I’ve only seen the “Wildgate” in Wildgate once. It was during the tutorial where its charming announcer lady introduced me to the many, many systems that drive this PvP space shooter, which will release on Steam later this month.
The goal is pretty simple: Drop into space with your crew of four players, loot upgrades for your ship, find the artifact, and escape through the Wildgate. Oh, and do all of this before one of the other five ships takes you out or pulls it off first.
As far as the first half of your mission goes, looting asteroids and derelict ships for spare parts is a blast. It reminds me of the early phases of a battle royale game or a MOBA. It’s all about efficiently gathering up items and resources so you’re ready for the inevitable confrontation with an enemy team. You’ll find ammo for your ship’s guns, shield enhancers, and other ways to reinforce your ride as you explore its randomized section of space.
Each point-of-interest is marked with a difficulty rating and a hint at what kind of loot you’ll find inside. I’m nowhere near good enough to know how that info helps you prioritize where it’s worth taking a pit stop, but given everything else going on in Wildgate, I expect to get pickier about it with more experience.
In the matches I played during the open beta, my crew hit up pretty much anything in front of us. Sometimes the big rocks just have piles of loot to take back to the ship, other times there are aliens to clear out first. These small PvE encounters are mostly forgettable—like farming creeps in a MOBA—but add just enough tension to keep you busy long enough for an enemy ship to sneak up on you.
For most of my matches, the first 10 minutes were pretty chill. One of us would steer the ship toward places to scavenge while the rest of us flew probes around to mark where to head next. My last run, however, was the opposite of chill.
I was busy deciding which item to take back with me when I heard one of the characters on my team say something about detecting an enemy ship. Ships move slow and this early in the game that isn’t usually a cause for alarm, because players generally spend some time equipping themselves before starting a fight. Not this team.
When I teleported back to our ship, everything was on fire. An enemy ship’s laser beams were slicing through our shields while our pilot was trying to speed us out of there. Unfortunately we were boxed in by shards of rock and debris. I got out my repair tool to help stabilize things and saw that the rest of our crew were still dawdling around on the nearby asteroid.
By the time they came back, our ship had lost half its health. I fired at the enemy frigate and watched as little dots fled the enemy’s ship through the foggy purple expanse toward us. The dots grew bigger and bigger until I could just make out that they were in fact enemy players who were on their way to board us.
I heard a clunk as one of them landed on the roof and trained my gun at the door. A few seconds passed before I heard gunshots and saw in the killfeed that one of my teammates had taken two enemies out right above me. I exhaled and went back to putting out fires.
Even though this was merely the first act of our eventual demise, it was proof to me that Wildgate has all the parts for a compelling storytelling machine. This isn’t the kind of FPS where firefights are quick and straightforward. There are tactics and surprises at play in every match. You never know when a team is going to show up to gank you or engage in a prolonged ship battle that plays out like a Star Wars battle.
I may not have ever made it far enough in a match to be one of the last ships standing, but I always came away with a handful of anecdotes that had me eager to see what else could happen. It’s not surprising to me that Wildgate has quite a few ex-Blizzard developers behind it. Like Overwatch, it’s designed for everyone to contribute and engage with its systems before the defeat screen, which not only eases the stress of a fight, but can make losing kind of fun anyway.
Team troubles
The problem is there’s a lot going on—almost too much going on for a squad-based game. If there’s anything that worries me about Wildgate it’s the solo experience.
I just finished reviewing Elden Ring Nightreign, a PvE run-based battle royale game where your team of three needs to gain as many levels as you can before the boss fights. Coordination is key and anyone who tries to do their own thing runs the risk of dooming the run. Wildgate might be worse, partially because it’s PvP and partially because there are so many plates to spin. Someone needs to be scouting for areas to loot; someone needs to be at the wheel; someone needs to be ready to board enemy ships; and someone should be on-board to defend the ship. And everyone has to be flexible based on the situation.
Naturally, this means playing solo is like playing on hard mode. Wildgate has in-game voice chat if that’s your thing, but that doesn’t solve how steep of a learning curve it has for understanding what you should be doing at any moment. My first few matches I was lost during the ship battles, which are ultimately what Wildgate is all about. Nothing in the tutorial helps you gauge whether a fight is worth taking or not, and most players don’t seem to understand the concept of retreating. All the nuanced decision-making built into the game flies out the airlock when people see an enemy ship to board.
Wildgate is desperately in need of more incentives for players to utilize all of its systems for combat because I fear it will be ruled by sweaty teams on voice chat pretty quickly when it comes out. I expect solo queue will always be a gamble in a game as tactically complex as this, but clearer directions for new players could help avoid early struggles. I think better direction on what’s even possible could help everyone have a better handle on what they should be doing at any given moment.
For example: There are nimble spaceships built for avoiding direct confrontations, and heroes better suited for boarding than looting. I’ve seen Reddit threads about players who’ve learned the strengths and weaknesses of each ship and what angle to approach them based on what guns they have installed. There are challenges for doing things like overloading an enemy ship’s reactor or cooling down yours that help you unlock new ships, heroes, and guns, but none of them are contextualized in a way that would help you identify when they’re needed in a fight. You end up having to rely on someone knowing exactly what to do, which doesn’t exactly promote the kind of teamwork the game seems to be made for.
That I could lose every single match of Wildgate and still want to suit back up and try again says a lot for a game as demanding as this. There’s truly something special in here that I’ve not really seen in other games—even something as recent as Void Crew.
Calling Wildgate a mix of Sea of Thieves and Overwatch isn’t enough to describe how cool it is to join a ragtag group of scavengers in space, picking alien ships clean and spotting enemies through the prongs of a drifting spinal cord from some ancient beast. It’s a sandbox of dynamic PvP battles set in a pocket of space built for drama. And despite some of my hesitations, I’m ready to suit back up and see if I can help a crew make it out alive.
Wildgate will be released on July 22.