I’m not much of a PvP guy. Without putting too fine a point on it, I’m bad at them. But something about Moonshot Games’ extraction RPG Wildgate spoke to me, so when the opportunity came up to play during the community preview a week ago, I decided to try it out.

The good news is that it is a lot of fun even for a PvE guy. The bad news (for whoever had to team up with me) is that I’m still terrible at PvP games. I enjoyed flying through space to find loot, jumping on a turret to fire at an enemy ship, scampering around repairing our spaceship as it was being attacked, and rammed into things (depending on who was flying the spaceship). It’s a new take on the squad-based game that brings a lot of potential to the table, so let’s dive in to the experience.

The basics

Wildgate, players team up in small crews of four people to venture into a dangerous region of space called the Reach to find an ancient relic called the Artifact. While searching for the artifact, players pilot their spaceships through the Reach, plunder wreckage, and loot upgrades. To win, players must reach the exit point, called – you guessed it – the Wildgate, with the artifact in their possession or destroy all rival ships.

The aesthetics

I have a confession to make here: A large part of my interest in the game was because the aesthetic reminded me of Wildstar. I loved that game, and anything that resembles it sets off the mildly delusional response in my brain that a completely different game from a decidedly not-MMORPG genre can somehow recapture the magic of Wildstar.

Surprisingly, Wildgate does at least manage to capture some of the Wildstar vibe. It’s definitely absurd and over the top. Even the narrator from the videos sounds a little like the narrator from the Wildstar videos. The aesthetics drew me and didn’t disappoint. I love the cartoony designs and characters, and the humor may not be quite at the Wildstar level, but I still cracked a smile a few times. I think the whole package works: The graphics, humor, and gameplay come together cohesively.

The prospectors

The character selection is standard fare for an extraction game; you pick a named character, or Prospector as the game calls it, and then you level that character up, unlocking new abilities as you do so. You also have to level to unlock the new characters. Everyone starts as the robot “Prospector,” who is notable because he doesn’t need oxygen and makes traversing the vacuum of space a little easier when you are starting out. I unlocked a second character, a dragon/griffin/sparrow fellow named Mophs, but I didn’t have a chance to play with him. There was also the goatman Sammo, the four-armed alien Ion, and the fish Sal. The number of prospectors feels a little limited right now, so I’m hoping at launch, Moonshot has a lot more.

The matches

Somehow, I missed that there was a tutorial and dived right into my first match, which I cannot recommend to to anyone reading this. Find the tutorial, trust me. I blundered around trying to figure out how to do anything while being annoyed at the fact that there wasn’t a tutorial. And that was the only match that I won! I attribute this to the fact that I don’t believe anyone on the team knew what the hell they were doing, not to any real skill on my team’s part. Call it beginner’s luck.

I discovered the tutorial after the first match, played through it, and queued for my next match feeling as if I knew enough to do something positive in the game. I did do better in this match, but we still lost because an enemy player sneaked into our ship and overloaded the core, exploding it before we realized what had happened. Lesson learned.

In match four, I finally felt that I was getting the hang of it. Fly out, salvage some new weapons and upgrades for the ship, and fly back. I discovered halfway through this match that there’s a handy-dandy teleport feature to yeet you back to your ship. After praying to the gaming gods that no one on my team had seen my super-noob mistake, I settled into defending and repairing the ship when we were attacked.

This was honestly one of my favorite parts of the game. Each prospector has a multitool that you use to repair the ship (among other things). As you are being attacked, fires will break out, windows will shatter venting oxygen into space, and doors will be destroyed. Someone needs to run around and repair everything as it happens. A blown-out door not only lets oxygen out but also lets enemies in. It was satisfying to run around repairing the ship as it was bursting into flames all around me.

As I played the matches, one of the things that bothered me was that the pacing felt off. The start of the match was always a flurry of activity as I salvaged for materials and upgrades, and the end of the match was always a firefight against the other teams. But the middle of the match was pretty slow. As I was piloting around looking for the artifact or enemy ships, there wasn’t much to do. I would spend minutes just kinda puttering around waiting for something to happen.

I know what the developers want me to be doing during that time: using probes to scout or salvage and harvest more. But it didn’t seem necessary. Once I had all the upgrades and had filled up all the hardpoints on my ship, I was good unless I happened to stumble across an upgrade. One person scouting was all we really needed.

The outcome was that while I could do those things, we never found anything meaningful in the transition periods, so my team would loiter on our ship while the pilot puttered around The Reach. Once we met another ship or found the artifact or the Wildgate, the pace picked back up again, but it created a strange cadence of “hurry up and wait” that wasn’t compelling.

That brings me to my biggest concern with the game: There’s a lot of cool stuff to experience in the Reach, but we all know gamers will ignore everything in pursuit of the shortest path to victory, even if it isn’t as fun. I worry that Wildgate’s challenge will be figuring out how to incentivize gamers to be more strategic and tactical and explore more instead of just playing the game like an Alterac Valley battleground run in World of Warcraft. There’s a lot of potential for a great game for both traditional PvP players and PvE players, but Moonshot has to figure out how to keep gamers from succumbing to their worst efficiency-at-all-cost tendencies.

The drama

I’ll leave you with the story of my final match in the game. It was the best run yet; we had blown up two enemy ships, had the artifact, and were motoring toward the Wildgate. There was one ship between us and the gate, and it would have been trivial to loop around to it. But our pilot had a different tactic in mind: He increased to full speed and swerved to hit the oncoming ship, presumably while laughing maniacally the whole time.

I was on my way to the enemy ship to try to blow it up when our pilot started his kamikaze run. I teleported just as we collided and sprinted around trying to cool down the reactor and repair the ship. The pilot continued to grind us into the enemy ship (again, I’m assuming with wild laughter). My other teammates were nowhere to be seen.

Our front shields failed, and the damage was more than I could keep up with on my own, so our ship exploded. We were within spitting distance of the Wildgate and winning the match, but no. Humans were a mistake.