Wildgate review

The tragedy of Wildgate is that it might be too clever for its own good.

Although it's a hero shooter on its surface, Wildgate is really a competitive ship battler. As you race other players to gather resources and build a better spaceship, it feels like playing as a unit in a sci-fi RTS. It's no surprise that Wildgate's game director, Dustin Browder, was previously the lead designer on StarCraft 2.

Even though you always have three other players on your team, success in Wildgate depends on your ability to juggle several different tasks in a short amount of time. Neglect your fuel and you won't be able to dodge another ship ramming straight into you. Skip out on mining ice and your reactor will overheat and eventually explode. Every individual decision you make impacts the strength of your ship and your chances of making it out alive.

Matches split players into five ships, each manned by four players. You're let loose in a big pocket of space filled with asteroid fields and derelict freighters to scavenge for loot. It's a race to load up your ship with parts and weapons so you won't be empty-handed when you inevitably cross paths with another ship.

Wildgate's structure is a lot like a battle royale where the level is so big that conflict is fairly random until the final moments of a match. Teams often get taken out while you're still busy fighting aliens and sifting through the rewards. The last ship standing automatically wins, but after a set amount of time the Wildgate portal will open allowing any team in possession of a special artifact to claim an instant victory.

At its best, Wildgate can create an entire story arc as your team rises in power, overcomes unforeseen obstacles, and eventually beats the odds. At its worst, Wildgate gives you 30-minute slogs where nobody is quite sure what to do until another more coordinated team dismantles your ship before you can even react.

In its current state, Wildgate's best matches are far too rare and too demanding to make me want to stick around. It's one of the most creative shooters I've played in a while, but at times I think the entire concept is better on paper than it is as a game.

High bar

The sign of a good multiplayer game is when a match is so dramatically resonant that you don't care if you lost. I had one of these happen in Wildgate and I've been searching for that high ever since. What unfolded in that match was both emblematic of how smartly designed Wildgate's systems are and also how demanding it is for a team of random players.

It started off strong. One player immediately took the wheel and brought us to an asteroid covered in crystal spikes with an entrance that opened up like the mouth of a dragon. Wildgate follows in the lineage of Blizzard's Pixar-like visual style, filling its pocket of outer space with quickly recognizable icicle clusters, lava globules, and massive spinal cords leftover from ancient beasts.

Inside the cave, we cleared out alien hives to stop little green monsters from crawling out and swarming us. We each grabbed an upgrade from the loot room and teleported back to the ship. I found some ammo for our turrets and a module that strengthened our shields. I had marked a few other locations with higher level loot nearby and we cleared through them like a well-oiled machine. Our ship was soon packed with supplies, including a laser beam upgrade for our turrets that's made to shred enemy shields as long as you can stay within its short range. We were more than prepared for a dogfight and for the first time in many matches, I was pretty confident we could take the win.

Then an alert popped up on our screens informing us that two of the other four ships had been taken out. Opening the map revealed the locations of the dead rigs, but not of the two intact ones still roaming around. A teammate operating a probe wrote in chat that they had eyes on both ships and that we could make a run for the artifact while they fought each other.

It was a smart call: Any team who finds and escapes through the Wildgate with the artifact will instantly win the match. We agreed to take the risk of ignoring more opportunities for ship upgrades to fight through the battalion of soldiers protecting the artifact. I'd love to tell you what happened next was a nail-biting charge into the citadel housing the artifact, but Wildgate's enemies mostly stand there and soak up bullets until either you or they die—which turns the PvE combat into a chore after the novelty of fighting its different alien species wears off.

Just as the monotony of fighting through waves of soldiers was almost over, we saw that one of the two other remaining ships had gone down. Wildgate is a battle of information as much as it is rockets and lasers, and we knew the other team would've been notified that the artifact was in our hands.

Back on the ship, our pilot spotted the other team waiting by the Wildgate, camping there to catch us on the way out. There was a little bit of relief knowing we had time to clear a path toward the ship and hoof it out of there with the artifact. But then our pilot gave us an update not a minute later: The enemy crew changed their mind and were now heading straight toward us.

Advantages like a ship missing most of its crew are rare in Wildgate, and even when they do happen, you don't have a lot of time to act on it before people start teleporting back. Our greed for the artifact and failure to quickly pivot to ship defense was our critical mistake in this match.

