Wildkeepers Rising blends survivor-like bullet-heavens with creature collection for lots of chaotic battles

Available now in Early Access on Steam, Wildkeepers Rising is one of the latest to attempt to put a new spin on the popularity of whatever genre we're calling things like Vampire Survivors today. Note: key provided by Evolve.

Bullet heaven? Survivor-likes? Auto-attacking roguelite? Heck, I don't know but I'm going to play all of them. Something about this genre just has me hooked. Probably because I have so little free "me" time, and they're always easy to get into for a quick run around.

Wildkeepers Rising is another quite unique entry here, and one that (at least initially) feels a whole lot more like you're playing a mini-RPG epic. There's an actual background story, and the starting setup acts much more like a game that's much bigger than the auto-attacking genre it's in. The style of it is fantastic too.

While most games in this genre just sort-of throw you into the thick of it, and expect you to understand them already, this is thoroughly different. You get a short story cut-scene, and then actual dialogue between characters before it sends you off into the world. What's really quite unique about this one, and how it helps evolve the whole genre, is the creature collection side of it. Not only are you levelling up and picking various character buffs and abilities, but you'll also be customising various Guardian creatures as you go along too.

During a run you'll come across various little shrines, where you can summon a Guardian creature from a list. These creatures then follow you around dealing damage to all the creatures around you. They each have their own health, and super ability that you manually activate. They can get knocked out, and then have their own individual timer to come back to life.

Active abilities you gain from the level up system can be given to either you, or your Guardians, and you can swap them around at any time. The ability swapping is only a small thing really but this change feels genuinely different and interesting. It's not just the active abilities either, on level up you'll also be picking character buffs between you and your creatures, so there's a lot of room to customise each run through.

YouTube videos require cookies, you must accept their cookies to view. View cookie preferences.
Accept Cookies & Show   Direct Link

The developers said they only expect it to be in Early Access for "a few months" but they plan to add in new playable characters and Guardian creators to follow you, new environments, more enemy variety, more content for the story and so on. Definitely keen to see what this evolves into once it's properly complete. At least from my initial look, it has all the makings of another excellent game to add to your collection.

Feature Highlight:

• Bullet Heaven | Shred thousands of monsters in bullet heaven runs.
• Creature Collector | Discover, tame, and train magical beasts.
• Runs & Builds | Create team synergies with different Guardians.
• Roguelike Runs | Take runs with different Wildkeepers wielding different weapons.
• Progression | Unlock new Guardians and items and make them stronger between runs.
• RPG Elements | Discover a rich world of fantasy heroes and magical monsters.

Wildkeepers Rising works great on Desktop Linux with the latest Proton 9.0-4.

I also tested it on Steam Deck (LCD model) but it's a bit problematic here. Their graphics settings are just odd. There's only a single setting "Quality" and anything below "Epic" in that drop-down results in a really blurry picture. Even with it set to "Epic" the picture quality is still a bit too blurry. Performance seems okay enough, but they've clearly got work to do to make it properly Steam Deck Playable.

Having a good time with this one. There's a whole lot of potential here, and even in the initial Early Access release there's a lot of fun to be had and a lot of charm to the style. I just hope they add in some proper progression into the game outside of the runs, and additionally once they add in a little more enemy variety it could be a must-have.