Wild Bastards Review – 12/09/24

thesixthaxis.com:

The Wild Bastards are all dead. Worse still, their corpses have been scattered across the galaxy, hidden away behind a multitude of evil robot cowboys and hordes of insidious giant insects. Which is a problem. Thankfully, it’s a problem that the two remaining Wild Bastards, Casino and Spider Rosa, are more than happy to solve; especially if it means blowing away thousands of cyborg outlaws in a cavalcade of bullets. Our two plucky bastards must roam the galaxy in a sentient spaceship, recovering and resuscitating their deceased posse as they go, until the gang are assembled and ready to take on big bad puritanical magnate Jebediah Chaste.

How best to describe the innovative gameplay experience that Wild Bastards offers? A Turn-Based Rogue-like First Person Shooter doesn’t quite cut it, but it’s close enough. The turn-based bit plays out like a board game, where you guide the good ship Drifter around a galaxy filled with randomised planets. At the end of each galaxy, you’ll rescue a member of the Wild Bastards to add to your burgeoning crew. Encounter a planet on your travels and you’ll descend to the surface with a small team of Bastards. Here’s the second turn-based bit, as you guide each of your three duos around the procedurally generated environment: gathering loot, temporary buffs, and permanent level-ups. It’s best not to dawdle to find everything though, as one of Jebediah’s family (think rock-hard bosses) will be loitering on the planet-surface to chase you down.

You enter the first-person action element when you encounter a moving gang or roadblock on your travels. Your two outlaws, who you can instantly switch between, run and shoot their way around a small environment, having to wipe out the set number of critters they meet. The action is solid and slick; the enemy refuses to meet you head-on and instead opts for cowering behind cover and shooting you in the back whenever they can. As such, it plays out like a deadly version of hide-and-seek rather than an