Wild Bastards

Blue Manchu's spiritual successor to Void Bastards is every bit as complex, challenging, and rewarding as that earlier gem.

The roguelike and FPS genres haven't been spliced so successfully since Deathloop-and Wild Bastards deserves just as much acclaim.

The novelty of a 13-character cast is a solid hook for Wild Bastards, but a myriad of streamlined and sidelined elements compromise its potential to the point of becoming a trip to outer space that you won't remember for long after hitting credits.

A mixed roguelike of comedy cowboys and surprisingly tense ghost town showdowns.

It’s tempting to call Wild Bastards an evolution, but that’s unfair to Void, which has its excellent crafting elements and the permadeath of characters (albeit with persistent progress). What’s crucially similar about both, beyond the excellent art and fantastic sense of humor, is that unlike so many roguelite games, they both want you to win. They’re about progressing forward, being able to reach an ending, and then starting all over to try it completely differently. It’s just that in Wild Bastards, there’s so much more that can be different each time.

Wild Bastards is good, but it didn’t quite hit as hard as we’d hoped. That said, the studio's fantastic art direction and writing continue to shine through, enough to make this a title worth looking at.

Blue Manchu delivered the goods with Void Bastards, but this follow-up is a disappointing effort that can't match its predecessor's atmosphere, charm, originality or strategic smarts. Instead, Wild Bastards is a strangely bland affair, melding boring top-down decision-making and dull first-person sections. The game never really picks up the pace or gives you anything surprising to work with. In a genre packed full of bangers, this one is pretty difficult to recommend on any level.

Wild Bastards has a lot of charm and style, and that’s enough of a hook to want to dive in and see what the game has to offer. Using a sizable roster of characters who are the major differentiators for gameplay as the main motivator to keep going is effective as well. But once you’ve got the Bastards roster filled out and you have combat figured out well enough, that’s about where the buck stops in this sci-fi western. It’s a chaotic and challenging experience, but promises a lot of complexity and nuance that seems bountiful at first, but fizzles a bit given time. Some balancing issues hold it back the most from being truly fulfilling, but there’s a little bit of genre fatigue talking on my part as well. On its own merits, Wild Bastards is ambitious and kinetic, and will definitely put FPS fans’ skills to the test.

A sort of successor to 2019's Void Bastards, Blue Manchu's Wild Bastards is a roguelike Wild West shooter that's a tad too ambitious for its own good.

Cosmic western with collecting bandits brings an interesting combination of action with strategic progress. At first it is remarkable, but gradually the interest in the game declines. Without a proper story, it becomes too long and monotonous.