Wild Bastards is a successor of sorts to Void Bastards, from developer Blue Manchu. While the previous game was a procedural “strategy shooter” inspired by the likes of System Shock, Wild Bastards is more of a roguelike with board game affectations. Each map is a small set of challenges you have to endure with a small team of outlaws, and surviving can net you all kinds of rewards. Of course, the main goal is building a crew… or in this case, reanimating one.

In the demo I played, which roughly comprised an hour of gameplay, I started the journey with a pair of Wild West weirdos. Spider Rosa has extra arms that hold extra pistols, letting her shoot and reload at the same time. Casino uses a straightforward shotgun, but his more interesting powers turn the stage into a gamble. The story involves adding more and more characters to the cast, such as Smoky, who does a lot of stuff with fire.

The game’s structure uses a board style, which has you moving pieces around with a set number of moves per turn. You can choose to land on various spaces that either give you special items, move you around on the board, start combat, or one of many other events or functions. Combat scenarios are small but challenging showdowns that pit you against a specific group of enemies. You can trade the Infamy you earn from taking down baddies for more goods, such as mods you can equip to your crew for the duration of that board.

One thing I noticed about Wild Bastards is how many variables there are. There’s a ton of stuff you can come across on your map. Some upgrades you can find are permanent, and others will only last across a stage. You can also find healing, shops for additional mods or items, and even support you can call-in for combat showdowns. There’s also a baked-in time limit that calls in a pretty much unbeatable boss character, who will chase you down if you don’t escape in time.

This is definitely a complex game, and the hyper specific and varied powers of each unlockable outlaw make it even more complex. Mods add additional abilities such as rocket-boosted jumping. You can also find character-specific powers that really impact a fight, such as Casino’s ability to randomly take out an enemy somewhere on the map, or Spider Rosa’s decoys that effectively draw enemy fire. Considering how quickly your health can drop and how accurate enemies are on the default difficulty, distractions are a huge deal. It’s also funny making your enemies yell, which is how they reveal their whereabouts to you.

Weirdly, it was hard to tell if Wild Bastards’ roguelike loop was stressful or not. There’s so much going on at first it’s almost overwhelming, and it didn’t give me a lot of space to process the overall challenge. Smoky seemed harder to work with compared to the first two outlaws, and the second character unlock signaled the end of the demo. It looked like there are a ton more to find, which could mean there’s a lot of room for individual experiences and player expression. Having different difficulty settings out of the box is also a sign that while there's a challenge to be had here, the developers also want people to enjoy the vibes. There’s a lot of silly dialogue and zany character designs to take in, so it feels like the “something for everyone” potential is very high with Wild Bastards.

Wild Bastards is aiming for a 2024 release date on PC. A demo code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this preview.