Wild Bastards

Lore & Background

Wild Bastards is a single-player roguelike first-person shooter featuring a full story campaign with multiple difficulties and modes. There are 13 playable characters, called Outlaws, all members of the titular Wild Bastards. Outlaws have feuds and friendships, which affect who can team up and certain gameplay synergies. The game begins with the remaining 2 outlaws tasked with crossing the galaxy and resurrecting their fallen teammates. The player can warp to different sectors that feature randomized planets and anomalies. Players choose a path through the sector and land on planets to gather mods, upgrades, and rescue playable characters. While on a planet, the player has a limited move set on a gameboard of encounters, navigating and surviving while planning a path to get loot and escape on the Beam Station tile. If an outlaw dies on a planet, they must be healed with a tonic to become playable again.

Reader's Guide

Wild Bastards is a spiritual sequel to Blue Manchu's previous game Void Bastards, announced in March 2024. The game received generally favorable reviews, with PC Gamer favorably comparing it to Arkane Studios' Deathloop, calling it 'a successful splicing of the roguelike and FPS genres.' NintendoLife was far more critical, finding the cast of characters fun and amusing but criticizing the gunplay as 'bland and simplistic' and stating the game progresses to nothing challenging or satisfying. CheckpointGaming rated the title 7.5/10, praising the gunplay as experimental, fluid, and frenetic, but criticizing the game length as 'dragging.' The mixed reception highlights a divide in opinion on the core gameplay loop, with some appreciating its experimental nature and others finding it repetitive or unchallenging.

Did You Know?

• The game features 13 playable Outlaws, each with feuds and friendships affecting gameplay synergies.
• The game was announced in March 2024.

The Unreliable Narrator as Gameplay Engine

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger distinguishes itself by making narrative structure a core gameplay mechanic rather than a backdrop. The entire campaign unfolds as Silas Greaves, a bounty hunter, regaling a group of saloon patrons in 1910 with his exploits from the latter half of the nineteenth century. The designers, drawing structural inspiration from the game Bastion, cast Silas as a deliberately unreliable narrator whose tales grow increasingly grandiose and implausible. When his audience calls out inconsistencies, the story literally rewrites itself in real time. A shootout that never occurred is undone as the narrative rewinds. An Apache war party materializes and vanishes without explanation. A cave escape physically forms in front of the player only after Silas mentions a way out. One level is experienced three separate times, each retelling shaped by a different character's perspective. Weather shifts mid-level as Silas adjusts the season. At one point, the narrative simply pauses while Silas steps away to the toilet, and the player overhears the patrons debating whether his stories hold up. This approach transforms the fine line between fact and legend into an interactive experience, examining how the myths of the American West were constructed.

Layered Combat and the Concentration System

As a first-person shooter, Gunslinger confines the player to a single protagonist, Silas Greaves, navigating sequential objectives across each level. The arsenal spans six-shooters, quickshooters, rangers, shotguns, sawed-off variants, rifles, and dynamite, with more powerful options unlocking as the campaign progresses. What sets the combat apart is its multi-tiered concentration system. The standard mode charges through kills, with headshots building the meter faster than body shots, and when activated, the world slows while every enemy glows red. Beyond this, falls and door breaches trigger automatic slow-motion sequences at set locations regardless of meter status. Quick Time Events demand the player press a specific button to eliminate up to five targets in rapid succession, with the reticle auto-advancing on success. The most dramatic variant, Sense of Death, fills as the player teeters near death; when Silas is one bullet from dying, time dilates and the player can dodge left or right to sidestep the fatal shot. Every takedown also feeds an experience system, where cumulative modifiers like range, headshots, and ricochets stack to reward skilled marksmanship.

Redeeming a Franchise

The third entry in the series, The Cartel, had shifted the setting to the modern day and was met with critical disdain and poor sales, leaving the Call of Juarez brand in tatters. Gunslinger was conceived as a deliberate act of redemption. By returning to the Wild West terrain that defined the first two installments, the development team at Techland, publishing through Ubisoft, set out to reclaim the franchise's identity. Their strategy centered on storytelling and myth-making rather than pure action, a philosophy that paid off. Critics responded warmly, singling out the narrative voice, the snappy arcade-style gunplay, the visual presentation, the voice performances, and the humor. Many reviewers explicitly stated the game was strong enough to make them forget The Cartel existed. The few common criticisms centered on a predictable conclusion and boss encounters that felt underdeveloped. Commercially, the gamble succeeded: Gunslinger became Ubisoft's second-highest-selling digital-only title of 2013, trailing only Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. A faithful Nintendo Switch port arrived in December 2019, earning similar praise for its fidelity, though some reviewers flagged control issues.

A Constellation of Wild West Icons

Though it is the fourth title in the Call of Juarez series, Gunslinger is narratively disconnected from its three predecessors. Its central plot follows Silas Greaves as he pursues the outlaw Roscoe 'Rustling Bob' Bryant across the American West of the second half of the nineteenth century. What elevates the experience is the sheer density of historical figures Silas encounters, sometimes as allies, sometimes as adversaries. His path crosses with Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, Newman Haynes Clanton, Johnny Ringo, Curly Bill Brocius, Henry Plummer, and John Wesley Hardin. He faces off against a Chiricahua war party, the Dalton Gang, George Curry, Kid Curry, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Jesse James, and Frank James. This constellation of real and legendary names transforms the campaign into a living anthology of frontier folklore. Because Silas is an unreliable narrator, these encounters are filtered through his embellished memory, blurring the boundary between documented history and the kind of tall-tale mythology that built the cultural image of the Old West. The game essentially asks the player to question which version of these figures is the true one.