Void Bastards was a lovely entry in 2019. I liked it so much I listed in my top ten games of that year. It was an interesting twist on injecting immersive sim elements into a Roguelite. This was my pre-Xbox Tavern time, so check out our review, where Mark gave a comprehensive explanation on why he thought it was ‘fine’ but not exemplary.
Taking the same foundations as its predecessor – Wild Bastards is a Roguelite First-Person shooter that uses cel-shading.
The setup is a solid one, the campaign starts with two characters: Rosa and Casino on the lam in their spaceship ‘The Drifter’. The two of them are running from the Chaste family, a family gang that murdered the other eleven members of the Wild Bastards. At this point the player takes control of ‘The Drifter’ and steers Rosa and Casino around in order to resurrect their team members.
Rosa is a four-armed alien who is able to reload a weapon without needing to stop firing and is equipped with a special that creates a decoy of herself. Casino is a robot who gets a big shotgun and can randomly kill one enemy when he powers up. Later they meet up with a wild cast – a robot sniper (voiced by Chocolate Rain singer themselves Tay Zonday), a goth preacher with a minigun, a lasso-twirling lizard and many more.
This roster expands slowly because The Drifter must travel across a star system board to reach each one of B’tards. This requires the player picking a route through the system, with the stops resulting in either an event or landing on a planet. Events are multiple choice options – maybe the player will have to trade in items, or risk-taking damage to a ship.
The real meat of the game is exploring the worlds. The first choice is to decide how many of the team will go down, there is a member limit on each of the drops, and those that do will be divided into 2-creature teams. Each planet is then divided up into its own grid with points of interest, and roaming enemies and roadblocks that contain combat moments (called Showdowns). The teams get a limited number of movement points that when all used up end the turn. There is a day/night cycle that flips with the turns, but more crucially it ticks down the time before one of the Chaste family members lands on the planet where they will run across the map to try and catch one, or all, of the teams. The aim is to avoid them (or fight them and win) and then make it to the extraction beacon with loot.
Loot can be anything from money, disguises, portable escape beacons, temporary mods, and permanent upgrades. Oh yeah, and cans of beans.
The combat is, or at least should be, where most of the drama plays out. There are a number of different Showdown areas, split across dusty fortresses, snowy mountains, and cratered low gravity moons. The objective is straight forward, kill all the enemies, or escape out a portal (and lose all remaining movement points for the turn). The enemies have other ideas: there are some standard 2D cowboy villains to fight, as well ‘Kyotes’ (alien dogs that shoot lasers), but later there are teleporting assassins, rocket launching alien bears and the Chaste family themselves. The Chastes come in four increasingly tough entities, with the patriarch himself being indestructible.
It is a good thing there are a ton of ways to upgrade each character to deal with these threats. There are mods – these are items that can be equipped on any character – but once a system has been completed all mods are removed (along with all other consumables). Mods can be immensely powerful, granting invulnerability, extra health, armour and accuracy. There are character specific level ups that can be acquired too, these are permanent and will influence the rest of the playthrough. For example, the squid faced Billy can get a permanent upgrade that makes him briefly invulnerable after being hit, the lasso wielding Hopalong can gain the ability to convert some animals in Showdowns to his side. There are also ‘charged’ upgrades – these are also immensely powerful with huge boosts to health, armour, or damage – but these are only in effect if the character is fully rested. Getting into fights fatigues the character, travelling between planets recovers a little of the meter.
It is down to the player to manage that fatigue, and the game encourages them to use every one of the characters. Another thing that encourages a plurality of tactics is that after beaming up from a planet, relationships might change. Often, they will fall out and if they do, they will refuse to go to planets together. It is a nice little mechanic which means you cannot rely on the same loadout of your preferred Wild’uns. That said, there is something that can reverse the animosity – if two characters share a can of beans they return to civil, if they were already civil the beans will create a bond that brings further bonuses to team ups.
This might all seem complicated but Wild Bastards does a great job of introducing these things in a piecemeal fashion. I never felt overwhelmed by these wrinkles and instead with each new challenge and twist I felt more compelled to finish the campaign.
Once the campaign is cleared extra modes are unlocked. There are tailored challenge maps where only certain characters can be used, and there is a procedural campaign where things are more randomised and can be set up to make it more punishing.
This gives the game a lot of replayability, for those that find the gunplay compelling.
The problem is that I didn’t, and this was mainly the fault of the AI and level design. In Void Bastards a lot of the levels were locked down, allowing for fights to be partitioned. In Wild Bastards levels are much more open, with hypothetical sniping spots, reeds to hide in and gangways to walk along. On first blush, the implication is that there will be more variety.
The reality is that the AI tends to spot you from a mile away, and when they do, they make a beeline for you. High ground is hardly advantageous as even animals can climb ladders. The interplay of different mods in these situations is still fun – like how I had a Horseman that whenever he killed an enemy dropped health pickups, making heavily populated Showdowns a source of amusement. For me, what was missing was the stories that emerged in Void Bastards because of the way systems clashed in real time.
In Wild Bastards encounters can be summarised as ‘I walked into an area, everyone was alerted and then I shot them’. When that is the summary of every encounter, it gets old after the 50th time, and then the 100th.
The game is more interested in telling the story outside of the encounters and that is not what I look for in a roguelike, or an immersive-sim adjacent title.
Conclusion
Wild Bastards is a solid sequel with a lot of interesting systems. Those systems mainly interact in the static of the 2D screens, and the drama of the real time combat is less engaging than its predecessor.
I do love being a flaming skeleton that shoots fireballs from his fingertips though.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
