Wild Bastards review: Getting the Bastards back together

When I previewed Wild Bastards a few months ago, one of my main takeaways was that it was overwhelming. I stand by that statement after spending several more hours with the game, the latest from Void Bastards developer Blue Manchu. I wouldn’t call it a Boomer Shooter, but Wild Bastards is still an action game that requires all of the focus and energy your brain can muster, just to simply survive. There’s enough leeway baked in for players of differing skill levels to see the story through and enjoy all the wacky characters, but at its heart Wild Bastards is as hardcore as it gets. Almost gratingly so.

Buckets of bolts and bullets

To be frank, Wild Bastards doesn’t give you a chance to start breathing, much less give you room for regular breathing. It’s one of those games in which enemies have knowledge, eyesight, and accuracy you can’t hope to match unless you live to shoot and sweat your way to FPS victory on the regular. Every other game feels like a roguelike these days, but there are different schools and subgenres. This one is the “you die quick, fast, and easy” kind, which doesn’t give a lot of room for exploring the nuances and complexities Wild Bastards wants to offer. Instead, on the default settings, I found each encounter a mad rush to find cover, take potshots, and ignore anything that isn’t shooting. Strafing and jumping weren’t even options really, just sprinting and being first. Yeesh!

After kicking it down a notch, I got to actually experience what Wild Bastards wanted to be, aside from rude. Letting enemies miss sometimes opens up a lot of room for a whole video game to happen, turns out! There are a lot of individual powers, abilities, equipment, and board events to play with, and making the game cool its jets a little let that stuff stand out and feel more impactful. And that’s without compromising a lot of the challenge, which simply felt more reasonable and balanced on easy mode. Call me a tourist if you want; there’s plenty to be said for overturning when it comes to games that want to be about an intoxicating, repeating loop.

Roguelike repeater

And there’s a lot of repeating when it comes to Wild Bastards. The game’s basic structure is like a board game with a time limit, with each destination for The Drifter (your ship with a mind of its own) giving you a few turns to do what you need before a big boss drops down to ruin your day. On the board you’ll find static and roaming enemies, shops, special items, and other kinds of variables for you to react to. It can be fun to roam around and see what kind of shenanigans you might unleash on enemy groups, but ultimately those combat encounters are the crux of the whole experience.

Fights are fast and furious, with a set number of enemies unleashed against you in small arenas. You know how many there are, and you hear them running around and comically yelling at you from cover. Once again, if you’re on the standard or higher difficulties these are intense death marches, in which even the basic enemies can take you out in a couple hits. Enemy types can vary quite a bit, and that brings us to the other major part of Wild Bastards, which is the Bastards themselves.

An ensemble cast

Most of the game is about recruiting a ragtag group of robot rebels and outlaws. Each character has a unique weapon, special ability, and skill tree of sorts. Effectively, each character is a function or weapon you’d expect to see in a regular FPS arsenal. There’s the sniper or the shotgun user, for example. Other characters can be more out of the box, like a guy who uses a laser lasso, but the point is these main weapons don’t change. So there’s a factor of choosing who you take down to a board with you, and then figuring out how you want to group them and take on enemies. Everything else is gravy, although I had a particular fondness for the shotgun-toting robot who could just press a button to kill a random enemy on the map with a certain power up. Why not, right?

The basic appeal of Wild Bastards is meeting a wacky cast of characters and choosing which ones you gel with the most, then taking them out into little adrenaline rush challenge boxes. This can be a lot of fun, especially when you find a groove and get a nice set of upgrades. The unfortunate flip side of the coin is that is pretty much all you do, over and over again. There isn’t a ton of nuance to the actual, core gameplay despite what the number of moving pieces seems to suggest at first glance. A lot of factors, such as a “feud” system that randomly sees characters befriend or get mad at each other (which can be immediately remedied by a pickup), are fairly shallow in the long-term. It’s all about running to the goal, fighting the guys you can’t avoid, then leaving before the scary guy shows up.

Wild Bastards has a lot of charm and style, and that’s enough of a hook to want to dive in and see what the game has to offer. Using a sizable roster of characters who are the major differentiators for gameplay as the main motivator to keep going is effective as well. But once you’ve got the Bastards roster filled out and you have combat figured out well enough, that’s about where the buck stops in this sci-fi western. It’s a chaotic and challenging experience, but promises a lot of complexity and nuance that seems bountiful at first, but fizzles a bit given time. Some balancing issues hold it back the most from being truly fulfilling, but there’s a little bit of genre fatigue talking on my part as well. On its own merits, Wild Bastards is ambitious and kinetic, and will definitely put FPS fans’ skills to the test.

Wild Bastards is available on September 12, 2024 for the PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. A PC code was provided by the publisher for review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.