Wild Bastards is the spiritual successor to Void Bastards, another roguelike shooter with a highly stylized look and “blink and you’re dead” gameplay. A healthy dose of strategy is thrown in for good measure, as you take your ever-growing group of space outlaws through battles where your decisions prior to the fights are just as important as the bullets that fly during the showdowns. This is a different kind of galactic western with a few attributes capable of awakening the gunslinger in you.
Roguelike Wild West In Space
Your start your adventure with a couple of outlaws, set to resurrect the remaining members of the gang that were killed by evil magnate Jebediah Chaste. Teaming up with a sentient spaceship called Drifter, you will move from planet to planet in search of the fallen members and getting into many brawls to bring them back to life. There is a total of 13 outlaws, each one with their unique look, skills, and identities, providing some welcome balance to the battles that you’ll face. Outlaws are beamed down according to the limits of a certain sector, and they move in duos in a board game-like screen, with turn count and enemies moving around as well.
In this board, you have various things to look for besides facing easy mobs or outrunning stronger enemies, including visiting shops, collecting materials such as mods and aces – the latter being valuable permanent upgrades for your characters – and a lot more. This is the tactical aspect of Wild Bastards, where getting into a showdown isn’t always the best call, and using the teleporters to avoid some heated battles may be the right option. This is even more true knowing that your outlaws’ health doesn’t automatically recover after each skirmish – if an outlaw dies, you must find and use a tonic to resurrect them, or wait to warp into a new sector.
Occasionally you get to recruit some allies that you place in a planned battle ahead, giving you some extra firepower that may be very valuable. But if a location seems too tough for your current standing, having a beacon is a great way to make a desperate escape back to the Drifter and to carefully plan the next descent.
Your outlaw gang is comprised of different and fierce personalities, and sometimes they clash with each other. This leads to fall-outs and quarrels that will stop you from beaming down some of them together, adding another element of strategy to team composition. While this is a nice touch that also flirts with the campaign’s narrative, I’m yet waiting to see just how intriguing and unexpected these feuds are, or if they are completely scripted and leaving no room for surprises – if this was to be random per each run, the effect would be a lot more poignant.
Showdown Style
When a showdown is started, you take your two outlaws into this fairly small arena to take out all enemies that roam the place. It plays out as a sci-fi western, maybe somewhat akin in style to the Firefly television show but with more garish colors and less of a crowd demanding for additional seasons. The stylized environments may often look crude and the dilapidated and dark interiors more like something one would expect from a VR simulation, but it grows on you, even with – or maybe due to – the deliberate low animation frames and sharp angles that lend the game a distinct retro charm.
The same could be said for the gameplay, which isn’t remarkably fast nor tactically deep, but there is enough oomph in this approach to keep you engaged, despite a couple of design decisions that may frustrate a few players. The out of nowhere enemy spawning is one of the odd and frequent events that may place a gunslinger right on your back, potentially destroying your current run, and the ladders don’t work as functional ladders, but as teleport points where you instantly ascend or descend, forced into an immediate rotation to make sure no enemy is right there, waiting for your “materialization.”
You can swiftly rotate between the two outlaws that you get into each showdown, a useful tactic to combine some of their unique abilities and firepower, including decoys and exploding random enemies, but also as a means to spare them when in low health. With over a dozen characters to choose from, these combinations should at least be fun to experiment with, although this preview build only allowed us to try three of them.
Small niggles aside, Wild Bastards is shaping up to be a treat for Void Bastards fans. It’s not the same game but there are elements in common between them, the skilled art style jumping out at you, and the character search and uniqueness is another thing to look forward to. Don’t expect it to be the next hit, but it should be a competent and engaging mix of roguelike and action with a very distinctive visual identity when it launches later this year.
MP1st was given access to a preview build of Wild Bastards for our hands-on session. Wild Bastards is launching for PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X and Series S in 2024.