There’s little in games that thrill me more than solid, snappy first-person-shooter gunplay and titles in the roguelike genre. Even greater is the simple but still to this day galaxy brain idea of merging the two, creating to me some of the best and most fun to play titles of the last few years. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the inventiveness of games like Deathloop and how exciting it was to navigate time loops and use my memory from prior loops to finally take out that one dastardly target. 2019’s Void Bastards is but another example of this fusion, creating tight gunplay combined with the risk vs reward nature that comes with the genre. Five years later we have a spiritual successor with a Western setting in Wild Bastards. While it doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel or turn the original on its head, it’s more of that fun, slick and strategic combat you’ve come to know.

Wild Bastards is the return of Australian developer Blue Manchu Games and it’s evident through my 15-odd hours of playing that this is a refinement of their craft. Trading up the space-ship prison setting for planet exploring with a set of adventurers, the meta has changed as combat encounters are more akin to open arenas for showdowns rather than narrow tense corridors of gunfire. This leads to more experimentation, exploration and a higher fighting chance. This potential expands tenfold with upwards of thirteen playable characters, each of whom does a good job of handling wildly different situations than the one prior.

The story goes that you are a band of outlaws on an intergalactic journey to reassemble. The band is getting back together. The boys have never been more back in town. Serving as a spanner in the works is that each is stranded across different galaxies and planets, with many a bounty hunter, venomous Western space critters and the like standing in the way of you and your buddies. There are thirteen of you, and you must navigate both overworld maps for galaxies and individual planets, overcoming many obstacles. At the end of a galaxy awaits one of your friends to add back to the posse. Suffice it to say, it’s going to take quite some time before that fully-fledged hearty reunion.

In true roguelike fashion, navigating these overworld maps comes with a lot of choice and risk vs reward. Having a map for planets where you can preview at least some of the conditions and one of the big rewards you’ll get out of that instanced run is a compelling idea because when you choose to land on a planet, that planet’s map may very well be your pitfall. Not every tile on the planet is a combat encounter. There’s the usual shop expected shop to get expected mods or other supplies to aid your cast of outlaws. Some tiles will have resources such as extra health or permanent upgrades (cards labelled as Aces) for characters. Combat encounters may be in the distance some moves away from you, known as roadblocks. All of this is very stock standard until after a set number of turns and moves across the board a bounty hunter spawns in. Uh oh!

This powerful character that moves across the board and will signify a combat encounter should they collide with you will ruthlessly hunt you down. Suddenly navigating this overworld becomes even more of a thinking man’s game. Do I keep two outlaws bundled together in a party so they’re in higher strength when the inevitable force that is the bounty hunter finally reaches me? Or do I split the party up and have them cover other ends of the map, utilising teleporters and the like in an attempt to get the ship’s beam that’ll safely get the crew off the planet? This kind of on-the-fly thinking is required constantly in Wild Bastards.

What will be fantastic news for some and sort of annoying to others is that Wild Bastards is a little too forgiving on standard difficulty. If all your currently deployed outlaws (a maximum of four) get downed on a planet, you can start again from the current planet as long as there are backup outlaws on your ship. If there aren’t, at least you’re only taken back to the start of the current galaxy. This becomes even more trivial with the more stacked your party count gets the more you play and the upgrades they’ll quickly collect. Thirteen is a very generous number of outlaws to choose from and though I’m glad there’s never a shortage of diverse playstyles to choose from, it makes the latter third of the game feel like it drags on a little too long. By ten hours I felt like I’d seen everything the game had to offer and already had a majority of my party near max level. Then it went on for another five hours following that. Then the game expects me to be stoked to jump into challenge modes after all that? At least all of that time is fun, I guess?

In fact, the hardest challenge I found with Wild Bastards is understanding all its moving parts and mechanics. This is because there’s a lot to keep track of and not all of it is tutorialised aptly. For one, outlaws can have ‘feuds,’ meaning they won’t agree to go down together to a planet. It never really gives a sufficient rhyme or reason as to why characters are deciding to feud and it happens a little too often for my liking that it becomes a pain to manage. The only way to remedy this is by having the pair share a meal in a can of beans together, a resource I’m always lacking a little too much in. Outlaws’ beam down to a planet can be unsuccessful, meaning they’re separated from the pack’s starting position and are out of play until they get rescued on the map, what some planet modifiers mean and how that can affect your run… several little bits and pieces of Wild Bastards aren’t telegraphed to you enough. It takes a good few hours before you understand what to look out for and how to be as strategic as the game wants you to be.

One unsung hero for me is Hopalong, an anthropomorphic snake with a cowboy hat and lasso that slithers down low to the ground when sprinting and does so silently. Before the enemy even knows where you are, you’ve snared them in your lasso, holding down the fire button long enough to dispatch said enemy. They play a little awkwardly at first but when you get to know them you’re snaking around a showdown map, a silent foe ducking between covers before getting the upper hand on an unknowing robot, intergalactic beastie or cowboy. Though they also are a little squishier and weaker an outlaw, unable to resist as much damage as others. If all else fails, you, like every outlaw, can use their ability via a pickup found on the map. For Hopalong, this is a stun for all enemies across the map that runs for a generous while, meaning you can both freely move about and get an eye for where everyone is but also chain a solid amount of takedowns if you’re quick enough, creating more ample breathing room.

Players will be pleased to know you can trip and stumble into some absolutely cracked builds with the mods on offer. One run through a planet saw me with the aforementioned double-barred shotgun-wielding Casino having a mod to their bullets that made them homing. This meant I could shotgun enemies from across the map provided I aimed in their general direction. Without fail this would take foes out in one hit, snaking around corners and covers to eliminate them. In another instance, Spider Rosa nabbed two mod upgrades: one that would make her invulnerable for a few seconds if she got hit and one that would do the same if she killed an enemy. This meant I could parade a map all cocky, taking out baddies with her revolvers left and right, never taking all that much damage for long. When you get these sorts of builds you joyously feel like you’ve broken Wild Bastards. I even caught myself laughing when I was able to make fights trivial through means like this.

I didn’t think it’d be possible for Blue Manchu Games to top how striking their graphic-novel art style was in Void Bastards. Little did I know all they had to do was take those strengths and fuse the sci-fi with a Western setting. Pop-up saloons depicted in neon on a cratered Moon planet with low gravity. Acidic bayou-like planets with docked ships and baddies hiding in thick reeds… It’s a striking and deliberate juxtaposition of aesthetics that’s been done before, but it always makes for a great end result. It’s incredibly fun to truly feel like a rootin’ tootin’ intergalactic outlaw cowboy as I watch comic-book-esque explosions erupt around me. The fact enemy assets are also 2D in these 3D environments is yet another aesthetic choice I never tire of that I always think looks good.

These also carry over to the character designs of the main outlaw cast. I’ve only touched on some of the characters here because it’s worth you stumbling upon and getting to know some of yourself. Though some include: an interstellar horse-man sheriff, a nomadic fish person armed with a sci-fi bow and arrow, a pistol-wielding Cthulu squid man and a ghost figure that throws dynamite about. You’ll get to know and be taken by their designs in the visual-novel-style dialogue interactions that feature their sprites in narrative moments. The cast is so distinguished and exciting that you truly feel like you’ve got your own messed-up freak family of outlaws at your disposal.