Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West

Since this review dedicated server support has been added.
 
When you set out to make a simplistic game which falls back onto the good old times where multiplayer games were a lot simpler and didn't rely on flashy over the top action to catch the players attention, you'd better make sure that you get the basics absolutely perfect. Unfortunately Lead and Gold falls short of doing this, becoming more of a chore to play than the fun back to basics western shooter it aspires to be.    

 As there is no single player function in Lead and Gold there is a lack of any kind of overlying storyline involved in the game as you enter a random server to kill random people for little or no reason other than collecting gold, which as this is a basic shooter with no persistent ranking system makes collecting gold throughout the game a pretty shallow experience and giving you no incentive to really carry on playing for very long.  
 
You can pick one of four different classes, the sniping Trapper, the rifle wielding Deputy, the shotgun slinging Blaster and the six shooting gun-slinger, you notice that each one is disappointingly devoid of any kind of personality compared to the games much bigger brother, Team Fortress 2.  Each class has their own unique ability, each which can be incredibly helpful in the right situation, especially if you are defending a building and let's just say... Your neighbourhood friendly trapper lays a trap in the door; the next sucker that walks in is going to be snared giving you an easy kill.  
 
Not only are the characters devoid of personality, the maps are too. There is not one memorable map that you want to play over and over again as you normally would when you play a shooting game, leading to several maps that you don't really feel like playing, but drudge through them anyway.
 
As this is made by a smaller games company you can expect quite a few bugs throughout the game, which unfortunately is a show-stopper for something as basic as this game. If you want to jump straight in for a quick game you can expect your experience to be a slightly disappointing one as random frame rate drops and server disconnects become more frequent as you continue to play. The server disconnections would not happen if there were dedicated servers, something that the game is lacking and desperately needed at launch, which makes me believe that by the time dedicated servers come out no one will really want to play by then. 
 

 
Whilst it is unfair to compare this small budget game to ones with much larger budgets, you begin to notice that something just doesn't feel right. Normally smaller budget games have a very unique personality compared to their larger counterparts, but Lead and Gold is missing that aspect completely and instead leaving you with an empty taste of something that should have been so much more.