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Space-faring ship warfare with friends is a great hook for a game. Even since videogames have been a thing, people have wanted to fly around outside of our Earthly orbit and take fiery, laser-powered shots at one another. What’s surprising is that it hasn’t been done on the carefully crafted scale that Wildgate does it at. Five ships with 1-4 person crews all spawn into a battlefield filled with hazards, loot-filled PvE opportunities, challenges, and a game-winning artifact to capture. Pilot, protect, and power up your ship’s arsenal all whilst the constant threat of opposing ships sits somewhere within the nearby space you occupy as they all try and reach the same goal: capture the artifact or take out all other ships to win the match. Wildgate, at its core, is a fun & super engaging team-based extraction shooter that facilitates some really epic moments with your buddies, but comes with a pretty steep learning curve to achieve success. After 7 hours in the skies around the Wildgate with various crews, I can say that I did come around to understanding and appreciating the mission Moonshot Games had with Wildgate, but there are some areas where I wish they’d tweak some decisions to better the gameplay experience for all skill levels.
Set out for Adventure
Loading up Wildgate, you get to go through a well-designed tutorial that gives you all the basics of what you’ll be doing out in the wide open battlefield. You learn that your chosen “prospector” is out to grab the elusive Artifact hidden somewhere in the map and escape with it on their ship through the “Wildgate”; a giant, spherical gate that opens after a set amount of time has passed in the match. That means that even if you find the artifact early, you can’t escape before the gate has opened, and everybody in the star system can track exactly where the artifact is after a crew locates it. Armed with that knowledge, you set out amongst the rock-riddled map that is chock full of points of interest to fly between and find equipment to deck out your ship with. Divvying out tasks to your crew mates is where the true strategy starts, and there are tons of important jobs to make sure you’re prepared for a fight, ready to make a getaway, or ready to start a fight head-on. Gathering ship parts, ammo, turrets, and more involves taking on PvE challenges set up within various giant crystals, spaceports, destroyed ships, and more. You never know what you’ll have to take on within these challenges, and it’s a huge highlight of the game. Coordinating if someone will man the ship whilst everyone else clears an area, positioning the ship for a getaway with your loot, celebrating the finding of a rare treasure trove of weapons as an enemy ship approaches from afar all made for fantastically unique moments that Wildgate made happen virtually every game.
There’s a calm before the storm during the first few minutes of the matches, where everyone is deciding where to go and what to do. A lot of this depends on what you can see in your immediate vicinity. Just like Sea of Thieves, the option to just go out and immediately start attacking the nearest opponent ships is there, but that could give another ship that pursues upgrades first the chance to build an arsenal and take you out later. There’s a tense game of chicken going on when you get within visual distance of another player. It’s altogether exciting and very consequential, as choosing the right moment to go in for the attack, or run if you’re pursued, can change the entire direction of the match in an instant. There truly are no rules to what you decide to do, other than that the Wildgate, your escape option to win with the artifact, doesn’t open up immediately. Because of this, if you happen to stumble upon the artifact early, your decisions expand even more. Do you put the target on your back and start traveling towards the exit? Do you use the threat and knowledge of your close location to the artifact as bait for a trap? Wildgate’s gameplay loop feels like it is designed in a way where if you don’t work as a team and make the right preparations, you’ll pay for it in the end. On the other hand, experience with the ship’s combat systems and individual Prospector gameplay styles pays off with the ability to absolutely dominate other less experienced crews.
Mastering & Adapting to the Meta
This leads me to the main trouble I had with Wildgate, and that is that it definitely already has a developed “meta” that can lead to a much higher probability of winning against human players. This matters because the only way to unlock new Prospectors and Ship models (many of which are much, much better than the ones given to you at the start) is to play matchmade PvPvE games against other crews. There is a “Versus AI” mode that is much more forgiving and allows you to learn without the threat of this overpowered meta taking you out at some random point in your match, but it doesn’t reward experience points along your various “Adventure” reward paths. These Adventure paths essentially function as free battlepass-like reward lines that give things like characters, skins, ships, costumes and more with every experience level earned. You can set your active path before each match, depending on what unlock you want to go for next. I did appreciate the option to choose, but you start with so few customization options that it’s hard to stand out for a while; especially when your first goal, if you want success, is to go for whatever Prospector or Ship is best within the game at the moment. I just really wish I could choose to enjoy and learn the game at my own pace whilst unlocking the characters I want to eventually play with. It’s hard when you want to play the absolutely adorable Mophs character, but against stronger competition, you’ve got to decide between trying to play meta or playing who you may really want to. I mean sure, you can play against AI for fun, but these matches aren’t short, and I wish I could feel like it tangibly rewarded the player for just…enjoying the game they wanted to. Sea of Thieves eventually learned this lesson with the “Safer Seas” experience, which allows you to play in a strictly PvE world with rewards coming at a reduced and capped rate.
