Wild Bastards’ bite-sized first-person shooter showdowns were a treat, especially when I was able to put together pairs of characters who complemented each other and made for something more than a simple shootout. A traditional shooter it is not, but its original gameplay loop and striking visuals make it a helluva good time.
Showdowns, when implemented in video games, are often tense exchanges between two players. In PvE settings, they’re occasionally made in a 1vX situation, where the player is expected to overcome waves of enemies despite being vastly outnumbered and outgunned. In Destiny 2, I tried my hand at playing its Trials of Osiris. While it wasn’t a true “showdown” in the sense that I was against a team, some games would leave me the last one standing against a team of players who were so coordinated. Here, the odds were almost stacked against me; here, I almost always lost those odds.
By design, showdown gameplay makes the player feel tense. One false move may end up losing the showdown, but being cautious and quiet can give you the upper hand. These bouts are almost implemented in small bursts to give players a moment of relief in between shootouts. I can claim to be halfway decent at PvP first-person shooters, but I can only take so much of the tenseness before I need reprieve. Wild Bastards offered me FPS showdowns in what I thought was drips and drabs alongside reprieve that manifested in more than just rootin’, tootin’, and shootin’.
Wild Bastards is not Blue Manchu’s first rodeo in meshing FPS, roguelike progression, and strategy. Its premiere title, Void Bastards, pushed players into using their environments and hundreds of weapons to experiment in taking down enemies. What it lacked in narrative cohesion it made up for with keeping players on their toes in strategizing weapon management and traps. Its approach to giving players roadmaps of rocketships felt like playing a revised version of FTL.
Several hours into Wild Bastards, I’ve become more and more convinced that Blue Manchu took a serious look at players’ critiques of Void Bastards and thought, “Hell. They want a story? They want a semblance of a universe? They want full control over a pair of characters? I’ll give ‘em all three, and then some.”
The core element of Wild Bastards tasked me with pairing up its heroes and sending them down to a planet to loot it. I would do this planet after planet in a galaxy, where the final planet tasked me with simply saving a comrade to add to my little band of outlaws. All of this was transpiring on what looked like a board game.
The majority of Wild Bastards’ gameplay takes place in single-round shootouts. When I came across a roadblock (group of enemies) or roaming pack of critters on a planet, my pair of outlaws (or sometimes the lone outlaw) was sent to a small level where I was to engage in a shootout, be it in a reed-filled poisonous marsh, moon base with low gravity, or an intergalactic ranch town full of neon saloons and stables. Once I killed all the enemies, or I succumbed to bullets/lasers/poison, the shootout was over. Showdowns last all of maybe 30 seconds, perhaps 40 if you’re taking your time.
The gunplay feels like a traditional ability-based shooter, but with a greater emphasis on resource management instead of chaos. Every one of my crew had a unique firearm and a special ability. On the firearm front, guns included single-shot sniper rifles, dual-wielding pistols, a laser lasso, and flamethrower hands. I could never run out of ammo, but I had to reload when a character reached the end of their magazine.
Floating purple canteens (“Juice”) peppered every shootout level and were clearly visible from far thanks to how their glittery FX rose up and through buildings’ ceilings. Upon picking up Juice, I was free to activate my current character’s special ability. Casino, a robot with a shotgun, would execute a random enemy; Billy, a squid with two pistols, would temporarily be able to rapid-fire his pistols and reload them lickity split.
Knowing that each character had unique loadouts with clear weaknesses, I was constantly thinking of how to compensate for these weaknesses by pairing complementary characters together. In a shootout, a simple button press let me switch characters in case I needed to switch weapons or preserve one character’s health. Unlike a traditional shooter that involved weapon swaps in the midst of battle, Wild Bastards had me conduct character swaps on the fly.
Character swaps, you say? How unique! I agree, folks. Wild Bastards’ implementation of swapping between characters leads to chaotic yet charismatic shootouts. My character on reserve would occasionally express hunger to enter the fray or mock me if I was absorbing too many bullets. When I would see a visual indicator of an enemy’s voice, I would try swapping to a character with greater mobility so I could get across the map in the quickest yet safest way possible. Then, I would swap back to someone with greater firepower.
Wild Bastards gave me tons of room to make creative loadouts comprised of pairs of outlaws, and it did so without forcing me in any direction during the narrative campaign that introduced me to its cast of 13 outlaws drip-by-drip. During the campaign, I kept getting drawn to using two characters who could summon additional allies just so I could make distractions, but they weren’t the silver bullet to get me through to the end. Once I had gotten to the challenge mode which gave me preset pairs, I was properly challenged with seemingly incompatible outlaws.
