Wild Bastards Reviews
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.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
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 has a unique take on the roguelike FPS genre that prioritizes strategy. The wacky space cowboy theme is interesting and the visuals are fantastic, but the game is lacking with its story, sound and it struggles a bit with repetitiveness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Spiritual sequel to Void Bastards, Wild Bastards changes up the formula but isn't necessarily the better for it. Its board game-like maps introduce some strategy, but its basic first-person shooter Showdowns disappoint, as do some of its other underdeveloped elements.
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.
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.
I really ended up loving Wild Bastards, especially once I unlocked the procedural campaign mode. Every run is its own open-ended puzzle of clearly defined rules that you have to solve with both, strategic planning and real-time combat. Both aspects influence each other in clever and satisfying ways using a really cool roster of unique and colorful outlaws.
An interesting mix of roguelike, survival and a hint of turn-based strategy that starts off strong but becomes progressively less memorable.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
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.
A mixed roguelike of comedy cowboys and surprisingly tense ghost town showdowns.