Wild Bastards review

It's dusk in a one-horse town, and that one horse is Sarge, a bipedal stallion carrying a lever rifle. As he scans the street for targets, a sniper wearing a monocle breaks the silence. "What precisely are you s'posed to be?", he yells in a clipped English accent.

It's the last thing the hunter ever says. The jibe gives away his location in the dark—behind the belltower, up on the church roof. Sarge closes the distance in seconds. Even on two legs, he gallops faster than any human. Seconds after that, the showdown is over. Up on the tactical map, Sarge is back on his own horse—best not to think too hard about that one—and riding off to his next encounter. This is the one-two punch of Wild Bastards—part FPS, part strategy game with the DNA of XCOM.

Sarge belongs to a gaggle of outlaws who start the game on the back hoof. In fact, as Wild Bastard begins, there are only two left—the 11 others hunted down and murdered by Jebediah Chaste and his cruel offspring. As his name suggests, Chaste objects to the sort of wildness Sarge and his ilk represent—enforcing a humancentric servitude throughout the expanse of space he oversees.

Thankfully for the Bastards, a legendary and enigmatic starship named the Drifter swoops in to save them. Nestled in its metallic bosom, you set out across the stars to find and resurrect the rest of the gang. Every sector of space you enter is like a roguelike run, in which you navigate between nodes representing shipwrecks and celestial bodies, trying to make it to the end and rescue a friend. Should all your Bastards be injured, you'll be returned to the start of that sector.

That's just the uppermost layer, however. Every time you enter a planet's orbit, you're held in place by its jump lock—which can only be broken by sending outlaws down to the surface. Every time this happens, you enter a mini roguelike run, in which you direct outlaws around a turn-based map—picking fights at roadblocks, dodging patrols, swiping cash and spending it in shops. There's a risk-reward equation here: in most cases, your only goal is to reach the exit point of the planet and beam up to the Drifter. Taking diversions can bag you temporary boosts and permanent upgrades to the powers of your outlaws, but battles chip away at the health of your Bastards, and sticking around too long will attract the attention of Chaste's children— intimidating enemies who chase you around the map on horseback.

So far, so strategy game. But the battles of Wild Bastards aren't resolved on a grid or with percentages. Rather, they're lightning-fast FPS showdowns that play out in tight, arena-esque levels. This is a deeply satisfying and consistently surprising blaster in which it feels fantastic to blow away a gunhand with dual revolvers; in which the exploding collar of an unstable kyote can hurl you sideways across the craters of a low-gravity moon. Combat in Wild Bastards is always fair, though its interacting systems can combine in all sorts of creative ways. Knowledge is your best defence against the unexpected, so that you can draw a pack of kyotes into a poison lake, and not the other way round.

Rustling

Despite the pace and immediacy of its combat, Wild Bastards is also accomplished in stealth. Developer Blue Manchu is the second studio of Irrational Games co-founder Jon Chey, which means immersive sims are in its blood. Encounters kick off much as they do in Arkane's Deathloop, with enemies unaware of your position, and you unsure of theirs. Thankfully, these cowpokes have a habit of shouting to each other ("You okay, Jethro??"), and Wild Bastards dutifully marks their last-heard-location on your compass—making this a rare stealth-shooter you can enjoy without headphones. That is, at least, until you come across the snakes. The soft crash of disturbed earth is often the first hint you'll have that a venom-belching beast has popped up somewhere over your shoulder. Learning the behaviours of your opponents is a significant factor in your success and at least as important as your trigger finger.

Some of the Bastards are better suited to a direct approach than others—and indeed their sheer variety is one of this game's great joys. Billy the gunslinger is a squid, and so becomes briefly invulnerable whenever he takes damage—a metaphorical jet of ink that allows you to scramble out of harm's way. Roswell is a grey alien whose ultimate fires him ludicrously high into the air for a series of rocket bounces, granting you a momentary overview of the battlefield and the chance to stomp hard on your opponents. Rawhide, meanwhile, is more of a hivemind than an individual—capable of ending a battle by swapping the last enemy critter to your side.

While you only control one Bastard at a time, you keep another in reserve during battle, as if they were a second weapon. That means you're swapping not just from Casino's shotgun to Judge's rifle, but taking on all the traits of that character as well: their movement speed, health bar, and the various perks you've picked up for them on your journey through the sectors. More than a gimmick, this setup brings extraordinary depth to loadout management. Once you realise a wounded Bastard can 'hide' behind their fellow before popping out to grab a health pickup, you start to wonder at the ways you might combine their abilities more cleverly.

Your choice of tag-team for a given planetary excursion is guided not only by these tactical considerations, but the circumstances the Bastards find themselves in. It might be that your ideal partnership is scuppered because one outlaw is injured, or another is nursing a grudge. When outlaws fall out, they'll refuse to beam down together—a situation best resolved by sitting them down side-by-side over a warm fire with a tin of beans. With a second helping, they'll even become pals—which means they'll fire off a special attack or throw out some pickups when their chum is taking a beating in battle. Yet beans are a scarce resource you'll want to deploy with care.

Managing your gang is as much about working around their petty squabbles—and your own past mistakes—as optimising your route through the stars. And there's something beautiful in that. By rooting for the Bastards, you're opting to endure their many clashing differences—and to figure out the synergies that might bind them, more powerfully than any force that sets out to flatten their quirks.