There's something about a space western that just hits the mark. Blending a lil' yeehaw with some ultra-technical sci-fi lore hits the mark, and being a scoundrel in a spaceship just makes sense. There's nothing like taking the wide expanse of a dirt field and transposing it onto the infinite blackness of space. And Wild Bastards, the latest from the team behind Void Bastards, leverages this vibe perfectly to deliver a first-person shooter/strategy roguelike experience that's easy to get addicted to.
Giddy up and punch it as we fly through space with the Bastards.
Just the Facts |
Developer: Blue Manchu |
Publisher: Maximum Entertainment |
Platform(s): PC*, PS5, Xbox Series S and X, Nintendo Switch *denotes platform reviewed on |
Price: $34.99 |
Release Date: September 12, 2024 |
Review key provided by publisher via Tinsley PR. |
The Wild Bastards will ride again...
Behind Wild Bastards is the crew at Blue Manchu, the studio that made Void Bastards and Card Hunter. Led by one of the co-founders of Irrational Games, the team has incredible immersive sim shooter pedigree and is constantly looking to find ways to make more dynamic versions of games like Bioshock and System Shock. Void Bastards was their big coming out party back in 2019, offering an immersive sim roguelike where nameless protagonists explore derelict spaceships, pick a path through the dangers of space, and keep themselves alive through any means possible.
Wild Bastards looks to inject a bit more personality to the formula, add a bit more narrative, and offer a smaller, more action-packed sandbox for players to blast their way through. With 13 unique outlaws to pull into your team, Wild Bastards offers up a plate of fascinating personalities and playstyles that make it constantly refreshing from end to end.
At the start of the game, the eponymous Wild Bastards — or what remains of the gang — are on the run. This outlaw group is down to two living members: Doc Casino, a gambling robot, and Spider Rosa, a dual-wielding spider woman. The two are being chased down by the Chaste family, a puritanical group of true scoundrels who've taken control of this pocket of space and bought out all the support they need to hunt these outlaws down, half for their crimes and half because they're all mutants and robots.
Pushed into a corner by one of Chaste's children, Casino and Rosa find themselves inexplicably saved by the Drifter, a sentient spaceship. The encounter starts them on a quest to find the remains of all the past members of the crew to revive them and soar off into the sunset toward the mythical Homestead, a chunk of space that welcomes all and celebrates relative peace.
And so, your quest is set and your goals clear: get the Wild Bastards back together and get to the Homestead, dodging the Chaste family and their crew as you zip through space systems.
The Wild Bastards live up to their name. They're robots, lizards, literal sci-fi ghosts, and nuns with miniguns. They bicker and fight one moment and bond through death-defying missions, manifesting in an entire gameplay system that tracks whether the bastards are beefing or friendly. It's your job to manage it all, as it changes who can be sent out on missions together and how much they help one another while there. It's so character-driven and each new member of the crew has a fun new twist that had me excited to rope new people in as I went.
Particular favorites include the eternally enflamed chef, Smoky, who literally ends up beefing with 90% of the Bastards because they're sick of eating beans, and Billy, a young and naive Cthulhu-man who holds arguably the greatest potential — both in gameplay and narratively — of the Bastards. And I mean, Billy the Squid Kid as an obvious nickname (that the game never uses) is just perfection.
On the whole, the narrative is not the focus here, much the same as with Void Bastards, which is fascinating because of the ways the main gameplay systems seem pulled out of narrative-heavy immersive sims. Blue Manchu wants you to get right back into the game as often as possible, so storytelling takes a backseat to the dynamic moments that emerge in the game's randomized gameplay chaos.
But by focusing the story on the Bastards themselves, 13 unique characters with distinct looks and personalities for you to fall in love with, it gives the experience easier touchstones to latch onto and keeps you invested in their journey through space.
Shoutout to the Chaste family being so hilariously evil that you can't help but enjoy blasting them away again and again.
Variety is the spice of a Bastard's life
Wild Bastards is a lot brainier than its setup might imply. Just as much as it is about being a group of gunslinging outlaws shooting through space, it's also about strategically picking your path through a space system and on the ground of the planets where you'll land, as well as who you bring into battle.
These roguelike elements and the randomly generated space sectors bring to mind FTL and the like, with randomized planets and events charted throughout the map that players must consider on their path toward the outlaws' remains. You have to consider the enemy types on each planet and who's best suited to wrangle 'em, plus which planets and treasures await down any path. There's everything from upgrades for your outlaws (both temporary and permanent), to beans you can share between feuding outlaws to end their disputes, to money you can spend on resources for that particular run.
Once you chart your path through space and choose a planet, you pick which outlaws to send down to the surface, where you'll do the same kind of route-based navigation. The Wild Bastards can be sent down in pairs that you'll swap between at will when you're finally on the ground and spraying bullets.
Each member of the posse has a certain number of moves they can make along the path, and once you identify where the goods are, you start picking fights at roadblocks that split off the map into chunks, and get to the meaty action.
