Wildgate feels for me like it combines my favorite aspects of Sea of Thieves, Void Crew, and an FPS. The combination makes the game feel novel, which is a rarity, and it's very polished. And there are some minor hero shooter elements here as well, with the different characters having unique abilities, which makes building your crew super modular and unique.

I love games built around crewing a ship. I've tried so many, but none have felt quite right. This hits an itch for me no other ship crew games have been able to. There is no pay to win, anything you buy is purely cosmetic. Even the free unlocks by leveling the character paths (which you choose, you don't have to play the respective character, which is wonderful), all of gear is in the first couple of levels, which you can breeze through in just a few rounds, so you can very quickly get all the characters, ships, weapons, and equipment and start mixing pieces to build a playstyle that is right for you.

The graphics are also wonderful. I was not expecting something so clean with only an 8 GB download.

Overall, the folks at Moonshot have done an amazing job. My gaming group has bought a few copies, and at least 4 of us have also bought the Renegade pack, because we feel like Moonshot has built an amazing new play experience, and we wanted to support them more than just buying the game.

My ONLY concern right now, and this has nothing to do with the game, is the player base is currently kind of low. It's holding steady at just under 7000 player peak in 24 hours, which is more than enough to have short queue times since matches are 20 players, But if we want the devs to be able to add content over time and grow the game, they're going to need a lot more players so they can afford to keep a team on it, rather than moving on to the next project. Which quality wise they definitely deserve, but there was no marketing or fanfare that I'm aware of. I only knew about it because I happened to google for well-reviewed gaming coming out this month, and this was in one of the videos I watched. So it's down to us to recruit all our friends so this amazing game can thrive.