Wildgate (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £24.99)

Verdict: Marvellous mash-up

Rating:

Wildgate is here – and wild is a good word for it.

This cartoonish first-person shooter isn’t just, well, a shooter. It casts you as a space prospector hunting for artefacts in the further reaches of the cosmos. 

In order to find them, and bring them back to your spaceship, you’ve got perform tasks like scanning and mining and even ship maintenance.

Thankfully, you’ve got help: a crew of prospectors made up of other Wildgate players from around the internet. But you’ve also got opposition: other crews are there to nab the artefacts for themselves. That’s where the shooting comes in.

Wildgate’s component parts aren’t exactly new. Its colourful prospectors – each with their own special abilities, ranging by from teleporting to hull-smashing – recall online shooters such as Overwatch. Its cooperative ship-handling is like a spacebound version of Sea of Thieves.

But the combination of those parts is certainly unusual – and pretty darn fun. I couldn’t stop myself playing round after round of this elegant mash-up. 

There’s something compulsive about trying out different prospectors and different upgrades for your ship (the best: the sniper cannon).

The problem – aside from the possibility that you might get teamed up with a crew of useless weirdos – is that those options run out quite quickly. Currently, Wildgate has only a handful of prospectors, weapons, ships and maps. Its universe is much smaller than its ambitions.

Surely this will get fixed over time, with future updates to the game. I certainly hope so. There’s gold in them thar planetary systems.