In a sea of fairly garden variety first-person shooters, Wild Bastards dares to do things a little bit differently. A roguelike shooter that places a real emphasis on the rogues, Wild Bastards is an riotous, intergalactic affair that has players attempting to piece together the titular outlaws after their destruction at the hands of the villainous Jebediah Chaste in a story that transplants an almost comically traditional Wild West setting into a sci-fi backdrop that spans whole solar systems.
Wild Bastards PS5 Review
FPS, Strategy & Roguelike Design Come Together In This Roundly Enjoyable Sci-Fi Western
As the remaining two Wild Bastards who have sided with the Drifter, an enigmatic sentient spacecraft with an agenda of its own (because why not, eh?), you’re tasked with crossing the galaxy and recruiting, well, resurrecting, the remaining eleven outlaws as you flee the nefarious Jebediah Chaste and seek sanctuary in a mysterious haven known as the Homestead.
In practice, Wild Bastards is broadly a game of three very distinct slices. First, you have the spacebound view whereas you use the Drifter to travel from one sector to the next, in search of new outlaws to bring back to life. Taking place on an essentially flat map, your ship must proceed from the beginning of the sector (left) to the end of the sector (right), with exclusionary routes being taken along the way that allow you to reach certain planets, explore anomalies, uncover unique events and more besides, while shutting off other avenues as a result, preventing you from travelling backwards.
In embracing roguelike game design, each of the sectors is procedurally generated, meaning that no single sector is like the last and so each time you enter a sector it always feels like an eminently fresh endeavour. Once you discover a planet to beam down to however, this is where the next portion of Wild Bastard’s overarching design comes into view.
Once you’ve chosen the outlaws that you’ll be taking down with you to the planet, events unfold from a third-person isometric perspective, providing you with a complete view of the areas on the planet that you can travel to. In practice, these sections play out in a turn-based fashion, as you have a certain amount of moves you can take per turn as you shift your outlaws from place to place.
There’s a lot to bear in mind too when you move your outlaws around Wild Bastards’ overland map. Not only do you have various shops that can sell you health, armour and other such useful replenishments in return for Cramm – essentially Wild Bastards’ currency – but other points of interest litter the map too. These include mods that provide buffs to your outlaws, tonics that will restore injured outlaws, ace cards that provide permanent level progression to each outlaw, teleports that allow you to hop from one place to another and special event markers that allow you to set off hazards (such as a rampaging herd of bulls, for instance) that will disrupt or sometimes outright destroy enemies, to name just a few.
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An added level of strategy is embedded into the overworld map when you realise that as part of the ‘Bastards odyssey to resurrect their fallen comrades and escape their tormentors, the ill-mannered progeny of Jebediah Chaste, Prince McNeil, can also find his way onto the map after a certain number of turns. Like a figurative guillotine hanging above your head, the arrival of Prince McNeil acts as a sort of time limit that is imposed upon each stage (he is chasing you all around the galaxy, lest we forget) and early on in the game at least, can prove to be an overwhelming foe. Naturally, this also lends Wild Bastards strategic sensibilities an additional layer, as you must do everything you can before McNeil arrives and a real risk/reward dynamic kicks into play as a result which is hugely satisfying.
When you’re not jetting around the sector and cutting across the various procedurally generated planetoids, you’ll be engaging in numerous ‘showdowns’ which is where the first-person shootery bits of Wild Bastards come out to play. Though the gunplay feels good enough, the various firearms don’t have much oomph – something of a cardinal sin considering its Wild West adjacent setting.
These showdowns also occur on relatively small maps (something which might stick in the craw of genre purists looking for something a bit more substantial), but make no mistake, showdowns often become quite tense affairs – especially later on as the enemies become smarter, stronger and kill you in just a few hits and so making the most out of cover and timing your reloads becomes crucial to staying alive. Luckily, there are more than a few things that can help you to even up the odds.
Not only can you level up each outlaw and open up a progression tree which invites additional upgrades like extra health and improved damage, but so too can you also use mods to buff certain stats and abilities, while special, single use powers found in each map can be employed to even up the odds further. Finally, another aspect of Wild Bastards’ design that is both clever and helpful in the midst of a firefight is its visual sound system which highlights on the UI where your enemies are making noise, allowing you to neatly flank them as a result.
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Certainly, the bite-sized procedural maps combined with the less than satisfying weapons and slower pace will frustrate genre veterans looking for something a bit more thunderous and broad. For anyone else looking to mix up stealth and strategy into their FPS diet though, Wild Bastards taut and frequently intense showdowns could prove to be just the ticket.
Something else you have to monitor in Wild Bastards are, well, the bastards themselves because they can be plenty wild. You see, each of the outlaws that make up the titular Wild Bastards have friendships and feuds with one another, which aside from enriching the largely amusing cut-scene banter which exists within the group, also has some fairly impactful gameplay ramifications too.
If, for example, you’re beaming down to the surface with a group of outlaws who all get on with each other (described by the game as ‘pals’), the entire group will benefit from buffs to things like reload time, health regen and more. If however, you have one or more outlaws that are feuding with each other, then those outlaws will simply refuse to accompany you on a mission to the surface of any planet where the target of their ire is also present. Thankfully, feuds are not a permanent state of being, as presumably tasty cans of beanz can be fried and cooked up by Smoky, one of the first outlaws that you meet, and can be used to calm down such animosities. I mean after all, nothing builds burned bridges better than a tasty tin ‘o beans, right?
Should all of your outlaws find themselves injured on a given run, the Drifter simply warps you back to the beginning of the sector to try again, though you’ll lose all your resources apart from whatever ace cards and Infamy you have on hand. Likewise, if you happen to make it out of a sector, all of your injured crew will be rejuvenated for the next sector. So even though failing is something you’ll do a lot in Wild Bastards, the game doesn’t penalise you too heavily for it.
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Something else that is worthy of note is that the Wild Bastards themselves are actually quite a charismatic and amusing bunch. Buoyed by appropriately entertaining VA performances, it’s genuinely quite amusing to watch them squabble with another in the various cutscenes that crop up and one of them is a horse with an eye patch – what’s not to like? Certainly, the same brand of humour that was a part of the developer’s last effort, Void Bastards, is also very much alive and kicking here too – adding a certain amusement and levity to proceedings. Functionally each of the Wild Bastards plays differently too, with Meson Ray using an energy pistol to fry her victims, while Smoky can quite literally immolate enemies with a click of his fingers.
Visually speaking, Wild Bastards is a handsomely made if somewhat unremarkable effort. Though the various 2D art is attractive enough, the 3D worlds that are used to showcase Wild Bastards’ showdowns are geometrically basic and sparsely detailed affairs. That said, the 3D sprites that are used nonetheless are portrayed stylishly enough, while the whole thing cranks along at a decent framerate (as one would hope considering the relatively lacking degree of visual complexity on show).
Finally, once the story-based campaign has been beaten, Wild Bastards opens up its challenges which arguably provide the game with its legs in the long-term, though it isn’t long before the procedurally generated levels begin to feel a little bit samey.
I certainly enjoyed my time with Wild Bastards. The blended Wild West and sci-fi settings, together with hybridised strategy and roguelike FPS approach, all make Wild Bastards feel a lot fresher than many of the shooters on the market right now. Sure, the nuts and bolts of its face-blasting might not rub shoulders with the genre’s best in the purest sense and the visual presentation is lacking somewhat, but the level of design ingenuity and rough-shackle charm that is on display here ably makes up for such shortcomings.
Wild Bastards is out now on PS5.
Review code kindly provided by PR.