I wasn’t fully on board with Wild Bastards from the get-go. Its neon Space Western-inspired comic motifs looked stellar, but the gunplay felt unnecessarily stiff. I kept trying to use stealth to win without fully utilizing my outlaws’ powers. Even more, enemies’ attacks felt unfair. One could dismiss these feelings as being new to the game and/or unfamiliar with its finer nuances. I would get pretty far in a galaxy, only to end up with my entire band of outlaws injured and I was sent back to the start of the procedurally generated galaxy only to start anew.
Alas, the roguelike gameplay loop of getting as far as possible only to start over with new equipment and new levels is a core element of Wild Bastards. My first death caused me to feel distraught – I didn’t want to have to start all the way over and recruit my outlaws again! All my progress – gone in a poof of smoke. Except…I wasn’t forced back that many steps. I only had to redo the current galaxy I was on.
As I hopped from galaxy to galaxy, my party of outlaws grew thanks to me digging them up one-by-one. I would send them down and sometimes they would return as pals. Sometimes, though, they would get angry with each other for no dang reason and start feuding…so I couldn’t send feuding pairs down to a planet. Feuds constantly threw wrenches in my plans to make the perfect pair of characters that could be used on any given planet. This meant that I had to reassess who to send every time I reached a new planet. I couldn’t always rely on Casino’s shotgun and instakill powers if he was downed on an earlier planet, or even worse –feuding with anyone else in my crew. Wild Bastards forced me into constantly mixing up who I was to send down to a planet because of a lore- and gameplay-driven party management system.
The only way to fix my feuding outlaws was by feeding them beans, and there were never enough of them to go around. The narrative campaign features set moments where a new outlaw rejoining the crew is already at odds with everyone else, so I constantly had to keep up with ameliorating my party’s moods and keep them on good terms with each other. If I kept the same pair of outlaws together, they would eventually grow tired of each other’s antics, so I was constantly on my toes. It’s silly to think that beans soothe angry spacefarers, but it makes sense if you’re a fan of chili.
There’s quite a bit to mix-and-match with the thirteen outlaws, health pickups, abilities, equipment modifiers (mods) that grant stats and other benefits, and feuds that only beans could solve. The constant shifting of my party and duos on a planet-by-planet basis meant that I could never get comfortable with just “one” outlaw. There wasn’t any “best” outlaw, either. Blue Manchu put some effort in making it so that every single one of the cast had distinct strengths and weaknesses.
Hopalong, a serpentine outlaw with a lasso, ended up being incredibly powerful but only in very select circumstances. I wasn’t able to slot him in, willy nilly, as his “gun” was a laser lasso that could ensnare a SINGLE enemy and keep them held up until they were drained of their health. Against swarms of critters, he almost always lost, but against a single big bad like McNeil or another miniboss who entered a planet when I spent too long exploring, Hopalong proved to be invaluable.
All in all, I was able to get through Wild Bastards’ narrative campaign in around 10 hours. The average playthrough would probably take longer for those who struggle in getting the hang of slotting complementary characters together. If you come across the perfect mod, like homing bullets, equipping it on someone will make a single galaxy fly by. Outside of the narrative campaign is a secondary campaign that is a true roguelike – you start with a different subset of outlaws on each run and get as far as you can. There is also a challenge mode which puts you in a single galaxy with a strict ruleset, like the second challenge where your entire party is feuding. Lordy, that challenge took some patience.
Taking all of this into account, you can easily hit the 15-hour mark if you’re seeking a good roguelike FPS challenge. Twenty hours, even.
I’ve had some struggles attempting to assign Wild Bastards a score, not because it’s a bad game. It’s a great game – it just has a high skill ceiling that will be appealing to those who love strategy FPS titles instead of sandboxes that offer endless running and gunning. This shouldn’t deter you, though – taking a chance on Wild Bastards and its party management meets creative power-based gunplay will most likely result in a good time. Heck, 16 hours flew by during my own review period because of how I was hooked on taking different combinations of my crew into shootouts over and over again.
Wild Bastards’ bite-sized first-person shooter showdowns were a treat, especially when I was able to put together pairs of characters who complemented each other and made for something more than a simple shootout. A traditional shooter it is not, but its original gameplay loop and striking visuals make it a helluva good time.
