Wildgate is a title that’s been in the works for Moonshot and in partnership with Dreamhaven, and recently opened up to a closed community beta for a couple of days. And well, I’m here to share what I experienced, what I think of it, and what could make it better.

To explain what this is like from a bird’s eye view, this is a combination of cooperative raiding, and a sort of battle-royale. 5 teams of 4 will wander around a map, looking for upgrades that will make their own weapons and ship stronger. But the real objective is to find the artifact, hidden among the many little dungeons around the map, and escape with it through the Wildgate. Otherwise, the other way to win is to be the last ship standing. Now, if any of that sounds good, or it piques your interest. Let’s take a closer look together.

Graphics wise, the game reminds me a bit about yester-year, or decade, honestly. Not that it looks terrible, but that’s what the aesthetic reminds me of. It’s like I’m seeing the universe Buzz Lightyear might have existed in before Disney recently decided otherwise. NPCs you fight presently come as either faceless legions or hordes of green monsters that hatch from piles of eggs. Much of what you see, like abandoned ships, wreckage, and even weapons fire are simple, easy to understand, and distinct from each other. Making it easy to discern what you’re looking at. I find the music fitting for your prospector adventure, which is another way of just saying space pirate, in my opinion. And audio call outs from within the game describe the kind of characters you’re playing and the ones around you.

 So let’s get to the meat of the game, what is it like?

All 5 teams are spawned in random points of the map that appears to be procedurally generated every time. And you might have guessed it, nobody knows what the entire map looks like. To figure out what’s nearby and around you, someone has to take out a probe and start scanning whatever’s in range. You’re likely to find several locations that are indicated to be easy or of medium difficulty, and you approach with your ship to raid these places. Abandoned cargo ships, military installations, a rock with spore creatures, it’s quite a variety of things to find. Each of them end up being their own little 5 to 10 minute dungeons that offer loot proportional to how hard it is to clear them. Most of the time they’re upgrades or supplies for your ship, giving you better shields, an energy lance that serves as a battering ram, or turrets. Some other items could be a turbine that makes it easier to cruise through space without being on a ship, a bomb that you can plant against an opponent, a tractor beam that can be used to pull all sorts of things towards you, or an alternate weapon you can use with limited ammo.

After some time the wild gate would have powered up, where you can continue farming for better gear, hunt for other crews to steal what they have, or look for the treasure that wins you the game, the artifact.

Going after other crews when they’re split up, unaware and vulnerable can be ideal. But once you start firing shots from your ship turrets, every other crew out there will know where you are. So knowing how to pilot your ship, how shields work, how much supplies you have to keep shooting your turrets, and how much fuel you have left to make use of boosts that you’ll need to either chase or flee from opponents are things you’ll have to consider.

Going after the artifact is the most direct way of winning, which always has a special dungeon you have to get through to finish. Think about those little quest raids in Destiny 2, and you’re more or less on the money. Note that the entire time you’re doing this, other crews can find your ship and jump in on the action. So knowing what to do at any point is going to be key to winning.

And to know what you want to do, you’ll want to understand what sort of kit you have. By default, you’ll be assigned to the bot-type character, which requires no oxygen and can survive in space indefinitely. There are other races you can play as that operate differently, and they’ll definitely have their pros and cons. You can also customize your loadout featuring two weapons you can freely change as well as two gadgets that let you do the same. You can have drones that float around for a little while that shoot any nearby enemies, set traps that can make invaders easy targets, or just have extra ammo to keep you from getting easily cornered. There’s a lot of possibilities with how you can play.

What you can’t really escape is the fact that your crew consists of 4 players. And there’s so many things you can do, but can’t have done all at the same time. Your default ship has four turrets and a helmsman seat to fill, on top of that, someone has to manage repairs and maintaining your core engine. One or more of the crew will have to respond to emergencies like opponents boarding the ship, or a part of the ship breaking while in combat. Every decision you can take has a certain amount of risk attached to it, and it’s a matter of figuring out the best action to take at any point that will lead your team to victory.

Even if you manage to have the best upgrades for your ship, even if your team loads the artifact onto it, you still have to escape the map through the wildgate, and every ship that knows you have it will do everything they can to prevent that. It’s a game with a very dynamic and daring concept.

It’s a game that finishes in about 30 minutes to an hour, which might be a little long, but do note that a lot of the people playing are still on the learning curve, and maybe they’ll figure out how to play this more efficiently as time goes on. There’s also the question if people want to play that way, for example, casual MOBA games tend to drag on because not everyone is in a rush to finish it. Making it require 20 people to start a game may also cause issues should, for example, a crewmate or two decide to just boot early when they don’t feel like the game is going in their favor. But we’ll have to see how much this becomes an issue as they release further betas down the line.

What I do find a bit of a concern are two things, first would be the piloting of ships. It was a little difficult to understand how the momentum pitch, direction and finer details about piloting a ship was a bit difficult to understand from the get go. It might be better to have some form of corrective auto-pilot that we can choose to have on. I ended up running into debris and such just trying to park the ship properly. It was also becoming difficult to visualize where the enemy ships were as we were flying past each other in combat, another way to deal with this might be to have an alternative view visible for the pilot so they can track or dodge things better.

The second issue would be spawn camping. The time to kill I think is in a good enough place, but having people quickly be able to board the ship, and then proceed to snipe crew members became a problem for me as I was getting better at the game. I realized how low-risk and highly rewarding it was to disrupt ship operations so long as I can take out enough of them. Since they all spawn at the same place, it was easy to predict where they would come from, and where they would be looking. I think either some spawn protection or randomization of spawn positions would do well in making this strategy less effective.

So down to the big question. Would I play this again? And with friends? I’d say yes, but I’m not so sure about having friends that want to try this since this takes a lot of effort to learn. Maybe with some balances or quality of life improvements to make it not as difficult to take on other roles, this could be a great game for people that want to squad up and take on the world. Looking forward to future developments for Wildgate, which is dated to release this year, pretty impressed that all it really needs now is some balance changes.

You can find more information about Wildgate through their x/twitter account, and I’ll be sure to talk about it when they give more to chew on.