Wild Bastards is the space cowboy roguelite shooter you've been looking for
8.5.2024
By John Walker, Contributor
Let’s be clear: This is no disparagement to Void Bastards. In fact, having devoured the preview levels of Wild, I returned to the previous game, obsessively exploring abandoned spaceships for missing parts for hours at a time, often irresponsibly late into the night. It remains brilliant, and if you didn’t play it, you should grab it immediately. But as we explore this new game—which comes out September 12—it's best to approach it as something completely new.
Spider Rosa and Casino are two peculiar characters who are traveling through space, looking to reach the promised lands of the Homestead, a near-mythical place where people are accepted in the body’s they’re in. However, the rest of their ragtag team has recently been murdered by an evil family intent on wiping these last two out as well. You begin on the surface of a planet, shuttling along pathways with a set number of moves, with lots of enemies occupying towns on your path to the machine that’ll return you to your ship.
This turn-based map is how you explore every planet you visit, with your characters given perhaps seven moves per turn, which you can use to reach as many locations as you can. After this, it’s the enemy’s turn, where wandering foes continue in their tracks and time advances until a member of the Chaste family finds you on the map.
In each town, you need to kill all the enemies who are there—whether that’s three tough customers, 15 annoying bug-creatures, or a mixture of the like—with unlimited ammo and special moves. However, your characters work in pairs (called “bunches") and can hot-switch in and out at any point during a town battle. The goal is to successfully clear out the area, grab any bonuses on the way, and then return to the local map. Then you can gather all the cool extras dotted about and beam back to your ship.
The very first time Rosa (a bug-like vampish lady) and Casino (a slot-machine-faced robot) beam down to a planet, however, they watch their ship get destroyed by McNeil, the youngest and dumbest of the Chaste family. This would be a problem if a legendary ship called the Drifter didn’t come along and fire right back at him, beaming you on board instead. It’s a literal lifesaver! However, Drifter has no intentions of taking you to the Homestead just yet, but rather to all the parts of the galaxy where your previous crew were killed in order to recover their “helixes." Once collected, you can combine this resource with spooky coffins on board to revive your dead chums.
Once you're back on the Drifter, you warp to the next section of space, then you pick your way through the sector map to reach the next helix, landing on planets of your choosing to gather extra items you might need. Most important of these are Tonics, which will revive any characters who get killed during a mission. (Lose everyone, and you restart the sector.)
The more people you rescue, the larger your selection of characters you can take on any drop. You can take from two to four depending on the mission, and you can then "bunch" them in different ways to combine their unique talents. For example, Rosa has four arms, so can reload as she shoots, and is fairly good at mid-range fire. Casino has a two-shot shotgun: excellent for close-up battles, but useless at a distance.
On top of this, each character has a unique talent that can be employed with a pickup. For Rosa, it’s a temporary decoy that’ll distract enemies, and for Casino, it’s randomly killing a single enemy in the current town. They are a good combination, since if a fight gets too up-close with Rosa, you can instantly switch to Casino and blast the buggers away.
Experimenting with combinations of characters makes for enormous fun, especially when you have two bunches on the same map exploring in different directions. You’ll likely lose some crew members on tougher missions, and balancing the bunches becomes enormously tactical.
Despite all the complexities I've already described, the game has even more going on. There are a large number of bonus items you pick up and assign to characters that have wildly varying effects: they might speed up their reload, give them a super-jump, or expand their clip size. These let you perfect your crew, but only temporarily, as these power-ups are all destroyed when you warp to the next sector. It’s galling, but it lets you experiment even more with builds as you play.
Then there are the Ace cards that apply fixed level-ups to your crew and let you permanently improve their aspects, such as health, damage, and so on. Then there’s the Hole In The Wall, a store that you enter at the start of each sector that unlocks a chest full of those temporary upgrades according to your current reputation score (improved by performing well and taking on extra fights that you could skip past on the maps).
Thankfully, all these elements are both carefully introduced and incredibly coherent, so it never feels like a muddle. The demo I played cuts off right where things are getting good, hence my need to fill the void with, well, Void Bastards. The most important thing is just how much it bothered me when it ended. That’s a true sign of a compelling game, and one I cannot wait to play more of when it’s out next month. Meanwhile, I might just have another play of Void Bastards.
Wild Bastards is out September 12.