One of the smartest things developer Randwerk did when advertising Wanderburg is not to compare it to Vampire Survivors. I won’t either. It’s tempting, though. The truth is that Wanderburg is not just another in the long line of games popping up in the wake of auto-battling roguelikes. Despite the obvious influence and shared mechanical DNA, it’s carved out its own space in a narrowing genre of games. It easily stands on its own solid footing.
Wanderburg is a semi-autobattler with an entirely different feeling. There’s no slot machine jingle or rainbow flourishes on a level-up. Abilities don’t combine for hidden boosts. Rather, Wanderburg is what happens when the American TV series BattleBots takes a cel-shaded spin in medieval fantasy arenas. There’s the familiar heart-thumping music with a Flogging Molly tempo coursing behind you as you fishtail your mobile castle to hoover up everything you see, from sheep to trees to mob enemies. It’s a good time.
I played through the majority of the maps available in Early Access and discovered that the initial premise held up well over several hours of play time. You select a map that comes with its own environmental hazards and a team of 4 bosses to defeat. When you have decided on your destination, you can customize your castle’s loadout configuration, starting troops, and abilities before starting the match. As expected, booting up the game initially will reveal that there is plenty of depth to this customization, but it’ll come slowly after sinking many hours into earning silver to purchase more options.
The user interface, including menus, feels rudimentary and clunky at times. I’m sure that this will change as the game advances in early access, but for folks interested in Wanderburg now, it’s nice to know that you won’t spend much time in the menus. Though, it’s where you’ll make your ability purchases and set up each run, which doesn’t require too many moving parts as is.
Time spent in the matches is where the game roars to life. Starting with a small tower on four wheels, as you accelerate, there’s a satisfyingly animated sway from your castle being top-heavy. The castle lurches forward, and you’re off.
Everything on the map is against you, and honestly, it’s fair. You are an absolute, all-consuming menace. Skirting through enemy bullets, circling slower enemy castles, and straight up plowing through mobs, Wanderburg could have just as easily been titled “Hell on Wheels.” It’s the kind of recklessness that goes way to Rampage, where the game becomes a kind of rage room. It’s a nonstop rush around the map collecting coins, sheep, trees, brush, and even enemies. It’s a clever way to mask that they’re all the same thing, experience, but they also all have their own goals. For example, you’ll unlock certain perks or abilities to toggle if you’ve vacuumed up 500 sheep and another if you’ve consumed 500 enemies. In the run, the result may be the same, but outside the run, it encourages different play while in the arenas.
At the top of the screen a timer will begin ticking downward until a boss appears. If you survive a full match of 4 bosses, it’ll clock about 15 minutes. At first I was worried that breaking the traditional rule of 3 in boss patterns would prove to be tiresome quickly. Because rounds are broken up into smaller chunks, the time instead passes speedily. It makes for delightful chaos. A session of Wanderburg is a series of small pivots to line up abilities and have your passives wear down enemies. Positioning and timing are key for victories, especially when it’s easy to get surrounded.
Your best defense is a heel turn and gobbling up the mob enemies that flank you. This was the detail that makes Wanderburg play differently than other games of its genre. Your best defense is a hungry offense. After dodging a barrage of attacks, being able to swoop in and chow down to level the playing field completely changed how I strategized my play style. When I could get the match to be me versus a few big enemies, then I could maneuver in and strike hard.
The second most crucial mechanical detail is one I’ve been alluding to for several paragraphs, and it’s that positioning matters immensely. Not only because you have front, back, and top slots for weapons, but also because there’s a minor bullet-hell aspect to the game. Upon defeating a boss and upgrading your castle, you have two options, which roughly are divided between bulky and speedy builds. Every time you level up, you can choose one, and in my playtime, alternating between both made me more reliably survive in matches. Speed is usually a stat that can be ignored in games like this. In Wanderburg, eventually the opposition will catch up to you.
Since how you face (or don’t) your enemies is significant, I had to adjust my tactics to think about movement before damage. However, there is an uneven implementation of abilities. Some were consistently better than the rest. For me, getting adjacent to most enemies was my path to victory. I would prioritize my side cannons to hit harder with more projectiles. Wanderburg will likely have to go through some fine-tuning to make all of the abilities worthwhile. At least at the onset, there was enough variety to accommodate multiple builds and get a feel for how each attack felt.
Wanderburg works because its design does not conform to one specific set of expected characteristics in a singular genre. It takes autobattlers at their simplest and then adds in new spices to flavor an old dish. The core is decided, and the basic premise and design are unlikely to change as it goes through additional development. The periphery is still underbaked, but I am confident that the final product will be a delightful, well-rounded treat.
Note: We do not rate early access games, as they are still a work in progress. We will reaccess the game at the point of its 1.0 and issue a score at that point.
