There are cold opens and cold ones. Sci-fi roguelike shooter Wild Bastards doesn’t start out wearing its sturdiest cowboy boots. You’re thrown into the middle of an interstellar chase and shown the ropes in a nutshell. The weapons feel basic, the arenas are bare, the loot is vanilla, and the loop of teleporting to a planet and engaging in small-scale “showdowns” threatens to grow stale within the first hour. But then you find an outlaw friend who suggests a new way to shoot human filth. Then another bandit. And another. By the time your spaceship is half-full of bandits and strange creatures shouting at each other, the game has warmed up enough to flesh out its core idea. This isn’t a big FPS campaign, and it’s not as fast-paced as roguelikes. It’s a snackable combat simulation with thorny towns that feels best when you’ve had the pre-fight tension.
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It's recognizable in many ways as a roguelike. There's a branching map of planets to visit, a planetary surface map, each filled with nodes, and spider paths leading to your destination: a special flare gun. Enemy blockades in your path trigger first-person encounters. These are relatively short gunfights in randomly generated towns, swamps, or mines. While there are important decisions to be made on the planetary map, it's the land-based showdowns where all these decisions pay off.
There's a strong “ghost town” atmosphere to the encounters. A criminal family of prejudiced humans are hellbent on taking down your gang of mutants and robots. These enemies (and their pets) hide among shacks, rocks, rooftops, and toilets, and generally wait for you to approach. But they give away their positions by chattering to each other, a helpful splash of comic book noise that visually winks from where they're shouting.
It took a minute to click through, but once I got the hang of the game, it worked. The visual shout is a thematic replacement for the ubiquitous “see through walls” ability that many games use to inform the player where enemies are. It encourages you to stop, listen, take your time, and sneak your way through the screen without having to cover everything up with a fancy blue filter.
That's not the only thing different about shooting monsters. For example, your heroes appear on the battlefield in pairs, but not side by side. Instead, you switch between your two characters at will. It's basically swapping weapons, but each weapon has its own unique abilities and its own health bar. Surviving on a planet means preserving as much of that health as possible between showdowns. You soon learn that this isn't a frantic, wall-to-wall shooter about sliding around corners or running from execution animation to execution animation. It's more careful than that.
Sure, there can be wild showdowns, like the time I encountered a handful of rocket-firing grizzlies hiding in the swamp reeds, and a swarm of rooftop bombers rained down an endless stream of cluster bombs on me. But more often it’s a slower-paced affair. Tense, even. You sneak around corners, listening for the distinct roar of dangerous “porcupines.” You walk carefully through a maze of ramshackle shacks, knowing that three shotgun-toting bushwhackers are there and won’t come out.
This is Wild Bastards at its most atmospheric, fully embracing the quiet cowboy dead-end fantasy. Environmental hazards add to the challenge. A swampy planet has toxic pools to avoid, while a frozen planet has snowdrifts that slow you down if you walk through them. A stormy planet has lightning chasing you, forcing both you and your enemy to take refuge in bubble domes or brave the open plains in constant motion. You'll often find night coming, which greatly reduces the visibility of every gunfighter involved.
Back in the world of the map, there are shops selling useful mods on the planet. We're talking boots that increase your jump height, weapon parts that speed up your reload, a poncho that makes you 50% immune to fire. Most of them are commonplace. But you'll lose all of these mods between star systems (every few planets). As a roguelike player, you may hate this. It goes against the expectation that some roguelikes should have the player hoarding goodies until death. I've gotten used to it, but here's a litmus test: if the decaying weapons in Zelda: Breath of the Wild bothered you, this probably will too.
