Wild Bastards Reviews
Wild Bastards is more dastardly delicious gaming to come from right here in Australia. Blue Manchu Games have done some building upon their Bastards universe to create a thoroughly fun and explosive experience. Though the game can go on a little too long and be a bit one-note, I could never accuse it of not being some of the best FPS and roguelike fusion we've had for a while. What awaits is a weird and creatively designed cast with varied playstyles, quality strategic roguelike thinking and build potential that'll more than satiate you. It's well worth going on your journey across the stars and finding yourself some weird alien outlaw friends. Family found.
Blue Manchu’s Wild Bastards offers a memorable mishmash with a unique setting and diverse characters, but suffers from underdeveloped elements and pacing issues that can detract from its otherwise entertaining gameplay loop.
Review in Dutch | Read full review
Wild Bastards is everything a Rougelite should be: challenging, fun, stylish and deeply engaging.
Wild Bastards adds strategic depth to the roguelite game but sacrifices depth in its shooting to do so. The result is a game that has fun characters and great strategy, but the shooting sections become stale over the course of the campaign.
If you're looking for a fun space western cowboy game or if you're a fan of anything with a spaghetti western vibe, Wild Bastards will satisfy your hunger just like a good can of beans.
Wild Bastards feels scaled back and lacks the immersion that its predecessor excelled at. Being a “spiritual successor to the award-winning game Void Bastards” sounds great, but tends to feel like an out-of-body experience. Thankfully, the new mechanics and systems are great to interact with, and assembling a varied and diverse crew of thirteen outlaws gives you a lot of wiggle room for experimentation. Add in the personality layer, and needing to manage relationships is a welcome addition. Wild Bastards is about strategizing and optimizing your not-so-merry band of outlaws for a tactical first-person experience that’s more style over substance.
Taking everything learnt from Void Bastards, Wild Bastards is an inventive spiritual sequel, blending strategy and shooter perfectly within its space cowboy antics. It's a must play, no doubt.
A mixed roguelike of comedy cowboys and surprisingly tense ghost town showdowns.
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.
In an Autumn release schedule of sequels, hero shooters, and the latest slightly different iteration of a long-running franchise; the uniqueness of Wild Bastards resolutely stands out. This innovative, bonkers, daring, and entirely brilliant genre-hybrid absolutely demands your attention.
Wild Bastards is a roguelite first-person shooter that presents itself to players in a superb and very pleasant way, while not innovating the formula and perhaps not deepening the bonds between the main protagonists too significantly. However, this allows you to overcome strategic situations to have an approach that deals with situations brilliantly, composing teams that are always different... Unless someone, in short, is angry with someone else. Which happens. The game design is very pleasant and detailed, also enriched by a nice gunplay system. Recommended for those who love the West, popcorn and Tarantino.
Review in Italian | Read full review
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.
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.
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.
Blue Manchu's spiritual successor to Void Bastards is every bit as complex, challenging, and rewarding as that earlier gem.
While the characters and voice actors add a lot of life into the group of characters present in Wild Bastards, the gameplay falls short of making it a game I would want to return to.
I certainly enjoyed my time with Wild Bastards. The blended Wild West and sci-fi settings, together with hybridised strategy and roguelike FPS approach, all make Wild Bastards feel a lot fresher than many of the shooters on the market right now. Sure, the nuts and bolts of its face-blasting might not rub shoulders with the genre's best in the purest sense and the visual presentation is lacking somewhat, but the level of design ingenuity and rough-shackle charm that is on display here ably makes up for such shortcomings.
Wild Bastards is a sequel that tries to mod some of the gameplay mechanics of the original, but loses steam along the way
Void Bastards is a title that I absolutely adored, so it set a lot of my expectations with what I wanted from Wild Bastards. The roster itself has a great deal of charm and personality, but the elements you engage with; combat, enemies, and the environments, where both of those play out, just fell incredibly flat. The character progression to improve the gang works well, and the abilities they have make for some interesting combat encounters. The conflicts between the gang are well written, acted, and executed, making for a compelling drama with the right amount of humor. As I mentioned before, I don’t think Wild Bastards is even remotely a bad game, it just feels like a step back for the team that gave us the vastly superior Void Bastards.