Anecdotally, I’ve heard from a lot of people who say they’re tired of roguelites. There’s been a years-long run on this genre, especially in the indie space where drilling down on systems, rather than expensive environments and setpieces, can be cost-effective while still producing something exciting and worthwhile. Because a roguelite game can take so many different shapes, I’ve not yet had my fill of them. Maybe fatigue will set in one day, though if games in the genre continue to be as great as Wild Bastards, I don’t think I’ll ever grow weary of them.
Wild Bastards comes from Blue Manchu, the same studio that released Void Bastards in 2019. Like that prior project, Wild Bastards is a strategy-shooter hybrid wrapped in a roguelite framework. But where Void Bastards drew clear inspiration from games like BioShock and System Shock 2, comparisons for Wild Bastards are harder to draw. It’s a fascinating blend of arena shooter, turn-based strategy, and even something like a single-player hero shooter all in one.
Wild Bastards is a sci-fi western mash-up with the same subtle sense of humor as the team’s last game. In it, you’ll explore procedurally generated clusters of planets in the hopes of reassembling your posse against all odds. Thirteen outlaws were killed by the game’s main antagonist, and it’s up to you to resurrect them and reassemble the titular Wild Bastards crew.
This is done in several intricate steps. First, you’ll arrive on an overworld map and choose which planets you’ll travel to as you make your way toward your crony at the end of the chain. This immediately demands thoughtfulness, as you can sometimes take a shorter and/or easier route to your goal, depending on which path you decide to go down. Some planets may be loaded with loot, like weapon mods, fast-travel beacons, and beans, which squash grudges or form friendships among your crew, but these same planets may also house tougher or more numerous enemies, as well as fierce conditions such as superstorms or obstructive snow.
From the space-travel map view, you can get a sense–but not a clear picture–of what each planet has to offer. This is the first in a multi-step process in which Void Bastards routinely challenges you to think ahead and stay alert of what you need to continue through a run, which ends if all of your recruited characters are dead at the same time.
You must land on every planet you pass, which initiates the game’s turn-based gameplay mechanics. Here, you travel an allotted number of moves per turn around a board-game-like map crowded with villains, dangerous wildlife, and the precious loot you’ve arrived for. Any map is liable to have one to upwards of about 10 high-value items, such as abilities for your crew, mods for their loadouts, and most importantly, new crew members themselves. The bulk of the game is spent reforming the complete 13-member posse, so a successful run ends with you adding a new character to your lineup. It would be unlikely to gather them all without dying–though there is an ironman mode that challenges you to do this if you’re up for it.
You can see all of a planet’s pathways once you land, unlike the hazier space-travel map that contains secrets, but even without anything hidden from view at this point, it only gets more complicated. Each planet allows for one to four outlaws to be brought planetside for your mission, almost like they are living, breathing weapon loadouts chosen before you head into battle. During the turn-based map sections, you can’t get hurt, though you can still ultimately inflict a lot more pain on your crew and make a successful run damn near impossible by making poor choices.
This is because every movement, from one tile to the next, has so much weight behind it. If you arrive with six moves to spare per turn, and a boss teased to be arriving on the map to hunt you down in five turns, and you’d need perhaps 40 steps to collect every high-value item on the map, when do you call it quits? Do you plot out the most time-saving path through the terrain, even if it means encountering more enemies along the way? Do you try to skillfully use the planet’s helpful features, like teleporters that can get you the hell out of dodge quickly once you’ve grabbed your fallen friend or a stash of cash? Do you leave it all untouched and just beeline it for the exit tile because ultimately this planet is only a pit stop on the way to the loot you need on a later planet?
These are a few of what must be a dozen or more considerations each planet had me asking myself through the game’s 20-hour campaign. The beauty of it all is that there’s really no wrong answer, just easier and harder solutions. It was always up to me to decide when to say enough is enough, and once I said it, I’d then find out if I was right or wrong based on how I fared with my exit strategy. As my posse, featuring a robot sheriff, a spider-like alien, an anthropomorphized fireball, and more, I could quite literally buck around and find out.