The main goal isn’t to collect mods. Reach the end of a star system and find a coffin inside, like a loot box of dead bodies, containing a new friendly outlaw. The starting heroes, Spider Rosa, who wields a pistol, and Casino, who carries a shotgun, are as plain as plain yogurt. But new, permanently unlockable heroes include the long-range sniper The Judge, a holographic executioner whose reticle adds a line to every enemy you hit (once the executioner is complete, the next shot is an instant kill). Or Preach, whose ultimate heals him while emptying bullets into bodies. Kaboom, the ghost, can become temporarily invisible when throwing sticks of dynamite. Smoky fires from his hands and reloads by counting his own fingers.
Most of the voice actors revel in their cowboy roles, fully embracing the “if'ns” and “guldems” of the western. There are a few crackerjack lines that play into the mix of spitting sci-fi. When an enemy uses his laser eyes to kill the Judge, one outlaw says, “It ain't right to shoot a man in the eyes.” When the angry Judge is revived, he's told to calm down and stop being so shaken. “I ain't shaken for nothing!” he shouts.
And it's not just a tasty language. Why, those losers are getting into honest fights and refusing to work together in showdowns, just like good people do. So you gotta reshuffle team compositions and stuff. (Hoo-wee, is it hard to keep the vernacular here? Damn.) But that's okay. Because you can get canned beans!
Look, you gotta use these baked beans to ease any unpleasant tension in the gang. Use those beans and those two bitches will be friends again. (Okay. Enough with this goddamned linguistic free-flying. I'm tired.)
What this all means is that there are times when you play an outlaw and instead of thanking him, he reveals a toxic personality that triggers a web of vicious cross-feuds. When this happened to me, I burst out laughing as I watched all those sharp lines of hatred appear on his personality graph. Most outlaws would refuse to teleport together anymore. I didn't care because it was funny.
Despite the comical camaraderie, some characters feel functionally weak. For example, lizardman Hopalong can incapacitate enemies by lassoing them, but he slows to a crawl when doing so. This means taking on one enemy at a time or risking getting hit while lassoing. Other characters, like the rapid-fire plasma-blasting Roswell, feel cohesive and reliable in nearly every encounter. This means that players focused on winning every encounter will be heavily skewed toward arguably the most boring fighters.
On top of that, some ultimates, like Smoky's “Cookout” or the casinos' “Roulette,” will kill enemies from anywhere on the battlefield, even if you can't see them or know where they are. That's useful. But I don't find it satisfying or engaging to have a “kill things I can't see” button in a shooter. It feels like an escape hatch that prevents you from playing the actual game – run and shoot, hide and seek.
Wild Bastards pushes certain orthodoxies out the window, even when you're comfortably nestled next to the fire. Sometimes it takes an interesting slant — slower-paced firefights, swappable heroes, equipment that breaks with each new star system. Other times, it's just weird. The default controller settings are extremely rigid and unreliable (I mostly fixed this by turning off “acceleration” and toning down the “display dead zone”). The UI often feels bare, clunky, or unfamiliar (why are “new game” and “continue” crammed into the bottom-right corner of the main menu?). And there are the odd occurrences, which I assume are bugs: twice I got into a fight and it automatically resolved itself as soon as the intro countdown finished.
There's so much more going on. Outlaws can “spread out” to the wrong place when they beam down to the planet's surface. Characters can become close friends. You can unleash a herd of cows to rough up bad guys on the planet's map. At times, it feels like a scattered, greedy game of throwing a bunch of ideas into a gift bag and running off into the sunset without thinking about whether or not they should all be in the same bag.
But my biggest impression is that it's a game that wants to set its own pace, its own “lunchtime” rhythm. And I quite like that. As a roguelike, its quirks will either draw you in or leave you wincing in mild disappointment. Its bumpy pace, both on and off the battlefield, makes it hard to recommend to anyone who likes their roguelikes fast-paced. And while I really enjoyed the cowboy chatter, it may irritate anyone who wants to rush to the next showdown. It's slow-moving, and the opening hour doesn't really convey its intentions. But as anyone who's ever tried to cook beans over a fire can attest, once they're warmed up, they're pretty darn good.
This review is based on the game review structure provided by the publisher.