Gunz The Duel

"GunZ: The egomaniac's pseudo-fun duel!"

GunZ: The duel, is an MMO3PS (that is also mildly RPG-Based if you consider the background story) created by MAIET (A Korean games company) is solely based on shooting other people that're playing around the world in the same "room" as you. Being quite a popular online game because of the fact that it's totally free if you want it to be (i.e. if you don't want to spend money all you'll miss out on is buffed up weapons and melee items, or upgrades) and possibly because it takes some form of skill (if you call mashing buttons skill) to climb the ranks. So let's have a look at what the game has to offer, shall we?

Gameplay: 4/10

And that's being generous. Sure, it may be fun rolling around and shooting for the first couple of hours, but it's guaranteed you'll always find one highly egotistic moron that is going to put you down in each room. Not only that, but the range of game modes is fairly poor. You can play training, deathmatch, team deathmatch, Those two modes only using melee weapons, duel match or team deathmatch extreme (Basically a team respawn match). That list is quite repetitive and you'll find you get the same feel from any game mode. After you find in the beginning that you often die before getting a kill you tend to get restless and will probably quit/uninstall GunZ or leave the particular room you were in and try another one. I wouldn't go with the latter option.

Though, I'll admit there are some fun factors to the game. There are 3 "styles" and one sub-style which can be quite fun to learn and master if you're into those things, but it can get tedious and boring trying to learn said styles. These styles are Korean-style, Dagger-style, European-style and Hybrid-style, each abbreviated to K, D, E and H-styles respectively. It is extensively known that H-style is a mixture of the 3 other said styles (not necessarily all three, but two or more of them). It is also known that E-style is the traditional style (i.e. it's the style using no glitches, like GunZ was intended) and K and D styles (particularly K-style) utilize glitches made by programming errors on MAIET's part. At one point MAIET patched those glitches but there was an uproar so they reintroduced them. VERY poor character customization. Levelling is for bragging rights and to get better weapons only, and you'll find a lot of people re-make accounts so they can be the "pros" of entry channel (where you begin). They DO have a quest mode, but it's repetitive and unrewarding to low levels. Overall fairly sloppy gameplay but the fun factor can vary depending on personal taste.

Graphics: 3/10

Outdated graphics with little detail and questionable 3D issues all over the place, yet fairly smooth and one of GunZ's better qualities. Doesn't get choppy, even with slower (to a degree) computers. Even at the maximum settings with an excellent graphics card, the graphics are poor and many other games are ahead of said graphics. The upping point here is that the settings work according to the story (which gets a plus for common sense).

Sound: 1/10

I barely had the heart to subhead this. Almost every track sounds the same. BTW, They're all no-lyric, uninteresting rock titles. Yes, in NAGunZ character sounds/modules were implemented but all they did were annoy people. When slashing with a melee weapon your character (whether male or female) cries out as if angry or in pain, and it's EXTREMELY annoying. Also, some of the emotes (those being laugh and taunt) have sound implemented into them, and often you'll find people press the button for the emote and then shift (or block) and keep spamming that to annoy people because of how annoying it is. They also didn't implement an option to turn just the voiceovers off, so you'll have to part with the music and all the other sound effects if you want to be rid of them.

Story: 1/10

Two pages of text for a story. And people refer to this game as an MMORPG? For shame I say, for shame.

Community: 1/10

Bunch of egomaniacs shouting "OMFG K-styl3 i5 t3h wai!!!11!!1!oneoneoneone!111eleven Spraya/dagga/blocka n00b gtf0!!1!1111!!1one!11!eleven!11111one" and then to make it even worse, posting on the forums "Every style is equal, blah blah blah stop being such ego wh0r3s". People on GunZ are kinda like round cubes: the vast majority of them are oxymorons (I'm not making this up, they're mostly foolish children with a knack for contradicting themselves). I'll share the notion that this is the WORST online gaming community I've ever been a part of. If you're looking for a friendly, helpful and supportive community, look elsewhere.

Overall: 2/10

This is quite a generous score from me. The score was one at first but I upped Gameplay and graphics a bit. I suggest you try it out: who knows, you may actually like the game; but don't be surprised when you find you've wasted a couple of hours playing a useless game.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 07/02/07