Blue Manchu’s Void Bastards, published by Humble Games back in the day, was a “strategy shooter” roguelike that I loved so much that I played it twice, once in a DRM-free version and once on Steam. More than five years after its release, Wild Bastards takes the game in a new direction that I’ve never really liked.
I was really excited to play this game. It looks really stylish and relaxing, and the perfect indie game for the pre-fall AAA craziness. Unfortunately, my first few hours with it were so-so, and I wondered if I wasn’t in the mood for it, but some of the reviews echoed many of my feelings.
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From the outset, it’s abundantly clear that Wild Bastards is a love letter to the Western genre. “Sure, that’s basically what it says on the cover!” Well, yes, but you may have the look but not the right voice. That’s not a problem, because Blue Manchu has a great handle on the banter between its characters (however often annoying) and the vibe of its sci-fi setting, which borrows all the bones from cowboy and bandit movies. There’s even a team of 13 legendary outlaws, and enough clichés to stop a train. It wears its influences with pride.
“Faced with their own mortality, the two remaining members join forces with a mysterious sentient spaceship, the Drifter, to find and resurrect their dead gang members as they flee to the mysterious Homestead,” the game’s Steam page reads. It’s an enticing enough premise, but the problems start to emerge once you boot up a new game; the opening is too rushed and confusing, like being thrown into the middle of a story that began long ago. Sure, it could be cinematic and engaging enough (and I love a good one) but it’s not as if the game is about the same kind of gangsterism that the characters in the film are about to be played. Media Coverage At first, it might have seemed like a random decision, and since we were looking at cartoon clippings and comics to get our bearings, it was a bit disorienting.
The information dump about systems, mechanics and structure is not elegant. In fact, the advantage of the first run (which in roguelike/lite games is always a tutorial) is that the game itself is not That complex, so just clicking around during your strategic turns and playing the combat encounter portions like you would in any other FPS is enough to get you defeated early due to your inexperience and lack of motivation.
Similar to Void Bastards, Wild Bastards prides itself on adding a layer of “strategy” on top of the actual levels, which means managing your team, their upgrades, and the routes you take (similar to FTL) in order to make progress and hopefully reach your destination at some point. For the most part, you’ll be clicking through a series of menus to decide who to take with you on each adventure, who gets which loot, and the safest (or most profitable) route to your next destination. As is always the case with games like this, there’s a bit of balance involved in order to win at the game in addition to experience, but Wild Bastards (at least on its default recommended difficulty) doesn’t feel fair until you’ve unlocked a truly broken legend.
Poison damage, for example, feels overly exaggerated, especially considering how slow most characters move and how limited their acrobatic skills are. The visuals don’t lie: Wild Bastards is as rigid as its “cardboard cutout” look would suggest. This wouldn’t be a problem if the gameplay was anything else, but as a stylish shooter (or at least an attempt at a stylish shooter), it feels too rigid. The game forces you to use each character’s special skills, like randomly detonating enemies, to gain an advantage, but the system simply relies on running aimlessly around procedurally generated maps to collect as many power-ups as possible to use those special skills. Option B is to walk slowly and knock down enemies while conserving as much health as possible, which sounds good on paper.
The problem is that, unlike Void Bastards, Blue Manchu’s latest game is built with guns blazing as the idea, but the movement and overall flow of encounters is actually more like Void Bastards, a game built around the idea of stealth and vicarious combat. Moving from System Shock-inspired levels to combat arenas for exploration isn’t a bad idea in itself, but basic elements like controls and player movement don’t do enough to accommodate that core idea. While the strategic layer works well, and there’s enough variety to keep me engaged until I’ve rolled the credits at least once (some ideas, like NPC support gangs and nuclear barricades, are a great way to keep things interesting), I found myself wishing this was a turn-based game or something.
There were also some annoying issues, at least in the pre-release version, that I can’t believe I didn’t discover in my testing. For one, the voices and music were alarmingly low, no matter what dynamic range I selected, and the effects and dialogue felt like they were being said in the room next to me. This was apparently an issue in the demo that was released some time ago, and the fact that it’s still there is puzzling. I also had enemies die for no apparent reason, as well as key presses that didn’t register during fatal gunfights.
These issues can be addressed, and balance improvements will arrive sooner or later, but fixing Wild Bastards’ larger problems simply isn’t going to happen. For many, the visual style and outlaw interactions will be enough to make up for the mediocre gunplay and action, or the plethora of systems that feel like little more than a puddle of depth. Despite its modest size, Wild Bastards tries to juggle a lot of new ideas without really committing to most of them or letting go of its old baggage, and with so many more polished and unique roguelike alternatives on the market now, I won’t be lingering in these galaxies for too long.
