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Wild Bastards review: a messy roguelike shooter that’s nonetheless full o' beansSome people call me the space cowboy
Some people call me the space cowboy
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Maximum Entertainment
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Maximum Entertainment
Wild Bastards - Release Date TrailerWatch on YouTube
Wild Bastards - Release Date Trailer
It’s rogueishly recognisable in a lot of ways. There’s a branching map of planets to visit, each with a planetary surface map filled with nodes and spidery routes to your goal: a special beacon. Getting in your way are blockades of enemies that trigger first-person showdowns. These are relatively short gun fights in randomly generated towns, swamps or mining quarries. Although there are important decisions to make on the planet map, it’s the grounded showdowns where all those decisions come to fruition.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Maximum Entertainment
It took a minute to click, but once I understood the game’s pace, it worked. The visual hollering is a thematic substitute for the ubiquitous “see through walls” ability that many games use to keep the player informed about enemy whereabouts. It encourages you to stop and listen, to take your time and creep along, without the need to obscure everything else on the screen with a cool blue filter.
There can be frantic showdowns, sure, like the time I was faced with a handful of rocket-launching grizzlies hiding in swamp reeds, while a heap of rooftop bombers rained endless cluster bombs down on me. But more often it’s a slower-paced affair. Tense, even. You creep around corners listening out for the tell-tale gurgle of dangerous “porcupines”. You walk gingerly into a warren of ruined huts knowing that a trio of shotgun-toting bushwhackers are in there, and they won’t come out.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Maximum Entertainment
This is Wild Bastards at its most atmospheric, fully embracing the quiet cowboy standoff fantasy. Environmental hazards up the challenge. A swamp planet has toxic pools to avoid, a frozen planet is covered in banks of snow that slow you right down if you trudge through them. On a stormy planet, lightning bolts chase you around, forcing both you and your enemy to take shelter in bubble domes, or brave the open plains with constant movement. You’ll often see nightfall arrive, greatly reducing vision for every gunslinger involved.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Maximum Entertainment
Many of the voice actors relish their cowboy roles, fully embracing the “if’ns” and the “guldems” of the western. There are some cracker lines playing on the mash-up of spitoon sci-fi. When an enemy uses his laser eyes to kill The Judge, one outlaw remarks: “It ain’t right, zappin' a feller eye-wise.” When the irritated Judge is resurrected, he is told to calm down, to stop being so shook up. “I ain’t shook up over jack OR shit!” he yells.
It ain’t just flavourful language neither. Why, them ne’er-do-wells get into honest-to-god feuds, and downright refuse to work together during showdowns, like what decent folk does. Meaning you gotta resituate yer team compositions and what-have-you. (Hoo-wee, is it hard work keepin' up this here vernacular. God damn.) But that’s fine. ‘Cause you can find cans o’ beans!
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Maximum Entertainment
See, you gots to use these here baked beans to dee-fuse any untoward tensions in the gang. Use ‘em beans, and them two sumbitches is friends again. (All right. Enough of these gosh-darned linguistic free-volities. I’m tuckered out.)
All this is to say, there are times when you revive an outlaw and, instead of thanking you, he reveals a toxic personality that triggers a horrendous criss-crossing network of feuds. I fell into a fit of laughter just watching all the jagged lines of dislike popping onto the personality graph when this happened to me. Many outlaws would now refuse to beam down together. I didn’t care, because it was funny.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Maximum Entertainment
On top of this, some of the ultimate abilities - like Smoky’s “Cookout” or Casino’s “Roulette” - will simply 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 it satisfying or engaging in a shooter to have a “kill things I can’t see” button. It feels like a cop-out that stops you from playing the actual game - run and gun, hide and seek.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Maximum Entertainment
There’s a lot more going on. Outlaws can get “scattered” to the wrong location when beamed to planet’s surface. Characters can become close pals. You can release a stampede of cows to run around the planet map, battering bad guys. At times, it feels like a messily greedy game, throwing a lot of ideas into its swag bag and running off into the sunset, without necessarily considering whether those ideas ought to exist in the same satchel together.
But my overwhelming impression is of a game that wants to set its own pace, its own “high noon” rhythm. And I quite liked that. As a roguelike its quirks will either endear you to it or make you grimace in mild frustration. Its up-and-down pacing, both on and off the battlefield, makes it hard to recommend to people who like their roguelikes snappy. And while I thoroughly enjoyed the cowboy chatter, it might grate on anyone who wants to hurry up and hit the next showdown. It’s a slow burn and the opening hour doesn’t communicate the intention particularly well. But as anyone who has really tried cooking beans over a fire can testify, once they’re warm, they’re just fine.
