Some people call me the space cowboy
There are cold opens and there are freezing ones.
Sci-fi roguelike shooterWild Bastardsdoesn’t start on its strongest cowboy boot.
You are dumped into the middle of an interstellar chase and summarily shown the ropes.
But then you find an outlaw buddy who offers a new way to shoot human dirtbags.
Then another fellow bandit.
This ain’t no grandFPScampaign, nor is it quick asroguelikesgo.
It’s a snacky shootout sim with tumbleweed towns that feels best when you savour the pre-fight suspense.
It’s rogueishly recognisable in a lot of ways.
Getting in your way are blockades of enemies that trigger first-person showdowns.
These are relatively short gun fights in randomly generated towns, swamps or mining quarries.
As encounters, they have a strong “ghost town” atmosphere.
It took a minute to click, but once I understood the game’s pace, it worked.
It’s not the only twist on shootin' doods.
For example, your heroes take to the battlefield in pairs, but not side-by-side.
Instead, you swap between your two characters at any time.
This is basically changing weapons, but said weapon has distinct abilities and its own health bar.
Surviving a planet means preserving that health as much as possible between showdowns.
It’s more cautious than that.
But more often it’s a slower-paced affair.
You creep around corners listening out for the tell-tale gurgle of dangerous “porcupines”.
This is Wild Bastards at its most atmospheric, fully embracing the quiet cowboy standoff fantasy.
Environmental hazards up the challenge.
You’ll often see nightfall arrive, greatly reducing vision for every gunslinger involved.
Back in map world, the planet has shops selling helpful mods.
But you’ll lose all these mods between star systems (every few planets).
As a roguelike player, you might hate this.
It goes against the expectation set by some roguelikes that the player should accrue goodies until death.
The real goal isn’t the accumulation of mods though.
The starter heroes, pistol wielding Spider Rosa and the shotgun toting Casino, are plain as basic yogurt.
Or the minigun toting Preach, whose ultimate ability heals her while she unloads bullets into bods.
The ghostly Kaboom can become temporarily invisible while tossing sticks of dynamite.
Smoky shoots fire from his hand, and reloads by counting his own fingers.
There are some cracker lines playing on the mash-up of spitoon sci-fi.
“I ain’t shook up over jack OR shit!”
It ain’t just flavourful language neither.
Meaning you gotta resituate yer team compositions and what-have-you.
(Hoo-wee, is it hard work keepin' up this here vernacular.
But that’s fine.
‘Cause you’re free to find cans o’ beans!
See, you gots to use these here baked beans to dee-fuse any untoward tensions in the gang.
Use ‘em beans, and them two sumbitches is friends again.
Enough of these gosh-darned linguistic free-volities.
I’m tuckered out.)
Many outlaws would now refuse to beam down together.
I didn’t care, because it was funny.
Despite the comic companionship, some characters do feel functionally weak.
Which means taking on one enemy at a time, or risk being shot while lassoing.
Other characters, like the rapid fire plasma-blasting Roswell, feel adaptable and reliable in nearly every encounter.
Which means players focused on winning every encounter will lean heavily toward, arguably, the most boring fighters.
Sometimes, though, it’s awkward.
There’s a lot more going on.
Outlaws can get “scattered” to the wrong location when beamed to planet’s surface.
Characters can become close pals.
you might release a stampede of cows to run around the planet map, battering bad guys.
And I quite liked that.
As a roguelike its quirks will either endear you to it or make you grimace in mild frustration.
It’s a slow burn and the opening hour doesn’t communicate the intention particularly well.