Each time you land on a space enemies occupy (or they land on your space), you enter the game’s final stage of its three-part gameplay loop; there, a “showdown” where rootin’ tootin’ first-person shootin’ kicks off. This moves the game from a turn-based board game to traditional FPS gameplay unfolding on procedurally generated levels with touches of Quake and Overwatch simultaneously. Each map has an arena-like quality to it, with high and low vantage points, environmental hazards, some destructible elements–though which parts would or would not break remained a bit unclear for me for much of the game–and a host of villains to eliminate before you can escape and return to the turn-based planet map.
The gunplay is pixel-perfectly reliable no matter which of the 13 diverse characters you’ve brought with you onto the planet. Just like Void Bastards before it, I find there’s something about the game’s 2D objects in a 3D world that makes aiming incredibly satisfying and trustworthy. Maybe it’s because its distinct solid lines and breaks in colors help me intuitively track my target better than, say, a moving target in a Call of Duty where everything tends to be a vaguer mist of military garb, natural flora colors, and probably some explosions. Here, the game’s artwork not only looks gorgeous and stylized, but it aids an already excellent-feeling experience on the controller or mouse and keyboard alike.
I’m thankful those mechanics are so reliable, because it makes each of the 13 playable characters, effectively hero-shooter characters built for solo play, so much fun to use. No two characters are anything alike. They each have their own weapon, voice, backstory, and can form relationships with other outlaws that help or hinder the group, like becoming friends with a member so that they will buff one another in showdowns, or causing a ruckus to the point that you can’t even pair them on missions together until their conflict is resolved. You’ll no doubt lean on your favorites–mine included an alien with a high jump and a ray gun, a militarized horse with an augmented targeting system, and a card dealer equipped with a punishing double-barrel shotgun–but there’s not a bad outlaw in the wild bunch.
The individual gang members account for a wide variety of ranged attacks and play styles. Hopalong, for example, is a python who can slither very fast around the map, flanking enemies to lasso them and choke them out from close range. The Judge is a tank with a slow-loading rifle that specializes in critical hits. Kaboom is a ball of talking pinkish mist who can throw dynamite up and over enemy barricades or into open windows where they’re hunkering down.
Because of each character’s use cases, you’ll find groups you like to bring on missions together, like using Fletch’s bow and arrow that can turn enemies into friendlies, allowing you to amass an army of good guys to take on an incoming boss with Sarge, a horse who can locate enemies from great distances, preventing them from flanking you. When you’ve turned a half-dozen villains into allies and you can no longer lose sight of the boss, it feels like the climax of a Marvel movie when all the heroes storm the enemy with dramatic flair.
The game’s social system can be a little unclear, however. It allows you to form friendships between pairings of different outlaws or sometimes even creates grudges. In the latter’s case, these tended to occur as preordained story beats meant to cause friction in your squad and give you a new challenge to overcome. Feuding allies can’t beam down to a planet together, so you’d need to separate them like argumentative siblings until they hashed it out over a shared can of beans.
When friendships form, allies will provide extra support to their buddies, like one hero sending a pack of four-legged robot “koyotes” with you to start a mission. I liked the effects of this system in either direction, but it was usually unclear to me how I was affecting it beyond cooking up beans to immediately form bonds or rebuild bridges. Whenever these outcomes would occur following a mission, I wasn’t sure why, and it almost seemed random outside of the scripted story beats.
Each character can be further tuned for specific builds, like turning the gatling gun-equipped Preach into a health-siphoning vampire, or piling on The Judge’s tank-like qualities with layers of additional armor that protect his HP across many showdowns if you’re careful. Leveling them up via cards found on planets, managing their stamina, and keeping them above 0 HP (or at least healing them if they dip that low) adds layers to systems already well-layered, and each one is a welcome new twist to your preparation and routine.
