Horrible gameplay balance, completely full of glitches and bugs, and takes about as much skill as a Hadoken.

User Rating: 3 | Gunz The Duel PC
Don't get me wrong, GunZ : The Duel was pretty fun a long time ago. It's a simplistic Third Person Shooter that takes alot from games like Max Payne, allowing you to pull off a wide variety of moves at all sorts of angles. Overall, it was a pretty enjoyable game.

It was, until someone discovered a glitch with the Sword weapons that allow you to cancel the delay of sword movements, and a whole series of glitches and bugs called Korean-Style (or K-style) was born. Now normally, this wouldn't matter and most companies would patch the game and fix the bug in it's early stages; however Maiet was so ineffective that when they did so people quit the game, and they gave in to player demands and kept it in.

This normally wouldn't be too much of a problem, even I think it's fun. The different, "moves" created by the players are pulled off by a different combinations of dashing moves (Tapping one of the movement keys twice in any direction), slashing (The normal sword attack), and blocking (pressing the block button, which allows you to block bullets and sword attacks on your upper body). So for example's sake, a "Butterfly" is pulled off by pressing the following keys: Space, Directional Button, Same Directional Button, Left Click, Block, Repeat.

Actually, it's interesting. It's kind of like making Street Fighter a Third Person shooter, it's actually quite fun. The problem? Most of these moves are completely unbalanced. Anyone who loves this, "K-style" will disagree, but it's nothing but a shallow lie. Take for instance, there's a move that allows you flip someone in the air, and if they don't press the Jump key at the right time, they land on their backs and are open to hits for a few seconds. K-style can completely ignore the flip, and by a short sequence of keys cause you to instantly be on your back, or juggle someone in mid air: it's completely unavoidable if it happens and can lead to an cheap death. In small rooms with low ceilings this move is as simple as Right-click, and hammering left click: you can tap that space bar with both hands, it's impossible to get out of it.

This is just one of many problems. The second problem is with Shotguns, which are great weapons sure. They have a high delay, a wide scatter, low ammo clips, and a high damage that is usually only effective at close range. The problem with them? You can carry two of them. This is a problem how? They don't share a delay or a cooldown or anything. Switching between two shotguns can kill someone in about 1-2 seconds depending on your speed. Just shoot, hold down the button and scroll up on the mouse wheel, shoot again, dead. Due to how fast you can spam shotguns, the delay is pointless and the damage is effective at longer ranges as it's impossible to miss someone. Using another K-style glitch dubbed, "Reload Shot (RS)" it's possible to shoot even faster, within 9 Milliseconds if your fast.

So what do you think every Duel, Deathmatch, and clan battle looks like? Yep, nothing but 12 people jumping around with swords spamming shotguns at each other. It's fast, yes; but it's only fast because of glitches and performing this kind of combat is tapping the same keys over and over for the entire time.

Now it doesn't mean there's a low selection of weapons, there's actually a lot. There's different pistols, revolvers, machine guns, rifles, Sub-machine guns, rocket launchers; the list goes on. The problem is if your using any other weapon, your a noob. Even if your getting headshots ever kill and completely outplay another bad player, your still harassed as a noob and eventually even kicked from rooms just for using a different weapon type. Short story shorter, the community is completely horrible: thank god they give you a option to turn off Personal Messages and even turning off the gameplay chat completely.

Another thing that hinders this game is a Client to Client connection that means if someone is within 200 miles of you with a stable connection, they have a low playable ping of 30-40. If someone lives on the other side of the country or even in a completely different country, they lag horribly to the point they are completely invincible. This forces you to actually have to aim behind where they actually are, and the formula for doing so is 100 Ping = 1 Second, so aim where they would be 1 Second before where they actually are. This adds up where when you get into a room and everyone has 150+ ping.

Oh, graphics and sound? The graphics are on-par with the original Counter-strike, but at least in counter-strike your mouth could move: in this game your face is nothing but an ugly mess of pixels on a single texture, the lack of detail is noticeable from a distance. This game has a couple of decent songs that fit the mood, but that's pretty much 2 out of 4 BGM tracks.

There are a different things I didn't even cover, and this is because there's no point to. The above is pretty much everything you will see in the higher levels of the game: People (Usually always women, as apparently their character animations make it simpler to perform K-style) flying around in repeating patterns spamming shotguns at each other. It's to the point people using any other weapons are kicked from the game, and the Cash Shop even sells a package called the, "Pro Set" which includes shotguns and a sword.

If your 12 years old, like being illiterate, like trying to insult other players and tapping the same keys over and over for hours using the same weapons and tactics as everyone else who plays the game, then GunZ is perfect. If your 13, looking for a great fast-paced third person shooter to play, move onto something else and avoid this sin against god.