Roguelike shooters aren’t the rarest combination these days, but Wild Bastards makes up for that with a great setting, quick showdowns and a really cool combat meta, all set in an intergalactic Wild-West drentched in neon.
Wild Bastards is a strategy shooter with three strategic layers: Shootouts, Map-Navigation and Meta Game. There’s a lot to love, from it’s baker’s dozen of misfit outlaws down to the barks and yelps of enemies as you face off against them around shanties and saloons. Combat is fast and brutal, with each of the outlaws having their own combat style and abilities — all played out in first person — until the numbers have balanced out at least, where you might struggle to find a sniper or somebody cowering in the back corner of the tight, but dense maps.
When you’re not gunning down enemies you’re making your way around whatever planet your spaceship is currently over in a point-crawl that’ll be familiar if you’ve played other run-based roguelikes. Each map is littered with potential gunfights, events, barricades to break down and capture points. You’ll gather bonuses, fight enemies and, well, get rich if you can manage to fight your way around the map, however you’ve only got a certain number of turns until a large enemy appears and actively tries to track you down and bring you to justice. Add to this that you can only ping a selection of your outlaws down and it becomes a careful balancing act of how much you want to push your luck against Wild Bastard‘s systems.
Not only can you only take a few of your outlaws down, but the outlaws can be actively feuding and refuse to go on missions with each other. Love Smoky’s fingerguns and Casino’s card flinging? It doesn’t matter, because if they’re feuding then you’re only getting one of them on mission until they work it out. As a counterpoint, there’s a Pal system in there where a character will trigger an ability if your buddies are there and certain things happen. It’s handy, and adds a lot of character and depth to each of the outlaws… and, that’s before you even get to talking about their abilities and your ability to attach modifications to each of the characters.
It’s clever and means that you really start to get familiar with, and favour, certain outlaws. They level up (I mean, every game has levelling up in it now, everything and everybody is an RPG; You’re an RPG, I’m an RPG) and grow stronger, giving you the options to tweak them to compliment your playstyle.
Just like Void Bastards before it, Wild Bastards’ big appeal isn’t even in its systems. It oozes style, with a comic-style interface and an explosive attitude, cell-shading, amazing colour palettes and enemy artwork that looks like it’s pulled straight from a really cool TTRPG handbook.
Wild Bastards steps away from the turquoise and orange of its predecessor and steps into dusk and high-noon colours, with large swaths of it in purples and yellows — at least, that was the case in the demo I recently played while at GDC earlier this year.
Wild Bastards is expected to release for PC, Xbox, PlayStation & Switch later this year.
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