Wild Bastards Review

Overview

Wild Bastards is a rogue-lite strategy shooter and that fact alone is going to make it a divisive experience, especially in today’s dopamine-hungry, power fantasy climate fueled by low attention spans that take offense at the mere mention of rubbing two brain cells together in order to play a game.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!

Wild Bastards requires you to rub those brain cells together vigorously. Any attempt to run and gun ensures that your bastards are promptly buried six feet under. The game features a variety of difficulty settings, but the core of the experience is executing a methodical plan, before, during, and after combat.

How Wild Bastards is structured reminds me of activities such as laser tag, paintball, or even children’s games such as tag or hide and seek. While Wild Bastards doesn’t play remotely like those activities, it follows a familiar rigid structure of easily defined rules. If you’re tagged, you’re it, etc.

For example, enemies don’t just swarm in from every angle, even when you’re spotted. They have very rigid and intentionally predictable behaviors that allow the specific abilities of your outlaws to shine or struggle.

A simple gunhand fires a shot before taking cover, and won’t engage if you’re far away. A sniper does the same but flees if you get close. Kyotes come at you in packs of three, and then scurry away, while a Stinger skitters from cover to cover between shots.

It is this rigid and predictable structure that defines each engagement. Every combat encounter is an arena, a self-contained puzzle, or a sporting match, with its own rigid rules. Your ability to tackle each bout is determined by the choices you make before, during, and even after each fight.

Wild Bastards has three layers to it’s gameplay. The system layer, where you choose what planets to visit as you travel. The planet layer, where you move your outlaws around a board game-style interface to navigate the planets, and then, of course, the combat layer.

What makes Wild Bastards special is how each of these layers meld together. Every decision you make on one layer has a ripple effect on the others, and you have to think several steps ahead to succeed.

A Strategy Shooter

Each of Wild Bastard’s 13 playable outlaws has very distinct gameplay styles, strengths, and weaknesses. Those may sound like generic buzzwords, but you can profoundly feel these differences when playing the game. Pitting Judge the Sniper against a pack of Kyotes feels a lot like having your goldfish challenge a cheetah to a tree-climbing contest. Preach, on the other hand, can dispatch a whole pack with ease using her chain gun.

If a spider-like porcupine skitters her way, however, she’s gonna get pricked by all the quills that come flying out each time it takes damage from her hailstorm of bullets. Those quills don’t activate on critical hits though, so Judge is well-suited to put a bullet right in their shiny mouth.

Outlaws and enemies counter each other in Wild Bastards, so it’s important that you try to match the right team for the job. But it’s gameplay style is also methodical. Enemies aren’t universally aware of you and can lose track of you even in the heat of combat. At the same time, you don’t know where they are either, but they talk and make sounds that ping their general direction on your compass.

Simply standing or strafing when fighting with enemies will get you killed. Instead, it’s all about utilizing stealth, planning, and tactics to create several smaller advantageous skirmishes throughout the fight.

This could be as simple as popping up from cover to gun down a couple of unsuspecting gunhands and then engaging from somewhere else, or other more complex maneuvers. Every outlaw has their own quirks, and you can find juice around the various arenas to power their special abilities. Judge can slow down time, for example, while Casino destroys a random enemy. Furthermore, if you take two outlaws into battle, you can switch between them at any time.

You could, for example, light up a small gunfight using Billy the Squid, only to then swap to Hopalong and use him to sprint away quietly like the sneaky snake he is. There are a bunch of ways to combo outlaws together using their powers and the environment, such as using Kaboom’s dynamite to knock a tough foe in the air in low-gravity arenas and then switching to Preach to light them up with her chaingun before they come down.

The slower and more thoughtful pace of Wild Bastards works well. A single combat can have ripple effects for a whole run, and thus, each engagement is risky and dangerous. At the same time, the combat feels snappy and satisfying, and you still get to engage in several fierce gunfights in each showdown.

What really makes the combat shine is the fact that it’s not contained in a vacuum. Sure, I explained how a single fight might work, but not how or why it happened, and all the strategic decisions I needed to make to get there in the first place. That’s where the other two layers come in.

Routing Tooting

The system layer will look familiar to anyone who has played a rogue-lite game. It’s full of branching paths with various nodes for you to interact with. However, the routes you take have a more profound impact than most rogue-lite games. Each planet lists the enemy types, modifiers, and potential loot that may be found there. Since the outlaws and enemies counter each other in various ways, you have to try and plan out ahead of time who can tackle each planet.

You can usually send 2 to 4 outlaws down at once, but if they get into a fight, they become tired and are less effective until they rest for a jump or two. Furthermore, you’re rarely playing with a full deck of cards. You spend most of the game rescuing various members of the Wild Bastards, so while there are 13 outlaws in the game, you seldomly have them all at once.

Not to mention they can also feud with each other. Two feuding outlaws will refuse to beam down together, further limiting your options. Your goal is to complete the final planet of each system, but you have to stop and beam down to any other planet you encounter along the way to break the jump lock preventing your ship from moving on. If all of your outlaws become injured, you have to replay a newly generated version of that system.

This means that when possible, you have to plan not just for the next planet, but the one after, and so on in order to give you the best chance of succeeding because once you go planetside, things can go sideways fast.

Planetside

Once you have chosen your team, they all beam down to the planet together. In theory, at least. There is a chance for one or more outlaws to scatter on the drop and you won’t be able to use them until you recover them with another outlaw. The planetside layer plays somewhat like a board game. Your outlaws have a certain amount of movement points and then you end your turn, allowing roaming bands of enemies to move around.

