The Wild, Wild West can be more than a Hollywood flop starring Will Smith – it can also be the perfect setting for a third person multiplayer experience via Fatshark. Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West is the name of the game and we’ll try to find out if this cheap game available for purchase on Steam has any value behind the tough look of the wild west. The short answer would be “Yes!” and in this Lead and Gold review we’ll analyze the things that make this shooter a good alternative to other more popular games.

Fatshark’s title looks and feels like a Team Fortress set in the Wild West and its biggest drawback is the lack of horses: you can’t really feel like a cowboy without riding a horse, right? Except for that, everything is how it should be and everybody will have fun after a few training matches to get used with the controls and learn the Pro’s and Con’s of each class.

Because, yes, there are more character types you can impersonate: the Trapper which is the precise sniper armed with a hunting rifle, the Deputy which is perfect for mid-range combat and the best choice for mid-level players, the Gunslinger is the lethal close-range fighter while the Blaster is the slow yet powerful and explosive Battle Tank.

Also the characters of Lead and Gold have a Synergy system – known as power-ups by the modern people – which encourage teamwork and variety when choosing your character’s class. Therefore, the Gunslinger will increase the team’s accuracy, while the Trapper has an increased critical hit chance and so on. The nice thing is that just one power up can be active at a time so teamwork is really important.

And like this was not enough already, it’s worth noting that each character has some special abilities they can use in the game, like laying traps, tagging enemy players and revealing their location on the map, throwing “grenades” and so on… All these details meaning that Lead and Gold can become a game where a team’s strategy and blending counts a lot when playing against other teams.

Game modes wise, you’ll also be very pleased with Fatshark’s creativity: you have the classic modes where it’s team vs. team, but also some Western-inspired modes, such as Robbery or Powderkeg, where team play is once again extremely important since the player carrying the robbed gold (or the powder keg, depending on the mode) can’t run nor shoot, so it’s up to the other players to protect him or her. The game maps also look pretty nice and wild west-style but really there should be some horses somewhere and at least a few cans of beans every here and there!

Of course, it’s not all sugar and honey when it comes to Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West. Lag tends to become a problem every now and then – not to the level of making the shooter unplayable, but to the level where it gets quite annoying – and I personally had quite some trouble adjusting with the third person view and aiming mode – it’s also true that I’m a fan of FPS games and might have mattered up to a level.

Other Cons include the lack of more weapon choices for your characters and the lack of a clear leveling-up process and ranking system, but as you can see we’re not talking about major deal breakers here, especially for a game that can be purchased for less than 20 bucks.

The visuals are really well done, bright, colorful and extremely joyful while the sound aspect is OK enough to keep the sound on so we can say that Fatshark did a pretty impressive job with Lead and Gold. So if you want to become a colorful, virtual Clint Eastwood in an action-packed game that resembles Team Fortress 2 in many aspects, head over to Steam and buy Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West. It’s fun, it’s intense, it’s cheap!

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