This Massive Online Multiplayer game blends first person shooter, RPG and action elements.
The game is pretty simple. You start out by creating an avatar that you will control in game. The choices are pretty limited. You can choose to be either male or female, each which only have 4 hair style and 4 faces. You can also choose a starting "class." These classes actually don't affect your character at all, except for slightly modifying your starting equipment. An option to select starting weapons would have sufficed.
Once you have created and named your character you can move onto the lobby. From the lobby, you can enter a game already running, create your own game, buy and sell equipment or join a clan.
Gunz: The Duel has a number of different game mode available, such as basic Death Matches, Team Death Matches, Questing, Training, Extreme and others. The gameplay itself is nice and straighforward. You join a game and are then set loose on your enemies, whether they be an opposing team, monsters (in which you can face co-operatively with other players) or an all out match with everyone pit against everyone.
You can use quite a few weapons from First Person Shooter standards such as shotguns, machine guns, magnums and so forth, as well as a variety of swords, daggers and grenades. Your character is also capable of pulling off gravity defying moves with the space bar, such as running along and up walls Matrix style.
As you defeat enemies, you earn experience. Collect enough experience and your character gains a level. Although levelling up doesn't directly enhance any of your characters capabilities, it does open stronger weapons and armour to them, allowing you to slowly become more powerful as the game progresses.
Not only does this added RPG element give the sense of progress in what would otherwise be a pretty dull game, but it is fairly well balanced. It is still very possible for a level 1 character to take on a level 40. Although it will, obviously, be more challenging to do so than take on another level 1. This balance will keep FPS fans from being turned off from the game, as it won't boil down to "who simply is of a higher level."
Gunz: The Duel does however have some major flaws. Not only are the graphics rather horrendous, but it suffers from a large degree of lag. Although the game does deal with the lag well to prevent it from becoming gamebreaking, you will still frequently see characters dart around erratically or in some bad cases, standing there doing nothing.
Another flaw in Gunz: The Duels gameplay is the presence of K-Styling. Players are able to take advantage of certain animations to pull of speedy and fast attacks which were not intended by the games original developers. Although this isn't cheating per se, some people may see it this way. But overall, this is also far from gamebreaking and Gunz still proves to be fun with it's existence.
Gameplay: 7/10
Graphics: 4/10
Sound: 8/10
Replay Value: 7/10
A great free game, although not exactly worth any (or much) real money. Worth checking out.