Best Of

Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West is a game that puts you in the shoes of a madman with a gun who has fled the ravages of civilization to go be completely alone on a server that time forgot. You find yourself in an abandoned gold mine, ghost town, or corn field pitting nothing but your balls and your bullets against zero other players. L&G:GotWW:GRRM:GoT:TF2:The Gamening is an online-only multiplayer shooter. It might have been a phenomenal game in its day for all I know, but this is not its day. Throughout the 10 (11... ugh) hours I put into this game, only twice did I find real live people playing this game (who had apparently taken a day off of counter strike to go school the noobs of the wild west, and to inform them of their homosexuality). The rest of the time was spent playing the training... again... and again... and again... against bots that weren't ever taught the first rule of gunslinging (point the barrel at the enemy). I used this time to practice my (rudimentary) sniping skills. The game seems harmless enough. You select one of four classes, each with a primary, secondary, and passive ability. The passive ability is really just a buff to everyone, and doesn't really seem to have a point - uninteresting design. Primary ability is generally shoot (big surprise), and secondary depends on your class - you might drop a bear trap or throw a bundle of dynamite (LOL HAMBONE) or give your friends the ability to see through walls a la Left 4 Dead. The secondary ability is a beacon of creativity in what is otherwise just another TF2 copycat. The art style is well executed, but fairly uninspired - there's a blend of realism with cartoon-ism that we've come to expect in games that don't have the budget to go one way or the other. The gameplay itself is fairly smooth - no glaring bugs, which in this day and age is a LEGITIMATE point in the game's favor. The premise of the game itself is fairly dull - each map has varying objectives that are really just variations on capture the flag, tug-of-war, or deliver-the-bomb. Major gripe in the camera setup - this is yet another third-person game that should have been made into a first-person game. There is legitimately no tactical benefit to being in the third person (and plenty of annoying side effects, which I've touched on in previous reviews), but I guess the devs REALLY wanted you to see your character from the back. Even with people, though, this just looks like another CS/TF2/Unreal clone, set in a different place and time. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.