Blood at high noon

If you’ve played a multiplayer deathmatch-style game in the past few years, you know that damn near all of them are first-person shooters either set in modern day or, as is the standby trope of the genre, World War II.

Although I like to dabble online with Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield 1943 from time to time, I don’t usually pay much attention to multiplayer-only shooters—without a single-player mode, they generally do little to hold my interest.

Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West, despite its online-only billing, stuck out to me for two reasons: first, the perspective is third-person, helping differentiate it from most other deathmatch types. Second, it’s set in the Old West, a time period rarely attempted (and even more rarely) done well in modern game design.

Lead and Gold makes somewhat liberal use of the (albeit skewed down) Team Fortress model, with four job classes that blend old western and shooter standards: there’s the deputy, a balanced, jack-of-all trades type with a six-shooter and a rifle; the blaster, a miner-type wielding a powerful double-barreled shotgun and dynamite; the trapper, essentially a coonskin-capped sniper, and my personal favorite, the rapid-fire gunslinger.

Like TF2, each class has strengths and weaknesses, and with secondary weapons and special abilities, the game is pretty well-balanced (it also really captures the western flavor). Although the name of the game here is strictly multiplayer, there are also six game modes to play through (think Uncharted 2 multiplayer), and a big slew of maps.

Maybe the most telling way that the game takes cues from Team Fortress, however, is in its interesting choice of aesthetic. Sure, it’s got your typical dusty, sun-soaked western visual theme, but the dev team opted to go for a slightly more stylized look with the game’s characters (à la TF2, but not quite as drastic).

The heads-up display is contrastingly stark and modern-looking, though, bringing a little bit of present-day to the visual proceedings. In addition to, say, your teammates all being outlined in white (for easy location on bigger maps), when seriously injured characters will “bleed” out a steady stream of plus signs, showing diminishing health while making for easier targeting to any nearby enemies.

Damage taken is also displayed on-screen in an RPG-style fashion and you level up over the course of a match. It’s pretty noisy, but once you get used to it, it’s not so bad. Everything from the modeling to the levels themselves really shines, though, and the animation is really impressive. No doubt about it: This is a damn pretty downloadable game.

There are just a couple things wrong with Lead and Gold. There are few options for gameplay, and not enough customization for creating a match. If the game does well, though, perhaps these things can be updated in a patch, or even some DLC with a couple of new character classes.

In the wake of Rockstar’s own Western epic, Red Dead Redemption, hitting stores this week, it would be easy for a smaller game like Lead and Gold to get completely overlooked, but I hope this doesn’t happen. The gameplay, as variations of kill-or-be-killed, is hardly complex, but this is a solid, polished and fun multiplayer excursion that shouldn’t be missed.

Red Dead notwithstanding, it’s not like you’re going to be able to get your western fix anywhere else for a long time.