Introduction

Wild Bastards is the latest cell-shaded, strategic, single-player, first-person shooter from gaming studio, Blue Manchu.

It’s touted as the “spiritual successor” to 2019’s Void Bastards, a charming, rogue-lite, FPS that saw you travelling through space and looting parts to build new equipment and repair key instruments on your space craft. It still holds up today and I highly recommend it.

Let’s dive into what I find great, and not so great, about Wild Bastards.

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Story

Set in the wild frontiers of space, you are being hunted by the Chaste family and embark on a quest to reach a place known as “The Homestead”, along the way you resurrect a medley of gang members, each with their own personalities and abilities.

Exposition is delivered through fully voiced dialogue, driving the story forward as your explore new sectors in space. I’ll be honest, I found myself tiring of the western frontier drawl and skimming through a lot of the dialogue but that’s just me.

You can rescue up to 13 outlaws in total, each bringing some more exposition to further unfold the story. It’s not a very convoluted story though it has it’s twists and turns and I found it very entertaining. But Wild Bastards doesn’t even need a strong focus on it’s story, it’s strength lies in it’s gameplay loop.

Room and Board

Gameplay

Speaking of the gameplay loop, the core loop is simple. Using your newly acquired spacecraft, called the Drifter, you warp to a system of planets and then embark on a journey from planet to planet. Each planet locks you in and prevents you from simply warping to the next one until you’ve beamed some of your outlaws down to clear things up on the surface.

The surface of the planet consists of a series of roadblocks that you need to fight through in first-person showdowns before you can progress through to more loot and your eventual escape from the surface back to the Drifter. It’s not as linear as it sounds though as it’s all randomised, a feature that can either makes things easier or more difficult, but I’ll talk more about that later.

You can normally beam a handful of outlaws down to the surface and there you can group them into pairs or if you’re confident send each individual in a different direction. The pairing system allows you to create some really powerful combos in showdowns.

These showdowns are where you’re going to spend most of your time. It is the first-person-shooter part of the game. They seem quite simple, set in smaller arenas of different styles, you go in with the intent to eliminate all of the bad guys. Take heed though, they might seem simple, and you might be tempted to rush through them but these require a bit of finesse and tact to get through. This creates variation in the maps, you might seek the high-ground or perhaps find yourself sneaking around corners to try and catch the enemies unaware.

Further variation comes in the form of the bad guys with 3 primary archetypes namely, “Chasteners”, the human variant out to kill you, “Critters”, and finally “Security”, usually in the form of a static barrel that pops out a laser cannon to roast your tootsies.

When two outlaws go into a showdown together you are able to tag team them, at will, depending on which abilities you might need. This works well in that you might use Hopalong, one of the faster outlaws, to quickly reposition yourself before switching back to the Judge, a sniper type outlaw, to pick off targets from a distance.

You’ll also have chatter from the inactive outlaw, either chastising your poor performance or perhaps giving you indications of where the enemies are.

There are 13 outlaws in total, bringing a lot of variation to the play style, as each has their own strengths and abilities. Most of these abilities are passive but each outlaw also has an activated ability they can use if they drink some juice, a consumable pickup you find scattered around showdowns, as well as a charged ability, which is also passive but only works when that particular outlaw is full on energy, a resource that goes down as they leave showdowns.

New core abilities are gained by picking up cards that level your outlaws up or by picking up specific ability cards as you search around the map. These abilities are permanent and will stick with your outlaws throughout the game. On the flip side, you also get equipment that will give your outlaws temporary buffs that will only last until the end of the sector.

At the end of the sector, most of your resources is destroyed and all that remains is the infamy you gained during the sector which is exchanged for early buffs at the start of the next sector.

Among the various pickups you also get more generalised pickups, like beacons that allow you to beam up from anywhere on the planet, tonics that allow you revive injured outlaws, and beans. Yeah, beans.

Between your outlaws there exists a rudimentary relationship mechanic. Two outlaws can be friends, in a feud, or indifferent. When two outlaws are feuding they can’t beam down together, breaking up what could be a great duo. However, when they’re friendly with each other, they help each other out in combat by dropping special abilities or pickups when you most need it. Being indifferent carries no effect at all on their team up.

I think the relationship mechanic, alongside the charged abilities, is a way the developers try to encourage different team-ups. I’d often find myself relying heavily on a particularly powerful pairing, Casino and Judge for the win, but then they’d get into an argument and I’d have to pick one or the other.

Though it is frustrating, I get it, it forces you to change up your play style, and it can all be sorted out with some beans. Beans are used to either repair broken relationships or improve on indifferent ones, but they can be a scarce resource in times of need, so keep that in mind.

To further complicate things, your time on the surface of a planet is limited. After a few turns the princes of the Chaste family will start landing, to hunt you down. Children of the big boss, Chaste himself. These horse riding enemies add increasing difficulty to the game until eventually the big cheese himself shows up, forcing you off the planet one way or another, as he can’t be defeated.

Humans Only

Difficulty

As is often the case with games that are heavy on random number generation, or RNG, the difficulty can vary quite a bit. Some showdowns are super easy, often leading you into a false sense of security only for one poorly planned showdown to put you back in your place. Add to this that even the best laid plans of mice and men can be subverted when the RNG decides that your favourite pairing of outlaws are now in a feud and you can’t pair them up until you find a can of beans, which the RNG has also decided will not be until much later in the game.

