The Gunslinger is a Lonely Hero
And you'll be lonely too, if you play Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West.
Published: July 19, 2010
That relaxed music would be better utilized in soothing the player during all the time spent staring at menus and navigating the clunky user interface. An average session with Lead and Gold involves too little action and too much sitting around, for a couple of reasons. One reason is technical: Lead and Gold is not entirely sound when it comes to the important business of players connecting up and staying connected. It has been improved since release, but there are still issues. Network latency too frequently manifests in a lot of jittering and warping around.
Lead and Gold has a generally reasonable control scheme, but it commits one sin that cannot be forgiven. Sprinting is accomplished by clicking in the left stick (L3). Now, this is nothing out of the ordinary. The egregious part is that it must be continually held in while the stick is pushed in the desired direction of movement. Note to developers: holding in the stick while moving it is a terrible thing that should never be necessary.
Even with these flaws (including the control issue that I probably a described a little too dramatically), the positive qualities of Lead and Gold would shine through and earn an endorsement were it not for the unfortunate lack of players to be found online. Even a comprehensive patch would likely not be enough to reverse the rapid attrition that has ensued since release. For this sad reason, we would be acting in bad faith if we encouraged potential buyers to part with their fifteen dollars for this warty-but-decent game. Multiplayer-only games are always a risk for this reason, especially in the downloadable game market. As players hop between the various Battlefields and Calls of Duty, smaller titles can easily be overlooked. In an ideal world, Lead and Gold would be more completely polished, and it would have an adequate following. This is not such a world.
