The game also uses an interesting leveling progression, but it’s per match and not persistent. So you all start at level 1 and work your way up the ladder as you go by doing various things. Generous rewards are handed out for reviving gangmates and clearing objectives. Your rank also affects how strong your synergy bonus is.

Speaking of reviving. When you get shot, provided it’s not a massive amount of damage and you are insta-killed, you get knocked down. This allows you to shoot and reload your pistal and that’s it. A gangmate needs to come by and revive you to full health. If you are killed then you can either respawn at the base or wherever the respawn flag is at the time, usually on the back of a gangmate but sometimes it gets dropped and stays somewhere until the other team sends it back to your home base or another gangmate picks it up.

Overall I quite enjoy the game. There are a lot of times though when you die and you have no idea why. I’m guessing that’s an effect of the synergy bonuses and leveling. If one team begins doing very well in a match and starts leveling rapidly it could spell total disaster for the less organized team as the fast-leveling  gang members are suddenly doing more damage than the less organized gang. It seems like there could still be some gameplay balancing that needs to be done. But that doesn’t stop the game from being fun. While it’s not always all-out gunslinging free-for-all it is quite cool and with the right set of gangmates it could be serious fun. Yee-Haw!! I sure hope it lives up to the expectations and they continue to improve upon it. I’ll have the full review next week or so.

And one thing I’d really like to see, now that I’m using the left-handed DeathAdder mouse, is a left-handed version of the characters since the third-person view is a little off-putting when thinking fully left-handed. Sure, it’s a little thing but it would be nice is all I’m saying.