If you have ever looked at a medieval castle and thought it could use a set of wheels and a cannon or two, developer Randwerk may have built the game specifically for you. Wanderburg, a bullet heaven roguelike where your primary vehicle is a modular castle grafted onto a tank chassis, is out now in early access on Steam.
What Is Wanderburg?
Wanderburg sits firmly in the bullet heaven genre, the category of auto-shooter roguelikes that Vampire Survivors helped push into mainstream attention. The core idea here is that you start the game with a castle that is also, somehow, a tank. Your mobile fortress begins with a single starting weapon – a cannon, for example – and from there the whole point is to survive long enough to grow bigger and stronger.
As you level up, you choose new modules to bolt onto your rolling castle. These can be structural additions like a barracks that spawns troops to fight on your behalf, or they can be new weapons like a giant hammer designed to send enemies flying to one side. The result is a fortress that grows increasingly chaotic and oversized the longer you stay alive, which seems to be exactly the aesthetic Randwerk is going for.
Sheep, Villages, and Rival Fortresses
Growth in Wanderburg does not come from just fighting. According to the game’s description, hoovering up cattle and flocks of sheep also contributes to your castle’s expansion, which is a detail that raises questions but also makes the whole thing more entertaining for it. Villages fleeing in terror and destroying rival fortresses are also listed as ways to progress, so the loop has a fair amount of variety built into it even at this early stage.
Movement in the game has a deliberately unstable quality to it. Everything looks bouncy and on the verge of toppling over, which suits the absurdity of piloting a structurally questionable castle across a battlefield. Players can also reportedly swap out their mode of transport, with the option to ditch wheels entirely in favor of legs, giving the castle an even more unsettling way of getting around.
Early Access Roadmap
Randwerk is launching Wanderburg into early access with the core gameplay loop in place, but the studio is clear that this is not the finished product. Over the next six to twelve months, the team plans to add more content and mechanics, while also making adjustments based on feedback from the community. That kind of timeline is fairly standard for early access releases in this genre, where getting players involved in shaping the game is part of the development strategy.
For fans of bullet heaven games looking for something with a different visual and mechanical hook, Wanderburg offers a setup that is hard to find anywhere else. A self-expanding medieval fortress on wheels, armed with cannons and hammers and staffed by soldiers you recruit along the way, is a premise that at least stands out in a genre that has seen a lot of entries since Vampire Survivors made it popular.
Where to Get It
Wanderburg is available right now on Steam in early access. If the idea of driving a Frankensteinian castle-tank through waves of enemies while absorbing livestock sounds like your kind of game, Randwerk has it ready for you to jump into today.
Keep an eye on updates from Randwerk over the coming months as the studio rolls out new content and responds to player feedback during the early access period.