An Action-RPG Roguelike with a Guardian Twist
When surrounded by vicious monsters, it’s good to have equally vicious beasts at your side. Luckily for you, in Wildkeepers Rising you won’t be taking on hordes of horrors alone. Instead, you’ll fight fire-with-fire as you bring up to four monsters with you to take on the hordes. Is it a fight worth fighting though?
Developed and published by Lioncode Games, Wildkeepers Rising is an action-RPG roguelike with bullet-heaven mechanics set in a fantasy world. In a similar vein to other survivor-likes, the gameplay involves moving the main character as they automatically attack the constantly spawning enemies around you, while collecting a range of pickups including experience, equipment, and three different currencies.
Despite being a single player experience, you won’t be fighting alone, as the most important thing you’ll pick up, and the big difference between this game and others in the genre, are the guardians you choose from shrines. You are able to have up to four guardians with your character all battling the enemies and moving together on the map as you complete missions.
Alone Together
The guardians are the true stars of Wildkeepers Rising. The story and most missions revolve around freeing them and the gameplay loop will be mostly trying to find which ones work best together. These guardian shines appear on the map from the start, forcing you to explore. Once freed, the guardians will join you in battle.
The guardians have their own AI so they will attack and move on their own, generally following the player character, and collecting the experience and currency dropped by enemies. The only times you have any say with what they get up to is when activating their ability or upgrading them.
Upgrades are important in Wildkeepers Rising, like they are in almost any game with basic RPG mechanics. In most games in the genre, by the end of a mission you may feel like a god, laying waste to everything in your path if you’ve managed to get the right upgrades.
In Wildkeepers Rising though, because you have to also level up your guardians, it takes a long time for any benefits to be noticed. Coupled with an upgrade cap of 10 for the character and guardians, you never feel particularly powerful and it takes a long time to feel like you are doing well even on the easiest difficulty. That the sigils you have (Wildkeepers Rising’s version of spells and buffs) don’t have any evolution or synergies makes the endgame feel less empowering and more like a chore.
Furthermore, during missions you have your character, experience points, three currencies, four guardians, and a ton of enemies, all on the screen at once. If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. In fact it’s often too much and if you don’t have the right upgrades to keep the enemies away from you, then it’s very easy to lose yourself let alone which monsters are friends or foe. Especially since sometimes it is hard to differentiate which monsters are with you and against you, this can lead to some unfortunate situations where you take damage when you thought you were safe. It also makes it difficult to navigate or find pickups you are going for.
Hub Operations
All the aforementioned gameplay comes from missions. After the mission is done you return to the hub where there is still plenty to do. This is where you will upgrade stats, unlock sigils to give new buffs and abilities to find and use through levelling up, and dole out equipment as well as level the equipment too. You can also visit the Spirit Realm if you want to spend some extra time with the freed guardians, and even though there is no interaction it is cool to see the designs in peace.
Lastly, you can also select which character to play as and check on your quests which provide resources such as currency, rerolls, and points for unlocking sigils.
These quests also provide completionists with lots to do. While the main game provides four main areas filled with missions, each mission has four difficulties all with rewards for completing. However, beating the main story will most likely not unlock all the 100+ quests available. That’s because they require, amongst many other things, using and leveling up all the characters and guardians, promoting experimentation and also requiring luck for you to get the guardians you need.
Pen-and-Paper Presentation
With all this to do you’ll be staring at the screen a lot so it’s a good thing Wildkeepers Rising is a pretty game. While the characters and environments are not particularly inventive, they still stand out in their quality. But what stands out the most are the guardians, which have the widest variety as well as some of the most entertaining animations when activating their supers. The opening cutscene in particular is gorgeous with an ink and paper aesthetic. Unfortunately, it’s the only time you’ll see it. Luckily the graphics still retain the hand drawn charm which makes it stand out amongst a deluge of games in the genre from the first glance.
While the graphics are great, the audio is solid if unspectacular. The music in the hub is the kind of relaxing, whimsical fare that jumps to a much more fitting high energy tune when in missions. While there’s not much variety, because you don’t spend too long in either place it never gets monotonous. Likewise for the sound effects which end up being a non-factor later in missions as the sounds of chaos and abilities drown each other out.
And the presentation and gameplay are good too, but it’s a shame that the story isn’t. Kudos for trying to give a story to a genre that generally just revolves around throwing the player into an area and letting them wreak havoc. However, what little is told in the opening cutscenes and blocks of text after beating the boss is nothing interesting or memorable outside of the typical “there’s an evil corruption and it must be stopped”. However, the voiceover reading the blocks of text does an entertaining job so there’s that at least. Honestly though, after the initial cutscenes, it’s better to skip past and just get to the gameplay.
A Content-Rich Choice for Bullet-Heaven Veterans
With nearly as many titles in the genre as there are enemies on screen, standing out in the ‘bullet-heaven’ crowd takes a lot of effort. Wildkeepers Rising offers a wealth of content, though much like the guardians within it, the quality can vary.
However, despite a few misses, Wildkeepers Rising tries enough new things to satisfy veterans, while remaining accessible enough for newcomers to enjoy for the long haul.
Important Links
Tame Monsters and Slay Hordes as Wildkeepers Rising Launches on Xbox, PlayStation and Switch – https://www.thexboxhub.com/tame-monsters-and-slay-hordes-as-wildkeepers-rising-launches-on-xbox-playstation-and-switch/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/wildkeepers-rising/9NF2SWZVHVXV/0010
