Sometimes, when you want a food metaphor for a video game, you reach for a comparison to fine dining. Other times you might allude toward fast food. In this instance, my trite and overused analogy is a great big buffet offering of all your favorite foods, where you just grab handfuls of everything and stuff it in until you’re sick. That, in the best way possible, is Wild Bastards.
Ostensibly a follow-up to developer Blue Manchu’s 2019 game Void Bastards, but defiantly not a sequel, Wild Bastards is a large part old-school FPS action, with a hefty helping of Slay The Spire, and then embellished with tactical strategy. It mimics the behavior of a thousand rogue-lites, but certainly isn’t one, throwing you into super-difficult first-person action sequences that last only a minute or two each and encouraging you to carefully craft elaborate teams of specifically equipped characters, before undoing all your work between every chapter. And it all absolutely works.
It’s tempting to spend too long comparing Wild Bastards to its predecessor, putting ticks and crosses next to the aspects it shares and doesn’t, but I think this undermines both. And despite the visual similarity, and that both have a branching map of locations leading to FPS-based missions, they are starkly different. So let’s focus on what Wild Bastards is, rather than what it isn’t.
You begin the game with two characters, the four-armed, somewhat demonic Spider Rosa, and gambling robot Casino. The pair are attempting to escape the Chaste family of twisted evil cowboy types by fleeing through the galaxy in their spaceship. When beaming down to a (tutorial) planet where the two must make their way across a map to reach a spot that lets them beam back to their craft, one of the Chastes, McNeil, destroys the ship and attempts to capture them. At this point, a legendary ship called Drifter swoops in and rescues them, and forces them on a journey to recover the life forces of former colleagues killed by monstrous patriarch Jebediah Chaste. Which is to say, each chapter of the game is about reaching the end of a small, branching sector of space to collect the DNA of the fallen, then revive them and add them to your crew.
Each point on the sector map you opt to fly to has a planet you must beam down to, and each of these planets has its own map with branching, intersecting locations, points variously filled with pick-ups, stores, and most importantly, battles to win. Each of these battles is a mini-FPS location, where you take on collections of enemies with your crew. Except—and bear with me, there’s a lot of explaining to do here—your gang travels a planet in “bunches,” grouped in ones or twos, with no more than four selected for any drop. You can bunch them as you wish, but when you’re battling, only one is fighting at any time—however, you can switch between either in the group on the fly. You then need to make use of your ears (and the game’s visual representation of sound on the compass) to locate the enemies, who’ll hide but endlessly give themselves away by shouting insults or having conversations with each other…Oh god, this game is so much easier to play than to describe.
If a character dies in battle, they’re dead until you either get back on Drifter and revive them with a rare potion, or if you lose everyone and travel back to the beginning of the sector, or succeed without them and move on to the next sector, whereupon everyone is revived. Except, in both instances, you also lose all the many pieces of equipment you’ve won, bought or picked up, and previously assigned among your crew, along with any money, potions, bonus items, or…beans.
Except, or, or, except, but, or, except, and my goodness. I’ve not even gotten into the Ace cards you pick up that permanently improve a character, or the Juice you find in battles that allows each to perform their special ability, or how you want to make sure you pair up a long-range one-shot shooter like furious robot Judge with a more rapid-fire but less precise crewmember like mysterious alien Roswell, and if it’s a drop where only three can go, use Casino and his Juice ability to instantly kill the enemy he’s facing, or ghostly pastor Preach who wields the ludicrously ammo-heavy Sermon .58 and who has no shields but can use Juice to heal when she kills. Oh, but also, if you’re battle is going to be against a bunch of Critters rather than humanoids, you’d be crazy to use snake-like Hopalong and his laser lasso, but he’d be perfect if it’s just against a couple of heavy Ironclads.
I hope, if somewhat laboriously, I’ve made my point. Wild Bastards is extraordinarily involved, layers upon layers upon layers, with tactics to develop for all its elements. The range of characters is elaborate, eventually offering you 12 to pick from, and even this has added layers of complications, as the wonderfully written and voiced crew will have fallings-out with one another at unscripted points, meaning they’ll refuse to bunch with each other until they make up over…a plate of beans. Or they may bond during one of the squillions of conversations that can occur (I’ve never heard the same one twice), and work better together, supporting the other by dropping items into the arena.
I’ve also failed to celebrate the ever-larger menagerie of enemies to battle, an extraordinary 25 humanoids (Chasteners), 11 animals (Critters), and five types of automated security bots, each with unique behaviors, weapons, and defenses. Let alone that each Bastard on your crew moves subtly differently, some faster, some able to jump higher, one slithering rapidly on his belly. Like I say, this game has taken something from every section of the buffet, and somehow fit it all on one delicious plate.
There are, of course, concerns. While the combat is a lot of fun, and even more so for the incredible variety on offer, I do think it lacks punchy impact on hitting enemies. It feels too often like they’re able to run through your fire unharmed, and there’s a lack of satisfying oof when you clip them. It makes things feel a little too ethereal.
Poison is ludicrously overpowered, and the levels with poison-spitting Rattlers can be miserable to get through until you’ve rescued some of the later crew members, the ongoing damage they deal being far too punishing. The other, rather more significant gripe, is that there’s a missing difficulty sweet spot between Normal and Easy. Normal can be a surprisingly tough choice, especially early on, as the game makes obsessed use of poison as you’re just getting going with two or three characters, and it can feel dispiriting. But Easy is genuinely easy, and lacks enough challenge. (Clearly there are those who’ll excel on Hard and Very Hard, and god bless them.) I wish that Normal were ever-so slightly less punishing at the beginning. I recommend switching back up to it when you’re just breezing through levels, however, because that’s to miss the point.
The other odd decision is to force you to play through the tutorial every run. Even switched to “Off” in the menu, the opening level remains required, and it’s pretty tedious when you’re on your third or fourth run (something made far worse for me by my having hammered through the demo of this multiple times earlier this year).
Oh, but if you’re an impatient bugger like me, know that hitting Escape will skip you past the grindingly slow beam up and down sequences and post-battle reports. Just don’t ever use it on the conversations, because they’re all brilliant.
There, I barely compared it to the brilliant Void Bastards at all, although I urge you to play both. It’s tempting to call Wild Bastards an evolution, but that’s unfair to Void, which has its excellent crafting elements and the permadeath of characters (albeit with persistent progress). What’s crucially similar about both, beyond the excellent art and fantastic sense of humor, is that unlike so many roguelite games, they both want you to win. They’re about progressing forward, being able to reach an ending, and then starting all over to try it completely differently. It’s just that in Wild Bastards, there’s so much more that can be different each time.
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