Wild Bastards Is High Noon at the Edge of the Universe

Wild Bastards Review

You may remember Void Bastards, a roguelike FPS with very memorable comicbook-style art. From that art style, it’s easy to see that Wild Bastards is a sequel to Void Bastards. And while the two games might share superficial similarities, the differences make them almost completely different genres. Wild Bastards refreshingly changes the pace of a tired genre.

Go Big or Go Home

Both Bastards games are going for a tried-and-true, cowboys-in-space thing. If you toned Borderlands down by at least 40%, you will get into the Bastards spirit. Most characters have at least one robot bit, and all of them have old-timey sounding names like Jebediah. After your whole mercenary gang is murdered, the player takes control of the Wild Bastards.

That’s a sensible place to start a game, which is probably why I’ve seen it a bazillion times. But then you start putting the band back together and you remember why this formula works. And once you see the shape of the campaign, and the runs within the campaigns, you will start to vibe with what makes Wild Bastards unique.

You’ll fly your team of mercs from node to node, exploring wrecks and mysterious planets. But to escape a planet, you need to beam your mercs down to the surface to do a mini roguelike run. Your success in the quick games supports the larger campaigns. Battles are fast and extremely strategic. No one is boasting about map sizes in this game. The cramped spaces send a clear message: there’s nowhere to hide so fight fast and without mercy.

Rootin’, Tootin’, Laser Shootin’

Experienced FPS players all have opinions about which game’s weapons feel the best to fire. Wild Bastards has cowboy guns that feel heavy, as they should. And there’s a nice ‘pew pew’ factor once you really get going with the guns. But Wild Bastards is one of the least twitchy shooters I’ve played in a while. The game rewards a thoughtful approach- but doesn’t give you all that much time to think. That’s not a balance I’ve ever encountered in other games. It almost feels like a rapid-fire single-player Ghost Recon campaign.

The roguelike/roguelite game is where the micro missions really shine. You aren’t making generic shooty-guys, you are leading a team with a lot of personality. So the repetitive nature of the gameplay is constantly serving to build characters, both by letting you spend a lot of time with them, and also by letting you change their stats and loadout like a party-based RPG. If number-crunching the best build isn’t for you well, at least you’ll quickly go back to shooting. The brevity of the approach means you’ll never do one thing for long.

How much you will want to spend time with these Bastards is something of an open question. After a run of shooting games all about personality, I kind of miss the days of a silent protagonist. That being said, I didn’t roll my eyes too-too much at the rat-tat-tat party banter. And again, how can you get bogged down with opinions on the characters when there is constantly something new to do? By the time you’ve processed what was stupid about that joke, you’ve already leveled up and beamed down to the next instanced battle.

The Quick and the Dead

I like having a quick shooter in my rotation. Overwatch was a great game for this. Once you take that experience online though, you get worries about balance and microtransactions. You don’t want your game to be accused of being pay-to-win. But a single-player roguelite offers that delicious feeling of progress. Against the Storm recently tried a similar spin on the RTS formula. You build a little town, only to abandon it for a fresh one, but with more starting bonuses. Swap out the top-down buildings for some six-shootin’ ray guns and they are almost the same game. Broadly speaking.

Bright colors and low-impact sound design keep Wild Bastards from ever feeling too chaotic. The action stays legible, without too many particle effects crowding your screen. With management, RPG, and unlocking mechanics, there’s a little something for everyone. Wild Bastards is a good hang. Rather than feeling pulled in every direction, you will feel hyper-focused on the next level. I expect to see imitators trying to pull off the same formula before too long. But the real question is, what does the future look like for the Bastards games? If the future looks like this, I’d feel just fine but Wild Bastards is such a leap forward I would hope to see more bold additions to the formula.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***