Some game premises are so wonderfully ridiculous you can’t help but get on board. Wanderburg essentially asks the question: ‘what if it was medieval times, but every building had wheels?’ Perfect, no notes.
Into this world of rolling stonework trundles my little castle, equipped with a few archers at the battlements and some cannons jutting out each side. What ensues is reminiscent of Vampire Survivors and its many imitators—I roam the medieval countryside battling swarms of other mobile castles with my auto-firing weapons, scooping up gold for defeating them that lets me level up and gain new abilities.
But there’s definitely enough quirks here to make it stand out. For one, there’s an oddly organic feel to a run, despite the focus on rather inorganic buildings. As I roam the land chasing down defenceless mobile windmills and hoovering up farmhouses, then running scared when massive mega-castles appear ready to chomp me up, it feels more like an ecosystem of predators and prey than a war.
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That’s only reinforced by the way my castle evolves over time—as I progress through a run, it grows in size and gets tougher and faster. Before I know it I’m looming over castles that once felt like major threats, and my travelling fortress looks like something out of Mortal Engines.
And I love that it really handles like 100,000 tons of stone on wheels, too. There’s a real weight and physicality to both my castle and the various enemies pursuing me as I careen around, trying to line up shots and dodge out of getting fired on in return. A limited boost meter gives me just enough fine control to pull off clever little maneuvers in between clumsy collisions and three point turns.
Monsters Are Coming!
Weirdly, this isn’t the first Vampire Survivors-inspired roguelike I’ve played recently about buildings on wheels. The awkwardly titled Monsters Are Coming! Rock & Road is a pretty different take on the idea, though, featuring elements of city building and tower defence as you guard a rolling settlement on a long journey through monster-infested lands.
The more I get to grips with the steering, the more tactile combat gets. On one run I decide my only weapons will be a mine layer that drops explosive payloads in my wake, and a huge battering ram that gives me a tasty forward charge ability. Between the two of them I’m soon leading enemies on merry chases, making them follow me through trails of mines, charging out of the way of their shots, and ramming them backwards whenever they get too close.
Very fun, but a bit slow to actually finish the job—I can’t just spend all my time running away. That’s when it really clicks. While the mine layer’s auto-fire ability just drops one bomb at a time every few seconds, its active ability lets me fire out a wide spread of them every 60 seconds or so. I start setting up little nests of death around the map, leading enemies near them… and then charging into them full speed to ram them across the screen into the mines, blowing them to pieces. I call it the Pinball Hustle.
Not a sophisticated strategy, perhaps, but dramatic enough to make it feel like I’m in some weird medieval Mad Max movie, explosively outsmarting my bigger, scarier opponents. That is, until I get blasted to pieces by a boss I can only describe as being Sauron’s tower from Lord of the Rings on wheels. Fair play.
Wanderburg’s current free demo is very limited—basically just one map with some upgrades to grind for—but it’s enough of a preview to see the potential, and the indication of a full overworld map of zones to progress through in the final game is tantalising. Currently its ETA is just some time this year, but hopefully we don’t have too long to wait before it rolls its way towards 1.0 and smashes headfirst into a release date.
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