Blue Manchu’s Void Bastards is a “strategy shooting” roguelike game released by Humble Games that year. I liked it very much and bought it twice, one without DRM and the other on Steam. More than five years after its launch, Wild Bastards takes things in a new direction that I’ve never experienced before.
I’m really excited to jump into this space. It looks very stylish and effortless, making it the perfect indie release for the crazy pre-fall AAA period. Unfortunately, my first few hours with it were mediocre and I wondered if I was in the right state for it, but some of the reviews echoed many of my feelings.
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From the get-go, it’s clear that The Wild Basterds is a huge love letter to the western. “Of course, that’s basically what the cover says!” Well, yes, but you may have the looks but lack the right voice. That’s not a problem here, as “Blue Manchurian” already perfectly blends the banter between its characters (albeit often annoying) with the atmosphere of a sci-fi setting that borrows all its skeleton from cowboys and bandits movies. There’s even a team of 13 legendary outlaws, and enough clichés to stop a train. It proudly wears its influence on its sleeves.
“Faced with their own mortality, the two remaining members team up with the Drifter, a mysterious sentient ship, to find and resurrect dead gang members as they flee to their mysterious home,” reads the game’s Steam page. An enticing enough premise, but problems arise once you launch a new game; the intro feels too rushed and confusing, like it’s been thrown in the middle of a story that started a long time ago. Sure, this could be cinematic and funny enough (I love me a good in media resources to begin with), but it was a decision that felt random and a bit disorienting since we were looking at cartoon cutouts and comics for direction.
Information dumps about systems, mechanisms and structures are not more elegant. In fact, the saving grace of the first run (which in roguelike/lite games is always a tutorial) is that the game itself isn’t That Complex, so just clicking the mouse during your strategy rounds and playing the combat encounter portion like in any other FPS is enough to make you die early due to inexperience and lack of motivation.
Much like Void Bastards, Wild Bastards prides itself on having a “strategy” layer on top of the actual levels you play, meaning managing the team, their upgrades, and the route you take to progress (a la FTL) As well as hoping to reach your destination at some point. For the most part, you’ll click through a bunch of menus to decide who you take with you on each adventure, who gets what loot, and the safest (or most profitable) route to your next destination. As with games of this type, winning requires some balance beyond just experience, but Wild Bastards (at least on its preset recommended difficulty) feels unfair until you unlock the truly shattered legend.
Poison damage, for example, feels a bit over-tuned, especially considering how slow most characters move and how limited their acrobatic skills are. The visuals don’t lie: Wild Bastards is as stiff as its “cardboard cutout” appearance might suggest. This wouldn’t be a problem if the gameplay did something else, but as a stylish shooter (or at least an attempt to create one), it feels too rigid. The game will push you to use each character’s special skills, such as randomly blasting enemies, to gain an advantage, but the system simply relies on running aimlessly around a procedurally generated map to collect as many power-ups as possible to spam Email Specials. Option B is to move around slowly and knock down enemies while conserving health as much as possible, which sounds good on paper.
The thing is, unlike Void Bastards, Blue Manchu’s latest game is built on the concept of gunplay, but the action and overall flow of combat actually feels more like Void Bastards, a game that blends stealth and combat alternatives Scheme game. Moving from System Shock-inspired levels to combat arenas isn’t a bad idea in itself, but there aren’t enough basic elements (such as controls and player movement) to accommodate the central idea. While the strategy layer worked well enough and had enough variety to keep me engaged until I rolled the points at least once (some ideas like NPC support gangs and nuke roadblocks were great ways to keep things interesting), I Found myself wishing this was a turn-based game or something.
At least in its pre-release version, there are a few annoyances that I can’t believe went undetected during testing. For starters, no matter what dynamic range I chose, the sound and music were shockingly low, and the effects and dialogue felt like they were being spoken in the room next to me. This was apparently an issue in the demo released a while ago, and the fact that it’s still present is confusing. I’ve also encountered enemies that died for no apparent reason and suffered undocumented keystrokes during deadly shootouts.
These problems can be solved, and a balance transfer will surely happen sooner or later, but solving Wild Bastards’ larger problems is simply not possible. For many, the visual style and outlaw interactions alone will be enough to make up for the so-so gunplay and action, or the overabundance of systems that feel as deep as puddles. Despite its small size, Wild Bastards tries to juggle a lot of new ideas without really committing to the majority, nor letting go of old baggage, and with so many more polished and unique roguelike alternatives on the market now, I wouldn’t stick with it Going down and staying in these galaxies is much longer.
