When you get PvP right, you can make something special. Take Sea of Thieves, for example. Rare’s pirate odyssey adventure took the best of team cooperation and mixed it well with PvP and PvE. Getting a balanced team co-op, where everyone knows how they should be supporting their team, providing meaningful treasure quests, and throwing good PvP/PvE into the mix helped surpass expectations from its launch. As of now, the game is filled to the brim full of people, while enjoying success on the PlayStation 5, and it keeps expanding and thriving. It’s an endless adventure that keeps on giving. Get it right, like SoT, and you reap the rewards for years to come.
Now, while Sea of Thieves has tasted the sweet smell of success since the Xbox One X, many games of its type have come and gone. Some of them were good, some of them not-so-much. It’s all about finding a good balance with co-op and PvP gameplay elements, while making the rest of the content just as meaningful. That is a well-planned and executed balancing act that is scooting across a thin line of success or failure.
Well, a newcomer has arrived called Wildgate from developer Moonshot Games and publisher Dreamhaven. The PvP multiplayer game is Sea of Thieves in space, though surprisingly smaller (it is space), with a solid mix of Fortnite combat without the fear of shrinking area sizes. While the girth of the game is limited, and the PvE portion of the game is decent, the real focus of this game appears to be cooperation with players on your team and taking out other gamers. Somewhere in that mess is looting. It’s a little lopsided in this area, but it’s still fun as hell.
So, let’s get our oxygen in order, open the doors to our spaceship, and get looting on this review.
Wildgate’s gameplay is rather limited in scope but hefty in how it performs. It’s a smaller experience but one with meaningful gameplay, which makes the scale of the game forgivable. Let’s dig into it.
The game is driven by PvP play. It all starts with you picking the mode of play, which features PvP as a separate option of its own; every other mode is either practice or going against AI, the latter of which isn’t bad. The PvP mode pairs you with random players, or real ones, if you have friends, and puts you on a ship to control and protect with them. It’s the same type of gameplay concept as Sea of Thieves, where everyone is put on a ship and must learn to cooperate to survive, while also protecting the ship and its crew. It’s a simple concept that translates well to space.
Before enemies even make it into the picture, your crew has two main goals: keep the ship in working order and find places to loot. This is a perceived treasure-hunting game at its core, which makes the co-op aspect of the gameplay even tighter. The more you survive, the more you collect, and the more everyone benefits.
As for the ship portion of the game, it is broken into different multi-level areas. The top area controls the ship (someone must be captain), while the surrounding areas can be used for defending the ship with turrets or sending out probes. The bottom level of the ship is where the engine lies, and players must pay close attention to that engine, as it can overheat and spell doom for all onboard. Keeping the ship in good/decent shape is a main goal for the gameplay, and a worthy one when the adventure gets going. If you lose your ship, you lose the game.
Related to the ship is the looting portion of the game. Your team must look for artifacts to loot on abandoned or destroyed ships or bases. The artifacts are hidden somewhere in your exploration space, and acquiring them means you can open a space gate and vamoose. If you can acquire one and make it through the gate safely, then you’ve won the game. The urgency of finding said artifact, while maintaining a good ship, is a juggling act that is enjoyable. You will feel some pressure to get in and out of places while taking chances of being found by enemy ships. We’ll get to that last part in a second.
Now, the artifacts aren’t just lying around. Players must enter areas, activate devices, and/or destroy computer-controlled enemies to unlock a loot room filled full of goodies. Unlocking these loot areas isn’t tough, as most of the enemies you run across are easily disposed of with the right number of people. This isn’t an MMORPG, so you aren’t running into impossible barriers. The enemies are an almost decent challenge when you’re soloing this game, but easily disposed of if you have shipmates with you.
Anyhoo, once you acquire loot or an artifact, you can quickly travel back to the ship through a transportation device on your person, which instantly brings you back to the ship’s bridge with loot in hand. It’s not too difficult, nor does it get in the way of the PvP – it just is.
Some of the more creative parts of Wildgate are loot and upgrades that you can acquire while robbing decimated ships/bases. This reminded me a lot of SoT because of the creative items you can stumble upon. An example includes a turbine engine that will allow you (not your ship) to travel quickly through the vacuum of space. You can cover a lot of ground with this one. Another example is upgrades to your ship that can help you out during space combat. It might be upgrading turrets to something more powerful, or gaining additional shields. The upgrades hook directly into the ship, and the game makes sure to make it seamless by showing markers on the screen where your upgrades can go. This portion of the loot can be super helpful and make the game more entertaining, especially when two ships (or three) go against each other.
Staying with space combat, it’s the highlight of the gameplay. When you go against other players, you can do it in two ways. You can go ship versus ship, which tightens the cooperation between players, something I truly enjoy about Wildgate, or you can board another person’s ship for true PvP. Or you can mix it up and take people out with a turret while they are trying to board your ship. That’s quite fun, as one shot makes the other person instantly disappear. Getting killed during gameplay just means you’re going to respawn within a few seconds. If your ship gets destroyed, that means the game has ended for you and your crew. Quite simple.
Honestly, the PvP works so darn well. It’s balanced, as you won’t feel like anyone is overpowered. The ship combat is out of this world (pun intended) fun because of all the moving parts, as well as the upgrades. Getting a team of gamers to communicate and cooperate is something to behold. It’s like watching someone play Battlefield, where the chaos is controlled by your team’s cooperation with each other. This part of the gameplay is far more entertaining than the looting/exploring. I think that was by design, and that design worked.
What I wished was a bit more girthier was the exploration and the size of the space you’re thrown into. Everything feels restricted and sometimes slow. It’s not the worst thing in the world for this game, but I hope updates or DLC in the future expand Wildgate a bit more. I want bigger and better adventures, especially with the loot you acquire. One of the coolest things about Sea of Thieves is how big the ocean feels in the game and how encouraged you are to explore everything, mainly for the random shit you find in that game. That crying treasure chest was the best discovery when the game was still vanilla. It was such a special way to take down enemy ships. Anyway, I hope Wildgate makes itself bigger and doesn’t go the gimmicky route that Fortnite has taken most of its life. Please, no skins from Family Guy. PLEASE.
Anyway, on the backend of the gameplay, you do have a decent reward system, where you can acquire new weapons, prospectors/characters, and other goodies that will push you to continue. Anytime a game can give you a solid amount of motivation to return to it through its rewards, then that is probably going to be a good game. Heck, that backend concept and rewards system is probably the reason why Fall Guys is still a thing. Wildgate’s backend reward system is fair, and it’s encouraging as it is motivating.
Beyond all the above, there isn’t much else to Wildgate, and that’s just fine. Overall, it’s a fun team co-op PvP multiplayer shooter that brings a space-aged Sea of Thieves to your screen. It’s fun and worth a look.
On that sweet note, let’s wrap up this review.
Conclusion
Wildgate from developer Moonshot Games and publisher Dreamhaven is a fun PvP multiplayer shooter that may seem a bit vanilla now, but it has room to grow. As it stands, you’ll get a lot more PvP co-op gaming out of this than anything else.
