An alien named Roswell beams down to the planet’s surface. It’s the kind of incident that might confirm 75 years of UFO conspiracies, were it not for the fact that Ros is accompanied by a robot sniper named Judge, and the planet in question isn’t Earth. In point of fact, it’s Aquarius Minor, a frontier world on the edge of the Baal sector, where the locals once mined a dangerously aggressive material named cramm. So dangerous was it that cramm consumed the place, leaving behind a desert landscape populated by roaming coyotes and rageful grizzlies.
The paved roads remain, though – a rare blessing in this part of the galaxy, and one we’re happy to capitalise on. If we take the path west at a gallop, we can pick up a pile of deactivated cramm – the closest thing to currency around here – and spend it on homing-weapon mods. To the south there’s a roadblock staffed by gun hands and assassins, but if we fight our way through, there’s an Ace card waiting on the other side, ready to level up one of our posse. Most tempting, however, is the innocuous floppy disk waiting in the hills to the east. It contains enemy data, and if we’re very lucky, might spill the beans on those assassins – the damage type of their pistols, their weak spots, and how best to counter their teleportation attacks. The data wins out. Forget the cramm: in Wild Bastards, nothing’s more dangerous than an enemy unknown.
Mulling over this and tougher decisions still, we recall E397’s Blue Manchu Studio Profile, in which founder Jon Chey spoke with regret about his white-whale project at Irrational – an XCOM shooter he felt unable to pull together. Hopefully Chey now feels he can put that failure to bed, knowing he’s finally hit the mark. Wild Bastards flits masterfully between its tactical layer and buoyant firstperson shootouts, neither side of the game dominating the other. It’s a Roguelike of sorts, demanding that you guide your outlaws through a series of consecutive planetary runs before you can zip to the next sector and take on daunting new challenges. Encountering rocket-belching bears for the first time knocks us for six, while burrowing poison snakes initially make a mockery of our six-shooters. The pain of the squad wipe lives on.