But that’s RNG for you. In short, the difficulty is fine, frustrating sometimes and forgiving sometimes. I’m playing on normal difficulty and have run into my fair share of troubles but I’ve also never hit a roadblock and have yet to fail entirely.

Your outlaws can’t die, if they’re killed in a showdown they are returned to the ship as injured and will wait to be revived with a tonic or until you move to the next sector.

I think the biggest barrier is getting to know your outlaws and your enemies. As you move around planets, you’ll find data on the enemies you’re fighting and studying these can help greatly in understanding their behaviour and their weak spots.

Once the princes arrive things turn up considerably. Your outlaws will already be tired and weakened from fighting, so running is likely your best option. That being said, even though these princes are increasingly tougher to kill with a larger health pool and more armour than most enemy types, they are not exempt from special abilities making outlaws like Casino, whose ability instantly kills a random nearby enemy, a very potent choice if you decided to fight them.

Eventually, after all the princes have arrived, the head of the Chaste family arrives and he is unbeatable, ultimately shooing you off the planet by forcing you to beam up willingly or by injuring all of your outlaws.

Skinner

Graphics

I always say, if you don’t have good graphics, you’d better have good artistic style, and Wild Bastards goes for the latter. This is where it takes things right from Void Bastards’ playbook, with beautifully cell-shaded environments and 2-D sprites that fit really well with the cartoon style narrative delivery.

It works for the game and there’s nothing to complain about, it’s a reminder that it’s focused on the tactical shooter element of it and not a sightseeing mission. Though that’s not to say the environments don’t look good, they each have their own unique setting depending on various circumstances.

On the performance side of things, everything is well optimised, I had no problems whatsoever. It’s not the type of game designed to tax your system with things like ray-tracing or individually animated strands of hair. There are no options for DLSS or any other sort of upscaling because you simply don’t need it.

One thing I would have loved to see was the return of the animated comic strips from Void Bastards, instead we get mostly still images to dispense dialogue and exposition. Not a deal breaker, I was just a huge fan of the comic strips of the spiritual-predecessor.

Permit Check

Sound and music

Though there’s nothing to brag about in the sound department, it’s all pretty standard stuff. They did do a good job of positional audio during showdowns. This is quite clever as little audio queues are imperative to locating enemies around the map and these queues are plentiful whether it’s the bad guys chatting to each other or a critter making footsteps on the other side of a wall.

I would note that these audio queues also show up on the compass for anyone playing with hearing difficulties or perhaps simply playing on mute.

The music is very fitting with the wild western frontier theme and you can purchase the soundtrack separately if it’s your kind of jam.

Western Town

Settings

If we look at the settings menu we have some stock standard graphics settings. I’m happy to report ultra-wide support out of the box and as mentioned earlier, no upscaling required like DLSS or FSR.

I like that I can change which display the game uses as well as my FOV and preferred gamma.

In terms of quality we have a simple slider to adjust quality from Low all the way to Ultra, no detailed settings here but I think the simplicity of the graphics doesn’t need that.

Moving on to the audio menu, we can either adjust master volume or only music volume if you find it too loud. You can disable the narrative voice, if like me you tire quickly of the overused drawl this might be the option for you. Finally, we can adjust the dynamic range, something that could be quite important if you lean heavily on using your sound for positioning and range.

Under gameplay you’ve got some customisation like stand on run, look smoothing, move smoothing, and toggles for run and aim.

You can rebind any keyboard keys and also adjust regular and zoom sensitivity independently under mouse settings. If you prefer to play like an aeroplane you can invert your pitch and finally add smoothing to your mouse input.

For those on controller you’ve got some great settings for fine tuning controller use alongside aim assist, acceleration, and sensitivities. You can view the controller mapping but you can’t change it, though I suspect that’s fine as most people will do their remapping in whatever third party software comes with their particular brand of controller.

Taking Fire

Shenanigans

To Blue Manchu’s credit, Wild Bastards suffers no shenanigans. There are no micro-transactions and there were no pre-order bonuses. The game is designed as an experience from beginning to end with no empty promises of future DLC or updates.

One would think that this shouldn’t need to be said but in today’s world it’s something to be appreciated and you love to see it.

To further add to their credit, it takes almost no time to get into the game. A quick title screen and you’re on the main menu with little to no loading times. Even more so, no invasive anti-cheat or DRM gets installed alongside the game.

Lastly, the game auto-saves progress as you go and you’re free to drop out at any time to return to the same spot later.

Firing back

Overall

In 2019, Void Bastards brought a cool sci-fi story and style to the rogue-lite genre. It’s spiritual-successor, Wild Bastards, brings it’s own style with each sector acting as a run and the abilities and characters you unlock along the way joining you for the next run.

I’m sure there are some ways in which Wild Bastards could have been better but I also don’t think Blue Manchu left anything out because of constraints, they had a clear vision of what they wanted to deliver and given the level of polish of their finished product, I think they can pat themselves on the back for having delivered it.

I’ve played about 10 hours and I’m still enjoying it. I would say that it’s not the type of game that you play through in one sitting but given how quickly it gets going from launching the game to being in a showdown, it’s great for pick-up-and-play.

If you can stomach the random swings in difficulty then I can definitely recommend Wild Bastards.

Shotgun