It only took one match of Wildgate to see the potential in its spacefaring PvPvE mayhem. Now, after just over 20 hours of playtime, I’m also noticing where there is still room for it to build on that compelling concept. The intensely cooperative chaos of managing a spacecraft, delving into PvE dungeons for loot, and fending off rival crews makes for complex and exciting contests of teamwork and communication. Unfortunately, that level of coordination doesn’t always lead to great outcomes when matchmaking with random crewmates, where silent players or, worse yet, insanely toxic personalities can make for a bad time. But when a matchmade crew manages to come together, or you bring your own friends to the party, Wildgate’s simple but solid gunplay and multifaceted ship-to-ship combat give Sea of Thieves a run for its money.
Wildgate is a unique multiplayer sci-fi shooter that sends five teams of four players out into the most dangerous section of the galaxy, called the Reach, to battle it out for loot and glory. Their ultimate goal is to find the all-important Artifact hidden somewhere in space and escape with it out of the Wildgate, but since there’s the little issue of only being one to go around, a clash of crews in tumultuous FPS combat is all but inevitable. To improve your chances of survival (and search for the Artifact along the way), you’ll want to hurriedly touch down to enter as many of the small PvE dungeons as possible, killing enemies and solving simple puzzles to claim whatever loot they’re hiding.
Upgrading your spacecraft with better shields, weapons, defensive measures, and stat improvements (like improved turning speed) can make all the difference when an enemy vessel nears and all hell breaks loose, which make for Wildgate’s tensest moments. If you’re able to find and escape with the Artifact, or simply murder all the enemy crews before they’re able to extract it themselves, then victory is yours, and in matches that can run over 40 minutes each, the taste of triumph is one of the sweetest there is.
There’s no story to be found in Wildgate, or at least not one outside of little snippets you can read from a menu between matches, but the world definitely has a distinct and endearing personality to it. That could be in the baddies you run into like raiders and alien life forms who look like booger people, or the playable characters, called Prospectors, who span from a big dog-looking alien to an aquatic creature in a mecha fishbowl. Each Prospector has their own interesting set of traits and abilities they can use to contribute to the team’s success (or demise). Ion, the four-armed alien can use his brawn to damage the hulls of ships just by smacking them with his fists, while Venture the robot serves as a great starter character since they don’t require oxygen to survive, regenerate health faster, and get warned when enemies are behind them.
I’ve had a lot of fun trying each one out to see which suits my playstyle, with my favorite being Mophs the winged, bird-like humanoid that can turn invisible, which is absolutely invaluable when boarding enemy ships to perform subterfuge. But as is the case with lots of stuff in Wildgate, the biggest issue is simply a scarcity of options, because it doesn’t take long at all to unlock and try each of them out. Seeing the same handful of familiar characters aboard each ship just feels a bit underwhelming in an endless galaxy of possibilities.
Though matches have been a lot of fun to play repeatedly the past few days, with only one game mode, seven characters, four models of starship, and a handful of weapons to use, it all feels a tad thin at the moment. If developer Moonshot Games comes out the (wild)gate swinging with regular updates that introduce new weapons, enemies, characters, and ships in the fashion of something like Helldivers 2, then I can definitely see Wildgate having some real legs. But, at the moment, it feels like just a taste of what will hopefully be a game with a lot more variety down the road, and I already feel like I’ve seen just about everything that can happen across the matches I’ve played so far. There’s still a ton of fun to be found in getting better at winning, and knowing what I know now about the types of dungeons to be found and loot to be claimed has made me a lot more strategic with how I play, but I stopped being surprised by things I saw out in the Reach pretty quickly.
I’ve got plenty more of Wildgate to play before my final review – I didn’t even talk about ship-to-ship combat yet, for example, since I’m still in the process of trying all of the different vessels out – but so far it’s been a lot of fun to play with friends marred by much less fun matches when on matchmade teams (the amount of slurs I heard shouted over the proximity voice chat on day one was frankly startling). I’m hopeful the Moonshot will be quick to add new content, because there’s the makings of a great live-service game here, and I’m eager to dive back in.
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