Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West Review
Lead and Gold is a Western themed third-person shooter set during the mid 1800s(the gold rush era). The game features two teams of up to 5 player per team. While being an online only game, it does feature an offline tutorial, which can also be played online with one other player.
There are four classes in Lead and Gold, Gunslinger, Trapper, Deputy and Blaster. The Gunslinger possess only one weapon, a revolver. He is most effective at close range using his fanning ability. A technique which increases his rate of fire but reduces his accuracy. The Trapper is a sniper, armed with a Buffalo rifle which requires a reload after every shot. The Deupty carries a rifle and is most effective at medium to long range. He possess the ability to tag enemies, which marks their location. He may also remove tags from allied players. The Blaster is equipped with a double-barrelled shotgun that is lethal at close range. He also carries dynamite which can be used much like a grenade. The Trapper, Deputy and Blaster each carry a secondary weapon, a slow firing and inaccurate revolver that’s only useful when you are knocked down. Each character also has their own unique abilities called Synergy Effects.
Synergy Effects are a nice addition to the game. A Synergy Effect is a buff that is granted to you and all teammates nearby. It’s a system which encourages players to stick together and use team work. The Gunslinger increases accuracy, the Trapper increases critical hits, the Deputy increases damage and the Blaster increases defense. The Synergies do not stack so it is recommended to use different classes. Along with all of these, each class has a Healing Synergy, which automatically restores some of your own HP and that of any teammate you pass by. The strength of your Synergy Effects can be increased by leveling up. By increasing your rank, your Synergy Effect ability increases. However, all ranks you gain in a game are reset back to one once the game ends.
There are seven games modes and seven maps. Although one game mode and map are restricted to each other(the online tutorial), there is still plenty of variety in the game modes. There’s the usual deathmatch and capture the flag type game modes, along with different variations of Team A attacking certain points and objectives with Team B defending. With the games being only 5v5, the maps are adequately sized. This keeps the game flowing with lots of fighting. Depending on the damage you receive, you can either be killed or simply knocked down. You can be very easily killed while knocked down and you may still shoot using your revolver while in this state. Teammates can revive you if you get knocked down. A player from each team may carry a respawn flag which allows you to respawn on that players, this will keep you in the middle of the fighting at all times. All of this ofcourse, is if you can actually join a server.
Server browsing is a painful experience at the best of times and just down right horrific at the worst of times. You are unable to sort the servers by ping, players, game mode or map. They are simply thrown at you in a random order and in random quantities. Sometimes you get thirty servers listed, sometimes only five. You are required to continuously refresh the page for servers. This isn’t the only problem, not by a long shot. Servers are very slow to update, so expect to see misleading numbers of players per server, often I’ve joined servers listed as near full, only to have the game load and realise there’s no more than two or three people, or worse, I’m the only person in the server. The problems don’t end there, while the game does have dedicated server support, it’s a very rare occurrence that you find a dedicated server actually in use. The full servers? Player hosted servers with atrocious pings. The host simply breezes around with his ping of five, while you struggle to make it five steps with your ping above four hundred. I simply can’t understand why people choose to play on these player hosted servers instead of the low ping dedicated servers. All of this isn’t helped by the size of the player base, on average there are 50 players online at all times and at peak times, roughly 100.
I really struggled with scoring this game, I’m torn and in two minds over it. On one side, it’s a very fun game with plenty of content and some very nice features. On the other side, it’s got a torturous server browser, nonexistent developer support, tiny player base and quite frankly, a rather unintelligent player base. It appears that the game was simply thrown out the door and left to rot once complete. I really want to recommend this game but there’s a dwindling player base and a lack of support. Priced at €15, the content is certainly more than worth it, but with the tiny player base and how often you’ll struggle to join a server with a playable ping, it’s highly unlikely that you will get value for your money.
Available for purchase through Steam.
Also available on Playstation Network and Xbox Live Arcade.
It’s weird to have this system where an MP game is on steam when its below par. Why are they going up against the likes of l4d and tf2?
I wouldn’t say the game itself is below par. When you can actually get into a game and play it, it’s a really fun game. But actually getting to join a game is the problem, there’s just no players, rubbish player hosted servers being used instead of the dedicated servers(which the game does support) and the developers just don’t seem to care about fixing that problem. That’s why it scored so low, since it’s online only, I had to factor in all of those things.