These more strategic segments, board game-like in execution, are fun to manipulate to figure out the path of least resistance to your goal (or the path of most upgrades). The varying conditions and randomizations of each planet make your decisions all the more difficult. Some have no roadblocks but are populated entirely with pesky moving patrols that block your paths. Some feature lower timers until the eventual arrival of one of the dangerous Chaste family members who hunt you down every step of the way, and so on.
You arguably spend more time on these boards than you do getting down and dirty with the shooting, so it's nice that it was consistently engaging.
When you do finally get shooting, though, Wild Bastards reveals its final trick: it's actually every kind of shooter all at once. Each outlaw represents a vastly different playstyle. Kaboom is an explosives-first character who can blast groups into pieces. Fletch and Spike are single shot stealth shooters. Sarge is an all-rounder who feels like a traditional shooter protagonist with his ability to spot targets across the map and offer good speed and damage all at once. As you unlock more outlaws, you're given the flexibility to swap your playstyle on the fly and pair their abilities together in complementary ways.
On the whole, Wild Bastards' shooting experience is a little slower, stiffer, and more strategic than the modern shooter — especially at the start, when each of your outlaws is brand new and upgradeless.
There's a satisfying thump to most every outlaw's weaponry, and with each one's unique ability, you feel confident that you can dispatch anyone in your path. But the enemies the game throws at you from the jump are trickier in the ways they engage you. They hide around corners, swarm you, and send out giant explosives from afar.
Wild Bastards is a harder game than you'd imagine, and hard in kind of a weird way in that early game, as you can't really adjust your strategy too much since you only have a handful of outlaws at your disposal. There's a genuine rush to scraping through a difficult roadblock combat encounter and to just getting through a planet before the most difficult of the Chaste family lands to ruin your day, but it's more enjoyable when you feel you have options.
Wild Bastards is at its best the deeper into a run you go. My favorite roguelikes are fun all throughout, but to really see the dynamics of what Blue Manchu has built here, you have to wait until about halfway through your first campaign (which took me around 11 hours to complete).
Well that ain't nice, pardner
That issue precedes some of the broader structural issues I had playing Wild Bastards. While more enjoyable, the back half of my campaign run was rarely too difficult because my outlaws' builds were complete enough to handle nearly every situation. The roguelike format made everything engaging, but the pool of environments and enemy types ran out quicker than I expected. The outlaws themselves aren't necessarily created equal, with some of them left pretty neglected by the end of my campaign run, simply because the situations they were built for felt few and far between.
And to top it off, I had a strange audio issue that left me having to crank my speakers and headphones to hear the game properly. It may have been a strange reaction to my specific PC setup, but I thought it worth mentioning.
In the end, though, these things were blips in what was otherwise an extremely enjoyable roguelike shooter. From the number of strategic decisions I made in picking my path to the actual down-and-dirty shooting, I could see myself playing future runs of Wild Bastards in small segments on my Steam Deck — in the same way I still play Balatro — for the rest of the year because of how fun it all was. How enjoyable I found spending time with these characters, learning their quirks both narratively and in their unique mechanics.
It also helps that the game looks so good.
Blue Manchu employs a similar pulpy comic book aesthetic in Wild Bastards as they did in their last Bastards game, with all characters running about the field as 2D cutouts in neon-toned environments. It's a simple effect that calls to mind some of the earliest FPS games, but with the chunky pixels of yesteryear replaced with stunning high fidelity hand-drawn assets. If anything, the style is so cohesive that it makes spotting some of the stealthier enemies that much more difficult.
And while I've talked about how great the design and function of all 13 outlaws was, I can't let it go uncelebrated that every single outlaw is fully voiced. Each performer brings a unique flavor to the members of the crew, even further giving them that distinct, standout personality and gameplay feel that I praised earlier. The multilayered "legion" of voices that bring together the hivemind-focused Rawhide, the innocence brought to Billy's horrifying Cthulu-like figure, and the raspy growl of Smoky's bean obsession... the voicework all around seals the deal on how much I loved this cast of characters.
Wild Bastards is the perfect game for those think-y roguelike fans who are ready to set aside the deckbuilding to slam some shells into a barrel, as well as for the shooter fan who is ready to think a bit harder about it when they start clicking heads.
Powered by a cast of characters so fun to watch tear each other to shreds and build back up again, Wild Bastards is the perfect intersection of so many niche interests that it stands out for the ways it solidly represents all of them. The pace wavers, the story is secondary, but nothing feels better than blasting away a robot with a six-shooter, I tell ya what.
Video Games Are Good and Wild Bastards is . . . GREAT. (8/10)
+ an extremely lovable cast of scoundrels with vastly different playstyles, detailed and beautiful comic book aesthetic, a more think-y shooter experience than you might expect
- narrative is secondary to everything else, roguelike pace a bit uneven, as is the playability of all 13 outlaws
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