Wildgate

Space piracy, done with real tactical depth

Wildgate's core loop combines two things multiplayer shooters rarely attempt together well: tactical ship-to-ship combat, where crews manage fuel, ammo and hazards while hunting rival vessels, and fast-paced first-person boarding action, where sneaking or fighting your way onto an enemy ship can turn a losing fight around entirely. Reviewers consistently credit this combination with genuine strategic creativity — piloting, defending your own ship, and infiltrating someone else's all demand different skills, and the procedurally-generated Reach setting keeps individual matches varied with environmental hazards layered on top of the player-versus-player tension. Long-term players back this up with real numbers: one reviewer specifically updates their own review at the 200-hour mark of live play — more than 1,200 hours total including beta — to say they still find at least one genuinely memorable match most days.

The comparison reviewers keep making, unprompted

What dominates Wildgate's review corpus, though, isn't a debate about the gameplay — it's a specific, recurring historical parallel multiple reviewers reach for independently: Evolve, the 2015 multiplayer shooter now remembered less for its design (which was well-regarded) than for how quickly bad monetisation and marketing decisions killed its playerbase. One reviewer states the comparison directly: "At launch, this looks like another case of Evolve... But you know what? I'm damn glad for the hours I got with Evolve, and this game is just as worth experiencing while you can." That a reviewer with lived experience of Evolve's decline reaches for it specifically, and frames their recommendation around urgency rather than confidence in the game's future, is a serious signal about where Wildgate's reputation currently sits — not as a bad game, but as a good one whose survival isn't guaranteed.

Monetisation on top of a full price tag

The specific complaint driving that comparison is monetisation. Wildgate launched at a full box price of up to NZ$43.95 for a Deluxe Edition, with a premium-currency cosmetic store added on top that multiple reviewers call shameless given the game isn't free-to-play. Several reviewers are explicit that they wouldn't object to the identical store on a genuinely free release — their objection is specifically to paying full price and then encountering a monetisation structure built for a different business model entirely. That's the same underlying tension that dogged Evolve, and reviewers drawing the comparison are doing so with that precedent directly in mind rather than reaching for a vague insult.

New players are having a rough time

A second, compounding problem concerns onboarding. Multiple reviewers describe an unusually brutal experience for new players, with no skill-based beginner lobbies separating newcomers from veterans — one reviewer specifically describes a 77-win expert player boarding their ship and eliminating their entire team in nearly every match, making it extremely difficult to keep new friends interested in a second session. Combined with reports the concurrent playerbase has fallen to as low as 30-40 players at points, several reviewers argue the matchmaking and long-term viability of the game are now genuinely at risk — not a hypothetical concern, but one already affecting queue times and match quality for the players still around.

A broken promise on top of it all

A more specific, recent grievance concerns Treasure Hunt, a calmer, loot-focused mode the developers removed post-launch, describing it as a temporary experiment. Reviewers who specifically enjoyed that mode with a regular play partner report real frustration at losing content they'd already paid for, regardless of the developer's stated intent to potentially bring it back — a concrete example of the kind of live-service uncertainty that erodes trust in exactly the way Evolve-style comparisons predict.

A studio built by veterans, in a crowded market

Wildgate carries real pedigree behind the scenes: developer Moonshot Games operates under Dreamhaven, the studio founded by Mike Morhaime after his departure from Blizzard, a company whose own history includes some of the most successful live-service and multiplayer titles ever shipped. That background makes the Evolve comparison sting a bit more for reviewers who expected a team with this much institutional experience in building and sustaining online communities to have anticipated the exact pitfalls their own game is now facing. It's also part of why several reviewers frame their criticism constructively rather than dismissively — the underlying talent and design sense is evident, which makes the monetisation and onboarding missteps read as avoidable rather than inevitable.

On the character side, players choose from a roster of "prospectors," each with distinct abilities suited to different roles — reviewers mention options built around piloting and ship defence alongside more mobile, infiltration-focused builds for boarding enemy vessels. That variety supports the tactical depth praised elsewhere in the review corpus, giving coordinated crews real room to specialise rather than everyone filling an identical role across a match.

The verdict

Wildgate's core idea is genuinely good, and reviewers who've spent real time with it back that up with specific, credible praise for its tactical depth and variety. But its own community keeps reaching for the same warning from recent multiplayer history, and the underlying evidence — an aggressive monetisation model on top of full price, a hostile new-player experience, a shrinking concurrent playerbase, and a fan-favourite mode already pulled — gives that comparison real weight rather than treating it as unfair pessimism. At its current discounted price, the honest recommendation from this review echoes the game's own most thoughtful reviewers: if the concept appeals to you, play it now, because the window in which Wildgate has enough players to actually deliver on its own design may not last indefinitely.