Wild Bastards Review: A Wild West Ride That Needs to Get Wilder

Wild Bastards is a strange mix of a roguelike, a top-down board game, and an arcade cover shooter, embracing all these different genres. Set with the backdrop of a futuristic space cowboy setting; we follow a band of outlaws trying to run for their lives and reunite the gang. The main campaign for this game will take roughly 15-20 hours to beat and longer if you play on higher difficulties. So, let’s get into what Wild Bastards is all about, what hits, what misses, and what we want more of.

First, we have to discuss the gameplay loop for Wild Bastards and how it works. Each chapter will have several planets on different branching paths for you to go through, and each planet will have a board game-style map where you take turns making moves. There are a whole bunch of nodes on each map, including enemies, buffs, utilities, teleporters, collectibles, upgrades, and a bunch more. Each map has a countdown for when the big bad princes arrive, and after the three princes, the unbeatable boss arrives. So you’ll be on a time limit trying to make it to the extraction point of each map while strategically making your turns before the princes and boss come to wipe out your characters.

There’s a bit more depth there, with each planet having different passives, different enemy types, the chance of scattering when dropping down to a planet, and how these things affect the Outlaws you send down. You can send between one and four Outlaws down to any planet, and if they get injured, you will have to worry about reviving them or fixing their feuds using limited resources.

Each time you clear a Sector, your resources are wiped out, and you start from scratch in the next Sector, which is great because it means you’re constantly changing equipment and trying out different combinations and playstyles. These combinations are the heart of the game because the crew and their interactions are great fun.

When I first started the story, Doctor Casino and Miss Rosa were babbling in some really old Western talk that made me feel the game was trying too hard. However, each Sector cleared, and each revived bastard (yes, we’re reviving the whole gang) has their own unique personality that adds to the dynamic. It’s a well-designed and colorful cast that you’ll learn to love.

There’s a feud system on board the ship that you need to handle with collectible items called Beans, or else they’ll refuse to work together. These feuds are both an obstacle and a very clever storytelling mechanic that tells you more about the personalities of these characters without having to be an overt cutscene. Every game session is guaranteed to have Smoky feud with at least six crew members about his Beans.

The combat encounters in Wild Bastards are some of the best parts of the game because when you’re well-equipped with gear, you look forward to demolishing anything in your path. Other times, these combat encounters can become massive hurdles that jeopardize your survival and the success of the extraction on the planet.

The combat can be described as an arena shooter with arcade aesthetics, as there will be a fixed number of enemies in each encounter, and you’ll have to employ a playstyle specific to those enemies. If they have a lot of snipers, you go with something long-range and accurate; if they have a lot of critters, you want characters with a higher rate of fire and AoE damage. This mixing and matching is quite satisfying, and it feels even better when you realize how well each Outlaw is designed.

There are a total of 13 different Outlaws that you will unlock through the course of the main story campaign. Playing with all of them, at least 11 of them are very well designed and feel extremely satisfying to play. We have two exceptions, but we’ll leave those for you to decide on your own. However, 11 out of 13 characters feeling good to play is an achievement in itself in a game that’s meant to have a bunch of replay value.

All characters are both visually and mechanically distinct from each other, and learning how to optimize and play each one is extremely satisfying. You’ll get random mods for each character across your journey, and these will let you decide the type of playstyle you want each character to perform. You can build these characters in a variety of ways; for example, the same character can be a burst DPS, a tank, or just a utility character, depending on your choice of mods.

Alongside the Mods, you also have three equipment slots for each character, and some of these equipment options can completely change how a character functions. Your DPS sniper can become a tank, your one-shot shiv character gets tracking shivs, your DPS characters get 100% crit rates, and so on. You lose equipment after each sector, but as we mentioned earlier, it keeps you on the hunt for overpowered equipment and experimenting with different playstyles for each character.

The gunplay can feel a bit janky sometimes due to how much spread and recoil a lot of the weapons, especially the ballistic ones, have, but this doesn’t feel out of place due to the whole Wild West setting. For weapons, you can expect anything from dual revolvers to fireballs to a lasso and a bow and arrow. Add to this the powerful individual abilities, or Stunts as the game calls them, of each character, and you have even more mix-and-match potential with how you tackle combat scenarios.

You can only bring down two characters into each combat scenario, and how you manage these pairings is a big part of the decision-making process. Depending on the type of enemies you face, you might want a tank and a DPS or two utility characters who can turn enemies to your side or just pure damage. It’s this kind of strategic decision-making, along with utilizing the support nodes across the map, that makes the board game aspect strategic and often quite satisfying. Sometimes, you figure out the perfect way to beat a map, and it’s a nice feeling.

However, I feel that the game somewhat sacrifices its combat system in favor of the board game side. Later on, as you make it through the campaign or in the post-campaign, you’ll often feel that you have everything figured out already, and the combat encounters won’t really last long enough to be enjoyable. This fatigue starts setting in halfway into the game, and the only remedy feels like bumping up the difficulty. However, this adjusts the numbers but doesn’t do anything to solve the issue of the encounters still feeling too short. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue as the game turns into a very methodical and strategic shooter at higher difficulties for even the most basic encounters, which is great. However, there is a distinct lack of any lengthy levels, game modes, arcade modes (how does the arcade game not have an arcade mode?), and, most importantly, boss fights.

Three main bosses chase you down on every single planet, and they’re not way too hard to beat because you can cheese them with abilities. The final boss is unbeatable, and you never get to fight them at any point in the game. By the time I finished the game, I felt disappointed due to the lack of any major meaningful challenge because it felt like the entire campaign and beyond was just you fighting fodder and running away even with the whole gang assembled.

There was never any planet where I could drop down more than four Outlaws. The reason this is so frustrating is that the game has a fantastic combat system set up as the base with a ton of potential to build on top of it, but it never utilizes it. I can’t say or guess why this wasn’t added, but I hope the studio will put some time into this aspect of Wild Bastards. I’d love to go back to a survival mode or build your custom levels or challenges or anything of the sort. The formula is there, it just needs some more innovation and content on top.

What the game needs is more content, more enemy types in the latter levels rather than reskinned and buffed variants of existing enemies, and levels that can last longer and feel meaningful to challenge and complete. The Procedural generation mode you unlock after beating the campaign is great but it’s more of the same with extra modifiers in a game where I feel the campaign already overstays its welcome for a few hours too many. Once you assemble all the Wild Bastards, it just comes to an end, and you start anew with only two characters and all your hard-earned upgrades gone. I get that this is the whole point of a Roguelike, but you don’t get a say in the characters you start another campaign with or get an NG+ mode that’s more challenging than the base game.

I’m honestly a big fan of Wild Bastards’s style and execution, and it’s all extremely well designed There’s just something missing to round it off and make it feel like a complete experience. That being said, I look forward to any post-game content that comes in the future.

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