Wild Bastards review: a messy roguelike shooter that’s still packed with fun

There are cold openings, and then there are icy openings. Sci-fi roguelike shooter Wild Bastards doesn’t start out on its strongest cowboy boots. It dumps you into the middle of an interstellar chase and immediately teaches you the ropes. The weapons feel simplistic, the arenas bare, the loot vanilla, and the whole loop of beaming you to a planet and engaging in small-scale “showdowns” threatens to get boring within the first hour or so. But then you find an outlaw buddy who offers a new way to gun down human bad guys. Then another outlaw. And another. By the time your spaceship is half full of thugs and weirdos shouting at each other, the game has warmed up enough to reveal its central premise. This isn’t a grand FPS campaign, nor is it as fast-paced as roguelikes. It’s a snacky shootout sim with tumbleweed cities that feels best when you’re tasting the tension before the fight.

It’s familiarly villainous in many ways. There’s a branching map of planets to visit, each with a planetary surface map filled with nodes and spider routes to your objective: a special beacon. Blockades of enemies block your path, which trigger first-person showdowns: relatively short firefights set in randomly generated cities, swamps, or mining pits. While there are important decisions to be made on the planetary map, it’s in the grounded showdowns where all those decisions come to fruition.

As encounters, they have a strong “ghost town” feel to them. A criminal family of prejudiced humans are desperate to put your band of mutants and robots in the ground. These enemies (and their pets) hide among the huts, boulders, rooftops, and toilets, often waiting for you to get close. But they routinely give their positions away by cackling to each other, a helpful comic book sound visually flashing from wherever they’re yelling from.

It took a while to get the hang of it, but once I got the hang of the game’s pace, it worked. The visual hooting is a thematic alternative to the ubiquitous “see through walls” feature that many games employ to keep the player informed of the whereabouts of enemies. It encourages you to stop and listen, to take your time and move forward stealthily, without having to obscure everything on-screen with a cool blue filter.

It’s not the only twist in shootin’ doods. For example, your heroes enter the battlefield in pairs, but not side by side. Instead, you switch between your two characters at any time. This is essentially swapping weapons, but those weapons have different abilities and their own health bar. To survive a planet, you need to preserve that health as much as possible between encounters. You quickly learn that this isn’t a frantic, balls-to-the-wall shooter about sliding around corners or racing from execution animation to execution animation. It’s more careful than that.

There can be frantic confrontations, sure, like the time I faced off against a handful of rocket-launching grizzlies hiding in the reeds of the swamp while a slew of bombers on the roof rained endless cluster bombs down on me. But more often, it’s a slower pace. Tense, even. You sneak around corners, listening for the treacherous gurgles of dangerous “porcupines.” You inch your way into a warren of ruined huts, knowing that a trio of shotgun-wielding bushwhackers are inside, and that they won’t be coming out.

This is Wild Bastards at its most atmospheric, fully embracing the low-key cowboy standoff fantasy. Environmental hazards add to the challenge. A swamp planet features toxic pools to avoid, a frozen planet is covered in snowdrifts that will slow you down considerably as you trudge through. On a stormy planet, lightning bolts chase you, forcing you and your enemy to take shelter in bubble domes or brave the open plains with constant movement. Night will often fall, greatly reducing visibility for any gunslinger involved.

Back in the map world, the planet has shops selling useful mods. We’re talking boots that increase your jump height, weapon parts that speed up your reloads, a poncho that makes you 50% immune to fire. Most of them are just normal. But you lose all of these mods between systems (every few planets). As a roguelike player, you might hate this. It goes against the expectation that some roguelikes have set that the player should collect goodies until death. I got used to it, but here’s a litmus test: if the rotting weapons in Zelda: Breath Of The Wild annoyed you, this probably will too.

