Wild Bastards

I spent a solid stretch of evenings trying to min-max my gang of space outlaws in Wild Bastards, and I can confirm: the build-order brain is well-served here, right up until the moment it isn't. Blue Manchu's follow-up to Void Bastards layers three distinct decision spaces on top of one another. At the galaxy level you plot a route sector by sector, picking which procedurally generated planets to visit based on their loot profiles and enemy composition. Drop onto a planet and you are moving your party around a board-game grid, rationing movement points while a pursuing boss closes in. Trigger a showdown and the game snaps to first-person, where you cycle between two outlaws mid-fight and run arenas that rarely last longer than two or three minutes. Each layer is genuinely different from the others, and the toggling between them keeps the pacing from going stale for the first half of a run. The 13 playable outlaws are where Wild Bastards earns most of its goodwill. Each character carries a completely distinct weapon, a signature ability, and a personal growth tree fed by 'aces', permanent cards that remain in your gang even after a failed run. Casino packs a double-barrelled shotgun and benefits from mods that turn her pellets homing. Spider Rosa can chain invulnerability windows by scoring kills. Snake-man Hopalong has a laser lasso for stealthy choke-outs. Preach deploys a chain gun that shreds grouped Kyotes but hates quill-firing porcupine enemies that punish full-auto fire. Judge the sniper, on the other hand, is purpose-built for those quill enemies because his critical hits suppress the retaliation mechanic entirely. The matchup system underneath all of this is real and matters, and it rewards the player who actually reads enemy tags before selecting their duo. That is, genuinely, strategy-game thinking applied to a first-person shooter, and it works. The problems stack up on the structural side. The planet board-game layer is functional but thin: there is no base-building, no resource web to optimise, and the Pal or Feud relationship system, which locks certain outlaw pairings from landing together, mostly stops being a constraint once your roster grows past six members. The beans resource that resolves feuds becomes almost dead weight by mid-game. The FPS showdowns, praised by some critics and questioned by others, are deliberately bite-sized. If you are coming from Void Bastards expecting extended immersive-sim corridors, you will feel the loss immediately; these are contained arenas, not sprawling ships. Enemy variety across biomes also runs thin after a few hours, with environments that largely resemble palette swaps of one another. The campaign clocks in at roughly 11 to 15 hours for most players, and the unlockable challenge mode that follows lacks the forward momentum that recruiting a new outlaw provides during the main run. For newcomers to the strategy-shooter hybrid genre, Wild Bastards is a surprisingly accessible entry point. The ace system means progress is not wiped clean on failure: recruited outlaws and their earned upgrades carry forward, so each run builds on the last in a tangible way. The three-layer structure introduces mechanics gradually sector by sector, and the pop-art visual style makes enemy types legible at a glance, which matters when you are deciding which two outlaws to bring planetside. Someone who has never played a roguelite before will find the learning curve gentler here than in most genre peers. The Metacritic sits at 76, which is an honest number: critics largely found the art direction and outlaw roster to be excellent while flagging the shallower-than-expected strategic depth and repetitive environments. Steam users land in a similar place at 75 percent positive. The consensus is a game with a genuinely smart concept and a terrific cast that runs slightly ahead of its own systems.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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