Wild Bastards Review: A Messy Roguelike Shooter That’s Still Full of Beans

Wild Bastards throws you into the fray with a cold open that could give you frostbite. This sci-fi roguelike shooter doesn’t exactly come out swinging, leaving you to fumble through basic gunfights, bland arenas, and generic loot in your first hour. At first, it feels like a barebones affair—beaming down to planets for small-scale "showdowns" that quickly threaten to get repetitive.

But then, something shifts. You recruit your first outlaw, then another, and before you know it, your ship is filled with a ragtag crew of scoundrels, each more colorful and chaotic than the last. That’s when Wild Bastards starts to show its true face. It’s not about fast-paced action or a grand FPS campaign. Instead, it’s a slow-burn shootout sim with tumbleweed towns and standoffs that thrive on pre-fight tension.

The structure is roguelike 101. You navigate branching planetary maps with nodes and spidery routes, leading to special beacons, but blocking your way are enemy showdowns in randomly generated environments. These short, first-person firefights happen in ghost towns, swamps, or quarries, where a gang of human criminals wants your mutant and robot outlaws six feet under. They hide behind shacks, boulders, and rooftops, but their constant yammering gives them away, adding a fun comic book flair as their speech bubbles blink from their hiding spots.

It took a while for me to get into the game’s rhythm, but once I did, it clicked. The enemies’ chatter is the game’s clever answer to the usual “see-through-walls” abilities that many shooters rely on. Instead of turning everything blue with a cool filter, Wild Bastards forces you to stop, listen, and approach cautiously.

One of the game’s best features is how your heroes fight in pairs, though not side by side. You swap between your two characters mid-fight, effectively treating each hero like a different weapon with its own abilities and health bar. The key to survival is managing their health and powers as you progress through each planet, but make no mistake—this isn’t a frenetic shooter where you’re sliding around corners or chaining execution animations. It’s a slower, more tactical game, where patience and timing matter as much as your aim.

Not that there aren’t chaotic moments. One fight had me dodging rocket-launching grizzlies in a swamp while rooftop bombers rained cluster bombs on my head. But more often, the tension builds slowly. You’ll creep through ruined huts, knowing a gang of shotgun-toting enemies is lurking inside, waiting for you to get too close. These are the moments when Wild Bastards truly captures that cowboy standoff vibe, especially when environmental hazards—like toxic pools, snowbanks, or lightning storms—force you and your enemies into tight spots.

Between firefights, the planet maps offer shops where you can buy mods for your characters, like jump-boosting boots or fire-resistant ponchos. However, you lose these mods after each star system, which might annoy roguelike veterans expecting permanent upgrades. If you hated the weapon durability in Breath of the Wild, this mechanic might grind your gears.

But the real prize isn’t the mods—it’s the new outlaws you unlock at the end of each system. Starting heroes like Spider Rosa (with her pistol) and Casino (with his shotgun) are pretty basic, but soon you’ll unlock characters like The Judge, whose sniper rifle plays a game of hangman every time you land a shot, or Kaboom, who goes invisible while tossing dynamite. The voice acting embraces the full Western vibe, with bandits spitting out lines like, "It ain't right, zappin' a feller eye-wise," after one of their comrades is taken out by laser vision. The dialogue alone is worth the price of admission.

That said, not all outlaws are equally fun to play. Characters like Hopalong, a lizard dude who uses a lasso to incapacitate enemies, feel slow and clunky compared to more reliable heroes like Roswell, who dishes out rapid-fire plasma blasts. And some of the ultimate abilities, like Smoky's “Cookout” or Casino’s “Roulette,” can wipe out enemies from across the battlefield without you even seeing them—useful, but not particularly satisfying.

Wild Bastards is a game that flirts with both innovation and awkwardness. It brings some fresh ideas to the roguelike shooter genre, like slower, more deliberate gunfights, hero-swapping mechanics, and decaying equipment. But it also stumbles with stiff default controls, a clunky UI, and some baffling bugs (I had a fight auto-resolve the moment the countdown ended—twice).

Despite the messiness, I couldn’t help but enjoy the ride. The game’s quirks—its unpredictable pacing, oddball characters, and frequent personality clashes among the outlaws—will either charm you or frustrate you. It’s not for everyone, especially if you prefer fast-paced roguelikes, but if you’re willing to embrace the slow-burn tension and soak in the cowboy atmosphere, Wild Bastards has a lot to offer. It may take a while to heat up, but like a pot of beans over a campfire, it’s worth the wait.