The real goal, however, isn’t collecting mods. It’s reaching the end of a galaxy and finding a coffin containing a new friendly outlaw, like a coffin. The starting heroes, the pistol-toting Spider Rosa and the shotgun-toting Casino, are as simple as yogurt. But new, permanently unlockable heroes include the long-range sniper The Judge, whose reticle is a steadily scribbled game of holographic hangman that adds a line every time you hit an enemy (once the hangman is complete, the next shot is an insta-kill). Or the minigun-toting Preach, whose ultimate ability heals her while firing bullets into bodies. The ghostly Kaboom can temporarily turn invisible while tossing sticks of dynamite. Smoky shoots fire from his hand and reloads by counting his own fingers.

Many of the voice actors relish their cowboy roles, fully embracing the “if’ns” and “guldems” of the Western. There are some great lines in the Spitoon sci-fi mash-up. When an enemy uses his laser eyes to kill The Judge, an outlaw remarks, “It ain’t no good zapping a guy with his eyes.” When the irritated Judge is revived, he’s told to calm down, to not get so upset. “I ain’t got shit jack OR shit!” he yells.

It’s not all tasteful language, either. Why, these good-for-nothings get into feuds and flat-out refuse to cooperate in confrontations, like decent people do. Which means you have to rearrange your team compositions and what-have-you. (Hoo-wee, is it hard to keep up this jargon here. Goddammit.) But that’s okay. Because you can find cans of beans!

Look, you need to use these baked beans to defuse all the unwanted tension in the gang. Use those beans and those two idiots will be friends again. (Okay. Enough of this damned linguistic blunder. I’m exhausted.)

All this to say that there are times when you bring an outlaw back to life and instead of thanking you, he reveals a toxic personality that sets in motion a horrible web of feuds. I burst out laughing as I watched all the jagged lines of dislike appear on the personality chart when this happened to me. Many outlaws would now refuse to agree to join in. I didn’t care because it was funny.

Despite the comical company, some characters feel functionally weak. For example, lizard-dude Hopalong can dispatch enemies by lassoing them, but is slowed to a crawl in the process. That means you must take on one enemy at a time, or risk getting shot while lassoing. Other characters, like the rapid-fire, plasma-blasting Roswell, feel adaptable and reliable in almost every encounter. That means players focused on winning every encounter will gravitate toward what are reportedly the most boring fighters.

Plus, some of the ultimate abilities—like Smoky’s “Cookout” or Casino’s “Roulette”—will kill enemies from anywhere on the battlefield, even if you can’t see them and don’t know where they are. That’s useful. But I don’t find having a “kill things I can’t see” button satisfying or engaging in a shooter. It feels like a cop-out that keeps you from playing the real game—the run-and-gun, the hide-and-seek.

Overall, Wild Bastards pushes some orthodoxies out the window while settling comfortably in with others by the fire. Sometimes it takes interesting turns—slower-paced gunplay, swappable heroes, gear that drops with each new galaxy. Sometimes, though, it’s clunky. Default controller settings are stiff and unreliable (I largely fixed this by turning off “acceleration” and reducing the “look deadzone”). The UI often feels bare, clunky, or oddly designed (why are “new game” and “continue” tucked away in the bottom-right corner of the main menu?). And there are odd occurrences that I have to assume are bugs: twice, I entered a fight and it automatically resolved itself as soon as the intro countdown finished.

There’s a lot more going on. Outlaws can get “scattered” to the wrong location when they’re beamed to the planet’s surface. Characters can become good friends. You can unleash a stampede of cows to run around the planet map and pummel bad guys. Sometimes it feels like a messy greedy game, where you throw a bunch of ideas in your swag bag and run off into the sunset without necessarily considering whether those ideas should be in the same bag at all.

But my overwhelming impression is of a game that wants to set its own pace, its own “high noon” rhythm. And I liked that. As a roguelike, its quirks will either appeal to you or make you grimace in mild frustration. The up-and-down pace, both on and off the battlefield, makes it hard to recommend to those who like fast-paced roguelikes. And while I thoroughly enjoyed the cowboy banter, it can be irritating if you want to rush to the next confrontation. It’s a slow game, and the opening hour doesn’t exactly communicate its intent very well. But as anyone who’s ever cooked beans on a fire can attest, they’re fine once they’re hot.

This review is based on a review of the game, written by the publisher.