The nature of each showdown tends to involve several enemies from the game’s expansive lineup of baddies flanking you from different directions, forcing you to control a crowd of enemies that may likely vary more than your small handful of characters brought into the showdown. You can switch between any characters you brought with you on a whim, and they’ll immediately replace the previous one–again, think of it like switching weapons, except in this case, you’re trading one whole being for another instantaneously. This usually makes a showdown fast-paced, though depending on which enemies you’re pitted against, it may be more of a knock-down, drag-out fight with perhaps just one single ultra-sturdy foe. At other points, you may be aimlessly tossing dynamite in the direction of enemy voice lines, hoping you’ll land a stick close enough to their boots to clear a small group. I enjoyed each showdown no matter its composition.
Knowing when to grab a level’s pick-ups–should it have any–is yet another consideration. One of my favorite details is how Casino’s ability will randomly kill only but always exactly one enemy in the showdown. If you pick up that item in a boss battle and save it for when only the boss remains, you can kill them with the simple press of a button. Where other games may restrict you from trying such a smart maneuver and force you to take on the boss with other means, Wild Bastards rewards you for being so savvy.
To understand the game’s many layers is to be excitedly challenged by them at all times. Seeking the optimal path through a complex web of interlocking systems makes finding it immensely gratifying. I knew I could make it through any scenario if I only played each one the right way, and that always felt within my grasp. Only my execution might fail me.
After a few failures, I felt like I could see through the matrix and knew where I’d gone wrong–maybe I waited to leave a planet for too long and the boss buried me, or I got cocky and bum-rushed the last enemy in a showdown who proceeded to one-shot me, when a more patient version of events likely would’ve meant victory. I never felt like anything that went wrong was the game putting its thumb on the scale. Each time I’d master a new system or think I’d found my groove, more layers would be there to force me to adapt, but never in a way that felt like it was piling on just so I’d have to play more than a few runs to beat the game. A few scripted narrative moments demanded that I grew more acquainted with some of my least used anti-heroes, and when I ultimately emerged from that challenge victorious, I felt like I’d come out the other side scathed, but breathing, and better for it.
This three-tiered gameplay loop of seeking specific loot merely hinted at, then navigating a crowded hostile planet in search of that loot and life-saving materials, before ultimately squaring off with a lengthy list of enemy classes in stylish first-person gunfights makes every few minutes of gameplay feel like a chess match and an action movie at the same time.
Going hand-in-hand with its striking aesthetic is the game’s subtle sense of humor. There’s a lot more dialogue here than you might expect given the game can’t reasonably be called story-driven. But the members of your posse have a long history, and you’ll come to learn of it in playing a full successful run. Their personalities are surprisingly vibrant, though best of all are the enemies, who yell out some hilarious things. My favorite of them, the Hunters, speak with British accents and distort typical video-game callouts with needlessly complicated versions of the same sentiment. For example, rather than ask their cronies about my location, they’d cry out “Who perceives the hideous foe?” and instead of a standard, “I’m flanking!” they’d yell, “Perhaps a change of scenery!” It’s very odd, and I found myself cracking up at these villains many times, sometimes even keeping them alive longer so I could hear more of their voice lines.
If there’s any notable letdown for the game, it’s the final few moments. Though the last of the procedurally generated maps certainly ramp up the difficulty to a noticeable but still fair degree, I actually hoped for some kind of final showdown that felt grander than all those before it, perhaps even letting me use a greater number of my outlaws or spread them across multiple major skirmishes to decide the fate of my run. I suppose this betrays some of the game’s systems, and so it’s sensible for it not to do this. But then, in lieu of that, the final act has a way of feeling no different than the several that led up to it. That still makes it a supremely satisfying strategy-shooter hybrid, but narratively, it unfolds anticlimactically.
But even as the last hour doesn’t push the envelope one last time, I lost count of how many times Wild Bastards had already done so. Plus, for the most dedicated players, other game modes await after you beat the game, including one that throws many more variables into a run, which blends well with the game’s expansive difficulty options that can make all of these aforementioned systems much easier or harder.
Wild Bastards is the second instance in as many games where Blue Manchu has left me mesmerized with its knack for creating intricate, interwoven gameplay systems and arranging them in such a way that rewards careful planning and skilled improvisation at different times. With a fantastic cast of 13 unique characters, tight gunplay, a striking sense of style and humor, and a deep array of possibilities in every part of its three-phase loop, Wild Bastards is unholstered brilliance.