What do you get when you mix Borderlands-esque characters, rogue-like elements, and a can of beans? Developer Blue Manchu Games aims to answer this question with the spiritual successor to Void Bastards: Wild Bastards.
Wild Bastards places you in control of a rag-tag team of outlaws, scattered to the far reaches of space with their dreams of making it to The Homestead all but gone. That is until the last two remaining bastards came back into contact with their sentient ship, The Drifter.
With nothing but the sound of laser fire behind them the last two outlaws still alive, Spider Rosa and Casino must reassemble the Wild Bastards and follow where The Drifter takes them. And while the premise certainly pulled me in, I found myself a bit let down by the end of the whole ordeal.
On release, the game has two game modes: Campaign (with a procedural option once completed), and Challenge Mode. We’re going to look at the individual modes and how they play before analyzing the unique gameplay systems and how they interact with the game.
Life is like a can of beans
It took me a total of eight and a half hours to complete the story mode on normal, and luckily I was able to beat it without ever dying or having to restart. As much as I’d like to think I’m a pro-FPS gamer, I was a bit shocked to find out that the game started to get easier for me as I got closer to the end of the game.
Wild Bastard gives you a glance at the inner workings of a band of outlaws, and I believe the game has some of the best character designs and directions I’ve seen from a game like this in a long time. When I say the characters are Borderlands-esque, I mean characters in Borderlands 1, rather than the eventual sequels (if you know, you know). The Judge is a no-nonsense robot, Roswell is a calculating and cold know-it-all, and Smoky just wants to eat some beans.
Each character feels unique, and this is complimented by fantastic voice acting from all the bastards, including internet icon Tay Zonday voicing The Judge. I was eagerly anticipating every new character I would collect as I warped in between sectors of space running from the dreaded Jebediah Chaste and his three children.
The Bastards aren’t friends, and that’s a good thing
But just because they belong to the same team, doesn’t mean all the Wild Bastards get along. As you progress through the game, certain characters might develop a feud with each other. This not only disables you from bringing those two characters on a planet together but there’s a little bit of dialogue to explain why they fell out of friendship. The only way to fix this is to find a can of beans and share it between the two who are feuding.
I found myself excited when characters started a feud (even if it messed with my combat team) since that meant I got to hear more dialogue and even some unique voice lines where the characters interact with each other. My only wish is that there was more dialogue since after you hear two characters feud for the first time, you’ve probably heard their only unique voice line.
I’ll try to avoid major spoilers for the story, but as you revive more bastards, you begin to learn how they all came to be in the ground, save for two of them. It’s an intriguing story for the majority of the time, but sadly as I wrapped up the story, I felt as if it was a bit rushed towards the end. I’ll go into more detail when we talk about gameplay as they’re closely related, but I felt that the conclusion fizzled out rather than ending with a boom.
Trial by Bastard
Once you beat the story mode, you unlock the second mode in the game: Challenge Mode. Think of these like pre-determined heat runs in Hades where you must complete one map sector with certain characters, modifiers, and potentially specific enemies.
I want to preface this section by saying that I am not a challenge mode completionist in games with rouge-like elements. I got through the four to five challenges and while they were fun, I never really felt like I was gaining anything from it. Completing challenges unlocks new gear to use on re-runs of the campaign, but aside from that, you don’t necessarily earn anything from it other than eventual achievements.
Granted I never got to the hardest challenges, but I had the same feeling as I did in the campaign where everything felt too easy. If you want to optimize challenge runs, you’re better off buying beacons when you can so you can easily leave planets and complete the challenge quickly, since your characters don’t keep anything from runs.
Ultimately, I left the challenge mode feeling as if I would not attempt them if I were the average gamer. But if you’re someone who enjoys the no-joker Balatro challenge or max heat runs of Hades, you might be able to find some enjoyment from the later challenges, you just gotta get through the easy ones first, which can feel like a slog sometimes.
A 3D game with 2D gameplay
I’ve tried to not talk about the gameplay in the other sections of the review since I wanted to collect my thoughts in one area. Sad to say, but the more time I spent playing Wild Bastards, the more I was only invested in the voice actors and characters rather than the gameplay.
Cautious Combat
Each character has a unique weapon combined with a unique ability known as a Stunt. As with characters, the weapons and abilities feel on point with their character and give each of them individual benefits that help you when fighting certain enemies. Towards the end of the story, the game forces you to use certain characters based on story events, but besides this I found myself using the same three to four characters on every single planet, ignoring their energy bar.
Furthermore, every time you warp from sector to sector the game takes away all the money, gear, and items you’ve collected. This is most likely an effort to promote the use of certain tools, but when they take away really good gear just for you to have to try and find new stuff over and over again in the same run, it makes you feel very stagnant in combat.
Level-ups, otherwise known as Aces, are the only things that don’t get lost between sectors. These can range from passive buffs to adding an NPC ally to every showdown. And some of them work really well situationally as you progress further in the story.
For example, I collected an Ace for Rawhide, which puts every enemy at one health if the showdown was taking place on a stormy planet. Going forward, I would scan every planet I could visit to find one that had electrical storms and dropped down with Rawhide. Since every encounter was tied to a storm, I was able to easily defeat every single enemy in no time at all.
Overwhelm the Outlaws
At the end of the day, I completed the campaign by doing my best to have the minimum amount of fights. This is primarily due to the fact that as you fight harder enemies, you start to feel like no matter what you do you’re bound to take damage when you attack other enemies. The showdowns take place in 3D FPS combat, however the enemy models are 2D in more than just style.
You can see an enemy running from one cover to the other and attempt to shoot them, but unless you are The Judge, you’re going to miss a lot of shots due to their movement speed and wonky hitboxes.
Left adrift in the galaxy
Finally, my biggest gripe with the overall gameplay of Wild Bastards has to be the fact that you never have to fight any bosses in the game if you choose not to. The only time there are “mini-bosses” is when you take too long on a planet, forcing one of three Chaste children to land and chase you until they catch you and put you into a showdown, or you leave.
However, even if you defeat all three children on one planet, they will just respawn and come back to chase you on the next planet. One could say that you get to choose how difficult you want the game to be by trying to fight the bosses or not, but when I can beat the game without ever having to fight a true boss, I felt unfulfilled by the time I rolled the credits.
I enjoyed a lot of my time with Wild Bastards, but overall I am not sure I would recommend it to everyone at the $40 price tag. The controls can feel a bit unresponsive whether you’re on controller or M/KB, and even though the characters and vibe of the game are spectacular, the meat and bones of its gameplay felt a bit too thin.
- Amazing character design
- Great voice acting
- Unique weapons and abilities
- Inconsistent first-person shooter aspects
- Underwhelming story
- Lackluster additional content
Published: Sep 12, 2024 03:00 am