Lead & Gold: Mini-Review

Lead & Gold

Lead & Gold: Gangs of the West was available on Steam over the weekend for a free trial. It’s a team-based, third-person shooter, set in the wild frontier lands, something akin to Team Fortress 2, but with outlaws and gunslingers. The game pitches two teams of players against one another in a variety of game modes, with four different classes for players to choose from. Each class has its own particular weapon combination, special ability, and a ‘synergy’, essentially a class skill which radiates out to nearby teammates and gives them one or other skill boost. The four classes are:

• The Blaster
  Armed with a double-barrelled shotgun and sticks of dynamite, radiate a defensive ‘synergy’ effect.
• The Deputy
  Wields a repeater carbine rifle, has the ability to tag enemies, and radiates the damage ‘synergy’ effect.
• The Gunslinger
  Armed with an accurate heavy revolver, has the ability to ‘fan’ his rounds off quickly, and radiates the ‘accuracy’ effect.
• The Trapper
  Armed with a scoped hunting rifle, is able to lay bear traps to immobilise enemies, and radiates the ‘criticals’ synergy effect.

Between these four basic classes, and the small variety of game modes, there technically doesn’t appear to be all that much to it. Yet the game’s simplicity is definitely its strong point. There’s no need to play a tutorial to get used to the action, nothing that isn’t basically self-explanatory which prevents players from diving right in and enjoying the gun fights. Since I have to play all games on reduced graphics settings, I can’t say how pretty the game can be, but the settings and scenery certainly fit the gameplay. There were plenty of laughs to be had, for a game that on offer was being sold for as little as €5 a copy if you bought a four-pack. I didn’t get a chance to play out all of the game modes, though they all appeared to combine one or more of the game’s basic mechanics — blowing up objectives with dynamite, stealing gold and taking it back to a team’s safe point, and generally killing the enemy players as many times as possible.

Hitting them when they're down... it's all part of the game

From what I could tell, the game was reasonably balanced between the four classes, with each having a useful role to play on the team. The synergies the players produced could probably lead to a very one-sided match if a team was well organised, however. Players could spawn either at the starting location, or by the team flag, which could be carried around as a mobile spawn point, and was often surrounded by a gaggle of players. A good group would stand a much better chance of staying alive, whilst disorganised enemy players kept respawning in dribs and drabs. Players sticking together not only provided synergy bonuses, but also healed one another, and were also able to rescue players who had been gunned down — players could find themselves grounded, similar to being knocked down in Valve’s Left 4 Dead. In fact, there were numerous cases where you felt inspiration from one of Valve’s multiplayer titles, it’s really a wonder the game wasn’t built on the Orange Box engine.

Which is perhaps one of the sorest criticisms of the game. I can’t help but feel the producers of this game have shot themselves in the foot with this free weekend trial. Whilst playing the game itself was a charming little diversion, actually getting onto a working server could cause all many of heartache and take more time than actually playing the game. The server browser gave the player the option of selecting a game mode, but as far as I could tell this had no effect on the list of servers returned. However if I selected ‘all types’, the game appeared to crash, or at least become unresponsive as the game process and steam.exe collectively used up 100% CPU time. Hosting a game myself was invariably fruitless, only once did I manage to get players on there, albeit that worked fine when they did. Every other time, however, I could start a game on my own and then the game would slow to several seconds per frame every time another player attempted to join (I only know this because a few of us were trying to get on the same server together). I couldn’t help thinking that had this game been built on an established engine, at least such problems would have been avoided.

The Trapper in action

In general, trying to get into a server of this essentially multiplayer only game was a sheer trial. Even the simple 2 player co-op mode didn’t work correctly: I joined a server with a friend and the game put me on the opposite team to him, i.e. it was him playing ‘co-op’ against me and the AI. As far as we could tell, there is no way to change your team, either before or during the game. Since the dedicated server appears to have come about as an after thought, most of the games we played were on client computers. This meant that the game may start off playable, and then become entirely unplayable as the host’s connection or computer became overloaded with players. Or the host would just decide he’d had enough, and quit leaving all players to find themselves a new host. Trying to join a friend’s game via the Steam menu usually failed, or in the case of a full server provided absolutely no feedback, not even to say the server in question was full. And at some point during the weekend the connections must’ve got crossed, as three of us playing on separate servers were unable to see that the others were even playing the game, let alone in a server. The was the concession of a handful of dedicated servers that at least provided a playable gaming experience, but there were all too few of those, and many were password protected or simply weren’t working or set up correctly.

Final word: if it weren’t for the issues of connectivity, both being able to join and host servers, or having random runaway CPU usage when scanning for servers or hosting your own, this game would easily be worth the €5 or €10 it was on offer for. Sadly, given that a gaming evening might consist of an hour of faffing about trying to find a working server, before finally getting on one with your friends, only to play for 10 minutes and have the host either crash or leave and start the whole process again, it’s very difficult to recommend. And given that the version we played was already v1.7, it begs the question what the earlier versions had been like!