As of this writing, some balance changes have already been made to try and mix up the most advantageous combat strategies, which is a move in the right direction. They’ve also worked on the matchmaking system, which is a welcome move, since our first two matches within the game ended within literally 3 seconds of making contact with another ship’s “onboarder” prospector Ion, which one shot two of us and melee’d the other before quickly blowing up the core of our ship with a few shots and a devastating ramming laser through the front of our ship’s window. Suffice it to say, it made us wish for the merciful space that the AI crews occupied.
Exceptionally Gratifying...Eventually
However, all that is to say that after about 3-4 hours of experimenting with strategies, applying things that had worked against us, and unlocking more ships and prospectors that gave us the same abilities that were destroying us before, Wildgate truly blossomed. Though it’s not a forgiving game to pick up, like I said earlier, it does reward your quest for knowledge and combat expertise with the chance to use those early failures to your advantage in later fights. Though there are no skill trees or points to apply to improve your character, what is always improving is your mind and awareness of what’s effective from game to game. Not every situation you run into will require pure brute force, and you won’t always be lucky enough to find the right ship cannons or upgrades that facilitate more successful ship battle encounters. Some of our most fun matches were ones where we had to adapt to the various worldwide conditions set for the map before it started, like cosmic storms, more turrets throughout, or a rare set of weapons/traps being available to acquire and use. We also all learned which roles we were best at, and yet still had to be able to adapt to the situation. It’s a game not for the faint of heart, but I sort of wish it could be, is all. It has a bit of a skill cap to truly succeed and enjoy it.
Amongst the Stars
Visually, Wildgate had a beautifully realized style that was super fun to run around in. Opinions differ on the design of the prospectors within the game, but here at GF, we have a soft spot for the fetching designs of Sammo (goat-like), Mophs (bird/moth-like), and Sal (axolotl-like.) All of the characters have extra colored skins and designs that you can unlock (for free!) as mentioned before, along with a set of voice lines and emotes. You can also deck out your various equipment and ships, all of which have their own pros and cons to play around with for playstyles, with skins. I especially loved getting to choose our crew’s ship name, with lots of creative presets to decide between. Flying to and from the different places you can check out within the map really feels like a grand adventure, and though there’s lots to decipher within the world, it all feels natural and like it has a purpose. We’re still discovering new enemies, PvE tasks and challenges, and ways to use ship enhancements we pick up. Each is a fun surprise, especially while discovering it all with friends.
All Inside Your Head
Backing all of this frantic space-faring fun is an incredibly orchestral futuristic OST by Maclaine Diemer. It’s engaging, emotion-stirring, and an absolutely perfect match to the epic adventures Wildgate wants you to go on with friends. But, it’s not always around during the matches. It rises up at important points in the match, and ferries you between them as well. During matches, the music takes a much needed backseat to the bevy of sounds around you. You’d think space would be quieter, but there’s a constant barrage of important voice lines being said by your crew about what they see and what’s happening with your ship (or on it) and a general hum of gunfire, engine noise, and a lot of other alarms, especially during fights. It is a -lot- to take in, visually and audibly, and you learn to try and keep communications to the really important decisions and tasks, along with really listening for what the game is telling you, too.
In Conclusion
Wildgate’s dev team is filled with industry vets and experts in their field. The game is tightly designed and has an incredibly satisfying gameplay loop when it “clicks” for you and your team. It’s not as easy to get into at its price point and gatekeeping of progress to PvPvE games only, but they absolutely accomplished what they set out to do, and that’s to create a unique, artistically pleasing spaceship battle extraction game that focuses on strategizing with your fellow teammates against 4 other crews trying to accomplish the same goals as you. Is that vision one that everyone will agree with and be able to enjoy to its fullest? No. But those that can will really love it.
