing baddies and clearing planets earns you a treasure chest stuffed with weapon boosts, gadgets, and health tonics to help you on your next playthrough.
It all adds up to quite the eccentric mix of gameplay mechanics, so it’s a credit to developers Blue Manchu that this strange hodgepodge totally works. The experience is thrilling, with the feeling of being a gang on the run from the law perfectly encapsulated. In every moment you are constantly at the risk of being caught, be it by a boss chasing you down on a planet, or your life meter slowly ebbing away as you try to find that one remaining outlaw, tucked away in some sneaky corner of the map.
The game also holds together so tightly because the Wild Bastards themselves are such an engaging and charismatic bunch. It’s a genuine delight to unlock a new gang member and discover the intricacies of their playstyle. Indeed, the repetitive elements of the gameplay structure are significantly eased simply through the joy of blasting baddies with a new weapon set and range of abilities. Take Casino by way of example – a shot-gun wielding card-hand android who, upon finding a power-up canteen, can randomly eliminate any enemy in the environment – and how much he differs to Judge – a mean and nasty sniper rifle-toting bot who can make everything move in John Woo slow-mo for a limited period. Then there’s Roswell, an alien with a charging energy gun who can jet pack around a stage, and Hopalong, a lasso-wielding lizard who favours a stealth approach. A fan-favourite will soon surely be Preach though, a chaingun-toting zealot who uses the potent power of her faith as armour. It’s like having thirteen brilliant first-person shooters bolted together.
Well, almost. Unfortunately, not every Bastard is a hit. Smoky will likely find himself left behind more often than not, due to the horrible inaccuracy of their fire attacks, and how they can inexplicably be harmed by the very same fire they leave behind. Still, twelve out of thirteen is darn good doing.
Varying up your teams, seeing how their disparate abilities complement each other (or not), is all part of the fun. The presentation of the gang is top notch too, the pop-art comic book visuals accentuated by the pitch-perfect over-the-top voice work. It’s like a Saturday-morning carton brought to life; like the space-western 1980’s carton BraveStarr, but on steroids. Indeed, BraveStarr must have been an inspiration for Bule Manchu, as horse-faced Sarge is a dead ringer for the kid’s show’s iconic horseman Thirty/Thirty.
The environments themselves continue the BraveStarr tone, with space canteens, underground mines, and abandoned hamlets to conduct your shoot-outs in. Though there’s something of Tron in the aesthetic too, with plenty of holograms and glowing lines smattered about. In short, this is a distinctive and visually compelling game.
Not everything is a success, characters teleport up the ladders in each level rather than climbing them, making it easy to be discombobulated as you clamber onto a rooftop. All the more galling when a bad guy gets a couple of cheap shots in while you figure out what you are looking at. Whilst the building and maintain of relationships between the Wild Bastards is underexplored, amounting to little more than collecting beans to earn a temporary ability boost. Also, once the, admittedly very enjoyable, campaign is wrapped up in around twelve hours or so, there’s not much left to do. Sure, a challenge mode offers opportunities to tinker and modify the play experience, but without the intrigue of unlocking a new Bastard hanging in the air, it pales in comparison to the main game.