We’ve parked our ship inside a hollowed out asteroid and we’re watching competitors disembarking in the distance to secure the monolith, a POI where they can grab the game-winning artifact, but they would still need to escape with it once they grab it. Our shields are down so we’re less conspicuous, but those idiots left theirs up so they’re a big blue bubble floating silently in the void and we can see the silhouettes of their crew as they spacewalk between the ship and the monolith, presumably because they’re dying to the AI bosses protecting the macguffin.
Our ship’s hold is stuffed to the gills with turbines, these handheld propulsion devices that allow us to spacewalk at speed, and we’re waiting for our moment, which arrives when we see the artifact move deeper into the monolith. We hop onto the turbines and accelerate toward their ship, leaving ours parked safely in the hollow – our mission is to strip their ship and teleport back. When we reach it, we circle the outside looking for accessible doors, and breach the ship as a team, fanning out before gunning down the spotter who stayed behind to keep a lookout for people like us. He did a bad job. We know the rest of the crew will teleport back at any moment, so we grab what we can – a hardpoint here for extra shields, an advanced gun turret there for extra damage – and beam back to our ship to install them, but not before overloading their reactor.
I jump on the cockpit controls as my team installs our ill-gotten goods and I gun it straight for them. They’ve started to move now, but you can tell there’s sheer panic onboard as they extinguish fires and fix their reactor. You can tell because they’re heading straight for an asteroid. I leave the controls and attach a handheld rocket clamp to the wall behind the cockpit, shooting it to get a boost of uncontrolled acceleration, which places our ship right behind theirs. All three of my crewmates are ready on the newly stolen front-facing cannons – a shotgun-style shatter cannon, a rapid-fire thermic cannon, and a slow-firing cannon that pushes enemy ships with kinetic energy.
The shatter cannon cracks the rear of their shields like an egg, and I raise our shield to nullify the return blasts from the ineffectual standard cannon on their rear. They’re still trying to remove their ship from the asteroid, but our kinetic blasts keep knocking them back into position.
One of them leaves the back door of their ship and attempts to cross space to board us, but the thermic cannon swats them from the void. They know their shield is useless, so they drop it and use the extra speed to boost away, but my crewmate stands on our roof and uses a handheld gravitational device to pull them back to us – their ship is like a dog pulling against its master’s chain, and the barrage continues.
Less than a minute later, their reactor explodes, leaving behind a blackened husk, which we board and strip for parts as one of our crewmates controls the probes and searches for enemies who might have spotted the ruckus. He finds the closest a kilometer away looting a random outpost, so we finish what this enemy team started and grab the artifact before gunning it to the exit to win the game.
Don’t let the Sea of Thieves comparisons put you off; Wildgate is some of the most fun I’ve had online in years.
Where Sea of Thieves is focused on exploration and repetition, Wildgate is action-packed and stuffed with the kinds of emergent, unexpected moments you get every few hours in Sea of Thieves if you’re lucky — except here, they happen every single game, which can last between 15-45 minutes.
It’s almost a roguelite. All five player ships are dropped into a different spot in a large box of space, and their goal is to loot up at various outposts manned by AI enemies before racing to escape with the artifact through the Wildgate, which opens at a different time each match. That’s one way to win. Another is to be the last ship standing.
During each match, you have to contend with cosmic storms, fire asteroids, asteroid fields, other players, on-foot shootouts with AI and other players, ship to ship combat, intense chases, and plenty more. What makes it truly special is how every single mechanic has nuance.
Take those shields. You go much faster when they’re down, so a good pilot has to know when to drop them and when to have them up. That rocket booster I used? You can place it on an enemy ship and shoot it, too, altering their trajectory to make them hit an asteroid or veer off course on the way to the gate. Hell, you could throw them straight into a cosmic storm if you send someone onboard to check they don’t have a storm shield (and steal it if they do). That slow-moving kinetic projectile we fired at the enemy ship to keep it stuck? They could have placed a crewmate outside and shot them out of the void with their assault rifle, rendering them ineffective, if they weren’t in panic mode. Every single match is a lesson for next time.
Moonshot Games’ co-founders speak about their time after Blizzard and their new game Wildgate. An interview with Moonshot Games.. dark. Next
I really appreciate how, even when you fail, you can watch a match play out with a free camera spectator mode. You can fly freely through space and watch epic ship battles, picking up tactics for next time or just enjoying the show. Every multiplayer game should have this.
The only thing letting the game down right now is how easy it is to board. Some kind of delay on door opening for boarders would solve the issue because right now it’s far too easy for annoying teams to constantly board and grenade spam through the doors — but even then, a good team can counter it with an electrical field upgrade, smashing the button to repel boarders. There’s a tool for everything, so it feels like your fault when you don’t successfully counter an enemy’s plans because it is. It’s your fault.
At the time of writing, the official Wildgate account on Twitter has just over 5,000 followers, and that’s a travesty. This is one of the most inventive, exciting multiplayer games in years — a proper remedy for all the copycat hero shooters we’ve had to contend with. It might look like one of those at a glance, but Wildgate is something else, an experience we haven’t had before. Get three mates, choose a ship, and head out into the rift for the most fun you can have online right now. If Wildgate’s post-launch plans come to fruition, it’s only going to get better.
Xbox Series X. Wildgate. Wildgate review score. 9. First-Person Shooter