I teleported back just in time to see the other ship, a Bastion type with reinforced walls and extra health, emerging out of the purple haze. The pilot and I braced for whatever was about to happen to us while praying the rest of the team would give up on the artifact and help us. I watched as the enemy ship moved closer and closer until all I could see through the cockpit was its massive hull.

When the rest of our team finally appeared, it was too late. We had been thoroughly read and outplayed. The enemy ship didn't fire a single shot, but instead rammed us straight on. I heard the screech of metal on metal and the sizzle of sparks as the inside of our ship turned into a fiery hell. My other teammates tried to fire back on turrets, but I think we all knew it was over. Everyone typed "GG" into chat and accepted defeat as the reactor overheated and blades of bright energy cut through the ship in a glorious explosion.

Crash course

Out of the many matches of Wildgate I've played, no other one was as tremendous as our failed artifact caper. Since then, I've learned so many ways to avoid making similar mistakes, but have found disappointingly few opportunities to deploy any clever tactics.

There are plenty of things you pick up on after several matches. For example: You can spot what weapons a ship has installed and approach the fight accordingly. Boarding enemy ships risks taking you out of the game while you wait to respawn, but any kind of small distraction, like blowing open a door, can buy you the time to get the upper hand. There are even weapons you can bring with you to deal extra damage against PvE enemies.

But because none of this frankly vital information is communicated in the game, either through its tutorial or visual aids, most teams flop under pressure, especially early in a match. It's like trying to row a boat in unison with people who've never used an oar before. It's not their fault, but the gap in knowledge almost always dooms your run if you're against even one other more competent team.

Wildgate's current roster of seven heroes also offer their own unique strengths when it comes to controlling the course of a match. Some are better at laying traps to deter boarders and some don't have to worry about refilling oxygen when exploring. Each one has a dedicated reward track with cosmetics and weapons that suit their strengths.

I had a lot of success playing as Sal with his ability to see enemy players through walls. A lot of players lean on boarding ships to catch people unaware and it was a lot of fun to play a character built to be their nemesis. It never quite feels like the rock-paper-scissors-style clashes that you'd find in Overwatch, but kitting yourself out with things like a close-range shotgun and a shield can get real close to playing like a counter to other characters.

The same character reward tracks also unlock the different ships you can pilot. You can't guarantee which one you'll get in a match, but you can choose the one you prefer the most. I'm not sure if it's because of how new the game is, but loading into a ship other than the basic starting one was annoyingly rare. Even if the differences are minor and mostly alter their internal layouts for turret and equipment placement, it would've been nice to have more variety up front.

Flawed execution

Or maybe it wouldn't, because the number of variables in a Wildgate match can be a curse when it comes to finding a competent team. Having different characters to learn, different ships to learn, and different loot to work around gives the game a neverending chasm of depth that it would take hundreds of hours to explore.

This is the tension at the heart of Wildgate that has me convinced it would be a much better game in a LAN party. All the potential for coordination and tactics falls apart when the learning curve is so steep and the skill disparity is so vast. And it's made worse when modifiers in a match upend things like how fast an artifact spawns or what kind of hazards you'll have to avoid.

All of these are great ideas to keep every match fresh, but Wildgate's non-traditional structure and entirely useless tutorial seems to pull players of all levels of skill apart. New players get crushed before anything interesting happens and good players get stuck on teams with people who can't keep up with them. Sometimes it feels like even voice chat can't help sync up a group of strangers enough to match the coordination of a group of friends with loads of experience playing together. Unless you have a willing group of friends to join you, your only choice is to throw yourself into a meat grinder and try to learn as fast as you can to keep up with a game that seems incapable of creating matches with players of equal skill level.

On paper, Wildgate is a phenomenal blend of first-person shooting and tactical ship battles, but it's a bit of a mess in practice.

Moonshot Games has created something truly special that simply overestimates how much players can handle. I respect the complexity and see the vision, but I'm not interested in rolling the dice again and again until I find a match that's actually worth my time. The developers plan on updating the game with new heroes and ships soon, and I hope it finds a way to massage the game into something more players can get a handle on. As it is right now though, Wildgate is a better concept than it is a game.