Wildgate Review - 20-Player Space Battles for One Artifact in the Reach

You know when you get into a game and you can’t decide if it’s genius or if it’s taunting you? Well, that’s Wildgate for me. Moonshot Games and Dreamhaven threw it out into the galaxy on July 22, 2025, for $29.99, and they’ve basically locked twenty people—five ships, four per crew—into this part of space called the Reach, which is stunning, hazardous, and chaotic, all in equal measure. It’s a space that looks like it belongs on the cover of some pulpy sci-fi paperback, cosmic blues and purples everywhere, streaks of red from stars or drifting magma globules, and giant alien spinal remains hanging in the void. Then they say, alright, there’s one Artifact hidden out there, one, and you either get it through the Wildgate portal or you make sure no one else is alive to try. And because there’s only one Artifact, and because people are, well, people, most of these forty-plus-minute matches end with total destruction instead of the clean, heroic dash to the gate the marketing might have you picturing.

The rhythm isn’t orderly. You spawn with your three teammates, inside whatever ship you’ve got access to—probably the Hunter early on, three front cannons, speed boost if you drop the shields, and you immediately have to decide whether you’re landing on the nearest asteroid to check a dungeon or pushing deeper into the map to find richer loot. The dungeons are compact, claustrophobic spaces where you’ll fight raiders or green-skinned alien creatures. They’re broken up with simple puzzles that, once solved, open the way to loot rooms. Loot can be ship upgrades like better shields or defensive gear, or maybe a new weapon module, or even stat boosts like increased turning speed, which matters more than you think when you’re lining up a cannon shot on a fast-moving Scout.

That’s one of the four ships, the Scout, and it’s basically a mosquito—so small it’s able to zip in and steal the Artifact before anyone can respond, but weak enough that if it gets caught in a fight, it’s over in seconds. There’s the Bastion, which I’ve grown to love when I feel like playing slow: heavier hull, more defense, intruder detection built in, lockable doors if the crew remembers to lock them, though its speed and cannon strength aren’t much to brag about. Then there’s the Privateer, six cannon slots, faster firing, harder hitting than anything else, but it pushes you into an aggressive style where you’re either wiping someone out quickly or feeding them wreckage from your own ship. And the Hunter, the starter, which ends up in most matches, because unlocking the others takes time.

All of this would be flat without the Prospectors, the seven playable characters. Ion’s a four-armed alien who can literally punch a ship hull to damage it. Venture’s the robot that doesn’t need oxygen, heals faster, and gets an alert when someone’s behind them. Sal, my absolute go-to, heals ships and can reroll bad loot into something useful, which is a huge advantage when the game decides to hand you garbage drops three dungeons in a row. Kae can teleport and use telekinesis to pull items off an enemy ship’s hull without stepping inside, which is a nightmare to defend against. Adrian can move extremely fast in space, but in the middle of all this, speed without more utility feels like a party trick. The others fill out the roster, but the imbalance is noticeable. Kae and Sal can swing a match on their own if the team knows what to do with them.

When you’re off the ship, the arsenal is small but specific, with nine weapons in total. The Sidelong launcher fires horizontally through the environment, an oddball that never clicked for me. The goo-firing gatling gun’s messy and fun for locking down space. The anti-ship rocket launcher will carve into hulls without you ever touching a turret. And then the rock—an honest-to-goodness rock—does heavy damage when thrown, and while it’s a joke weapon, it’s way too effective to leave behind. Gadgets fill the rest of your kit: a drill that attaches to ships and eats away at their armor over time, or a tool that reloads everything you’ve got when you teleport back to your ship.

The Reach isn’t static, which helps. One match, you’re dodging asteroid swarms that’ll rip your hull apart if you get sloppy; the next, you’re dealing with energy-devouring leeches clinging to your ship until you shoot them off, or a cosmic storm rolling through the map that will absolutely destroy you unless you’ve found a special shield somewhere in a dungeon. These modifiers are clever, and they can force you to change plans mid-match, but there aren’t many, so you start to see repeats faster than you’d like.

The best moments are when your ship crew clicks into place. I’ve been in a Bastion with locked doors, defensive modules humming, trading long-range fire from a sniper cannon while a teammate slips around to stick bomb cannon shots to an enemy’s hull. I’ve boarded ships and been boarded, fought my way down narrow corridors with goo guns, and been knocked into a respawn timer by someone who knew exactly how to crack a defense. And I’ve been in those matches where no one’s talking, one player’s mining ice while another’s getting cut down in a boarding attempt, and before you’ve even figured out where the Artifact is, your reactor’s screaming, and then you’re a cloud of debris. 

The visual style helps soften the sting when you lose—bright, Pixar-like designs that make icicle clusters, lava globules, and alien hives pop against the background. Caves shaped like dragon jaws, the strange curve of a derelict freighter’s hull, all of it reads clearly even in the middle of chaos. The audio’s equally sharp, from sweeping orchestral swells to calm lo-fi synths, with character voice lines that actually tell you what’s happening without relying on voice chat, which, given how matchmaking can go, is a blessing.

But for all of that polish, there’s no getting around the fact that it feels thin once you’ve seen everything—seven Prospectors, four ships, nine weapons, a handful of gadgets, a small pool of modifiers and dungeon types, and PvE enemies that mostly stand there and take fire until one side dies. Moonshot says three new characters or ships per year are coming, and that’ll help, but at the moment, the loop starts repeating sooner than you’d hope.

And yet, I keep coming back, because every so often, you get a match worth remembering. Like the one where we fought through a citadel, got the Artifact, and were about to make the run to the Wildgate when the last remaining enemy ship—a Bastion—decided to meet us head-on. They didn’t fire a shot. They rammed us full speed, metal on metal, sparks flying, alarms howling, reactor overheating, until the whole thing went white. A total loss that I still think about because, for those few seconds before the impact, I was certain we had it in the bag.