GamesRoguelikeSummer Game Fest 2024Wild Bastards is a roguelike FPS that makes some shocking changes over its predecessor, but its posse of planet plundering robots eventually won me overWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesRoguelikeSummer Game Fest 2024Wild Bastards is a roguelike FPS that makes some shocking changes over its predecessor, but its posse of planet plundering robots eventually won me overWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Maximum Entertainment)
Summer Games PreviewWe are diving deep into the hottest upcoming games out of Summer Game Fest. To find all of our coverage, visitGamesRadar’s What’s Hot 2024 hub.
Summer Games PreviewWe are diving deep into the hottest upcoming games out of Summer Game Fest. To find all of our coverage, visitGamesRadar’s What’s Hot 2024 hub.
Summer Games PreviewWe are diving deep into the hottest upcoming games out of Summer Game Fest. To find all of our coverage, visitGamesRadar’s What’s Hot 2024 hub.
Summer Games PreviewWe are diving deep into the hottest upcoming games out of Summer Game Fest. To find all of our coverage, visitGamesRadar’s What’s Hot 2024 hub.
Summer Games PreviewWe are diving deep into the hottest upcoming games out of Summer Game Fest. To find all of our coverage, visitGamesRadar’s What’s Hot 2024 hub.
Summer Games PreviewWe are diving deep into the hottest upcoming games out of Summer Game Fest. To find all of our coverage, visitGamesRadar’s What’s Hot 2024 hub.
Interstellar bandits
(Image credit: Maximum Entertainment)
Wild Bastards sees you guiding a posse of interstellar bandits through different sectors of space, as they flee from a hostile organization known as The Chaste. Think FTL, only each sector of space has multiple planets you can beam down to and scavenge for resources. Landing on a planet triggers a turn-based, isometric planetary map that you can move your posse around, buying, collecting, or outright stealing as many useful gizmos as you can.
This is the part of the game that I initially recoiled from like a branding iron. Void Bastards was far from an exceptional shooter, but there was much more to its first-person play than fighting. You had to plan each spacecraft excursion carefully, then execute it rapidly, interfacing with the ships' various systems, using evasion and traps to get the drop on enemies, and escape before your oxygen ran out. Playing each ship was like downing a shot of System Shock, a condensed and intoxicating blend of that game’s ideas.
(Image credit: Maximum Entertainment)
Fortunately, Wild Bastards has a couple of aces up its sleeve. The strategic planet maps quickly expand in size and complexity, adding multiple routes from which you can attack your objective, and a wide range of secondary locations that provide strategic bonuses. For example, some planets feature teleporters that will zap you to another part of the board, while others include modifiers you can bring into showdowns to gain an advantage, like AI allies or ability enhancing tonics. Moving around the board in the right way can have a huge impact on your prospects both inside and outside combat, while wasting moving might see you forced to abandon valuable loot, or worse, find yourself stuck in a gunfight with McNeil.
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Teamwork
(Image credit: Maximum Entertainment)
It’s important to do this, because each character brings new weapons and abilities to the battlefield. Spider Rosa is an arachnid gunslinger who wields twin pistols and can deploy enemy-distracting decoys. Doc Casino, meanwhile, is a walking slot machine who blasts foes with a shotgun and can roll a deadly jackpot to kill random enemies outright. Combined with an enemy roster that adds poison spitting snakes and gun-turrets disguised as whiskey barrels to the standard selection of robotic cowboys, combat quickly escalates in both novelty and challenge. Since characters maintain damage across encounters, a single bad combat round can dramatically impact your chances of escaping a planet in one piece.
(Image credit: Maximum Entertainment)
Teamwork plays an important role both on and off the battlefield.
Teamwork plays an important role both on and off the battlefield.
The final point worth noting is the narrative potential of your posse. Initially, I found the game’s heavy pastiche of Wild West lingo a little grating (Doc Casino in particular talks like ChatGPT for cowboy similes). But as more characters unlock, the game’s voice becomes more diverse, and internal conflicts begin to emerge that counterbalance the game’s irreverent humor. At the end of the demo, you unlock a character named ‘Judge’ who has a standing feud with Casino and refuses to deploy onto any planet with the robotic card sharp. It promises an intriguing blend of scripted and dynamic narrative, and I’m curious to see where this goes.
I’ll miss the derelict diving of Void Bastards, and I still question whether Wild Bastards' arena combat can generate enough depth and satisfaction to stand on its own. That said, the more involved strategic layer helps to compensate for the lighter first-person sections, and I’ve only seen three of its purported 13 characters in action, let alone how they can be modified and upgraded. If the game can continue to elaborate on its ideas at the rate of the demo, then Wild Bastards could yet lasso me into its way of thinking.
Here are the15 games we really want to see at Summer Game Fest.
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1Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”
1Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”
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3Kraven the Hunter review: “The insistence on an R-rating helps save this, with a decent helping of bloodthirsty action”
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4The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review – “An uninspired expansion of the most iconic screen take on Tolkien”
4The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review – “An uninspired expansion of the most iconic screen take on Tolkien”
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2Secret Level review: “An uneven experience with serious highlights that ultimately make up for the misses”
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2
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5
Cobra Kai season 6, part 2 review: “Returns to the sort of hard-hitting form that made it such a fan favorite in the first place”