If you’re into first-person roguelites then you’ve probably either played or are well aware of Void Bastards, the brain-bashing sci-fi shooter developed by indie studio Blue Manchu. I rather enjoyed my time with that game, but I also seem to remember it being flawed in places, despite the overall production oozing style and charisma.
Not content with making one slick action-roguelite, the devs at Blue Manchu are back for another shot (pardon to terrible pun) and the studio’s next game is an even more stylish sci-fi shooter. It’s not a direct sequel, though, and this time the roguish structure has been blended with a western theme to create something that feels very different from its predecessor.
Enter Wild Bastards, a game about a motley crew of robots and aliens who are travelling across the galaxy in an effort to put the band back together. It’s just like The Blues Brothers, if it were a roguish space western with lasers and warp drives.
Everybody needs somebody
The Next Fest demo gives you the two starting characters, and when you’re playing missions you can switch between them with a button press, tagging them in and out of the action. The rest of the time you’ll spend in your ship, and as more characters are added to the roster, your bridge will fill up. It’s a nice way of showing your progression as your crew appears to stay with you despite any misadventure that may befall you in the field.
You preside over a growing cast of miscreants, all voiced enthusiastically and all brought to life with some of the most striking and distinctive art I’ve seen this year. To be fair, this is to be expected, because the studio’s previous game was a slick little bastard, too. Wild Bastards looks like a cartoon. At times it looks better than a cartoon.
The worlds you explore are 3D spaces but you’re shooting at 2D-style targets. Popping off shots and hitting your enemies as they drop in and out of cover almost feels like you’re at some sort of intergalactic fairground firing range. I have to say, I’m really impressed by the quality of the audio-visual side of things.
The picture looks good but what about the frame?
The first stop on each journey is at the Hole in the Wall, where you get given a couple of new items ahead of your upcoming attempt. Next you pick a couple of crew members and head planetside for a mission.
Once you’ve landed, play switches to a map of interlinking objectives. What’s different here is that you can move your avatar a limited distance per turn, which felt like moving a unit around in Civ. Also like Civ, between your turns you watch the AI move its units around.
There are several different destination types on the planets I visited, and you won’t get to see all of them because you’re constantly being hunted. These objectives allow you to expand your knowledge of the enemy, grab money, teleport between locations, and, of course, get into battles with bandits or the villains who are out to get you.
When it comes to it, the gunplay is, on the whole, pretty solid. The animations are stiff, but that’s by design, and everything looks so damn good that I won’t complain. Being able to swap between the characters in your squad – you can usually take two or three characters on any given mission – means that the first-person experience can change drastically depending on who you control. One crewmember has twin six-shooters, another has a shotgun, and I quickly unlocked a third who fires a flaming finger gun.
The combat is tactical, and enemies will spot you from across the map; I frequently found my opponents because they’d found me first. You need to keep to cover, move through open spaces quickly, and take advantage of the terrain when you can. Failure to do so will result in your untimely death – at which point the character is sent back to your ship, the Drifter, with an injury that prevents them from being used again.
Once all of your outlaws are injured and out of the game, it’s time to warp back to the beginning. Warping heals any injuries but it removes most of your items and essentially restarts your progress but with a bigger selection of characters to choose from. It’s a neat system and, as I’ve mentioned previously, your overall progress is writ large even after you’ve stumbled, which keeps morale up.
It’s never too long before you’re back in the action, and that’s the main selling point here – tactical sci-fi combat with an irreverent twist. I’ve only seen the opening part of the game, but I’m eager to see more. I don’t have to wait very long either, because Wild Bastards is heading to PC, PlayStation and Xbox on September 12.