The catch is, you’re on somewhat of a soft timer. After a few turns, princes start to beam down to hunt your outlaws. The three princes are very dangerous, but can actually be defeated. However, once big daddy Chaste shows up, you better be ready to skidaddle. He can’t be defeated and injures every outlaw he catches.

To escape, you simply need to reach the stairwell with an outlaw. However, planets also house loot. Loot, especially the aces used to level up your outlaws are incredibly useful. Roadblocks protect various paths of the planet and must be defeated to proceed, but combat is always dangerous. All of these factors offer you a lot of strategic decisions to make.

For example, you can pair up your outlaws so that you can take two of them into combat, or split them up to cover more ground, You can see what enemy types occupy the blockades and try to plan accordingly. If one has a bunch of security turrets, for example, you could always send Spike whose power allows him to hack them. Assuming you sent him planetside in the first place.

However, you can also use various locations to your advantage, if you can spare the time. If a roadblock seems particularly menacing, maybe you can pick up a contract for some hired help, or cause a stampede to run through and weaken every enemy group in its path. Maybe if you time it right, you can send one outlaw to a chowhouse to reduce the guards at all roadblocks by half, and then attack it with another outlaw.

If there is a prince blocking one outlaw from getting to the stairwell, maybe you can reach a shop with another outlaw and buy a disguise, so that your first outlaw can use it to slip by the prince. There are a lot of options at your disposal, and it’s rare that you can loot an entire planet. You have to weigh the odds of what your outlaws can manage to take on and still escape before the princes can catch them.

The beauty of it is, you aren’t weighing those odds against a statistical win percentage. You’re weighing them against yourself. Can you take down a roadblock with 4 ironclads, 3 snipers, and 8 Kyotes using Hopalong and Judge? Do you need to try, and soften it up ahead of time? Or maybe just take a different route altogether. That’s for you to decide.

Bending The Rules

I tend to view Wild Bastards’ structure to be akin to a variety of Olympic events. Each planet and showdown presents me with a set of rules, and I choose which players to put in and what ones to bench. This player is good at skeet shooting, this one is good at running, etc. Judge the sniper is good at this, but bad at that.

However, another powerful element of the game is the ability to bend those rules. As I said before, you won’t always have an ideal roster for a situation, but mods and Aces allow you to tweak your roster. Mods only last for a system but can be game-changing.

Judge is a long-ranged sniper who has to reload after every shot. That means that he struggles with swarms like Kyotes. But what if I gave him a mod that increased how many bullets his gun has, or gave him sonic resistance so he can tank the Kyote’s sonic blasts, or better yet, a mod that makes him invincible for five seconds after every kill, allowing him to down each Kyote in succession and not take a scratch?

Spike uses throwing knives and goes invisible after every kill. What if I made his knives home in on enemies? What if I gave Preach’s chaingun exploding bullets, or maxed out Kaboom’s fire resistance completely nullifying certain attacks? There is a lot of fun to be had with mods and it really makes them worth looting when planetside.

Aces on the other hand allow you to choose abilities for your outlaws that last an entire campaign and allow you to fine-tune each outlaw to the role and play style you want for them. All of it adds to the satisfyingly fun strategic nature of the game that gives it a really unique identity among first-person shooters.

The Real Game Begins

For me at least, the real game doesn’t begin in Wild Bastards until you complete the campaign. Doing so unlocks two new modes, challenge mode, and procedural campaign. I strongly believe the meat of the game is contained within its procedural campaign.

In the normal narrative campaign, narrative events dictate the flow, including the order in which you rescue each outlaw. In a procedural campaign, you’re given two random outlaws and you rescue the rest in random order. This makes the game very, very replayable and feels like how Wild Bastards is meant to be played. This feels especially true because the outlaws that appear late in the narrative campaign come pre-leveled, so without the procedural mode, you would never get to experience honing them to your liking.

It’s incredibly strange that the procedural mode is locked behind completing the narrative campaign. I can’t help but feel a lot of folks are gonna see the credits roll and hang up their saddlebags before ever really getting to experience the full ride.

Stranger still, is the challenge mode. Challenge mode pits you against single systems with preselected outlaws and modifiers, which is fine as a side mode. The problem is, that each challenge unlocks a new mod that can then be found in the other modes. Wild Bastards is at its strongest when you’re planning for the long haul of a whole campaign, not one isolated system. I don’t particularly love being forced to play those challenges to unlock items for the mode I actually want to play.

Complaining aside, the procedural campaign elevates Wild Bastards up from a singular novel outing, to the throne of high replayability that the rogue-lite genre is known for.

Verdict

Wild Bastards, like Void Bastards that came before it, are games that require you to think, in a genre that usually just showers you in explosions while the drool dribbles out of the corner of your mouth. For me at least, the satisfaction of carefully executing a plan that allows me to drop three gunhands without taking a scratch tickles my brain a whole lot more than just pointing and shooting.

Wild Bastards manages to keep the shooting fun while also serving up a triple-decker of strategy to facilitate that fun. It’s a nice hybrid of X-COM-like planning that leaves the shooty bits in your hands, and that turned out to be a really awesome idea.

Beyond locking the procedural campaign behind completing the story, and weirdly locking a bunch of mods behind a challenge mode. My only other complaint is that the game could use more enemy variety, a lot of enemies in the game are just more advanced versions of other enemies, and that’s a bummer.

That said. I really ended up loving Wild Bastards, especially once I unlocked the procedural campaign mode. Every run is its own open-ended puzzle of clearly defined rules that you have to solve with both, strategic planning and real-time combat. Both aspects influence each other in clever and satisfying ways using a really cool roster of unique and colorful outlaws.

I’m giving Wild Bastards my Golden Shield Award.