You'd think that a few more hours out in the wilds - trotting through the scrub, listening to the world as dusk spills across the sky - would be enough to take the edge off those rough first impressions of Wild West Online. The sad truth, however, is that the more time you spend galavanting around in this world, the easier it is to spot its flaws, and the harder it is to overlook them. For all its bluster and promise, Wild West Online is a desperately hollow, cheap experience, and wholly unworthy of those three little letters: MMO.

Having pulled back on its promise of a PvE experience, the Steam store description of Wild West Online does, in fairness, now tout this as a PvP adventure, insisting it "isn't a story-driven MMO with deep narrative and AI opponents to solo-grind" but rather a "PVP action MMO game where you duke it out with other players in a persistent PVP combat world."

That said, it's important to remember that this is now considered a full release, entirely out of Early Access. And that's what makes all the rough-edges - the placeholder text, the imperfect graphics, the shallow gameplay, the glitches and crashes - all the more difficult to endure. Add on to that the game's incessant demands that you shell out more money to unlock some pretty fundamental features, and everything starts to feel more than a little unpleasant.

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Our review of Wild West Online will be with you next week. Ahead of that, here are some early impressions of this frontier MMO.

Wild West Online couldn't have come at a better time, could it?

Whether by accident or design, Wild West Online arrives on the coattails of HBO's phenomenal Westworld, and is an early appetiser to those of us aching to lay hands on that Red Dead Redemption successor and are struggling with the wait. And thanks to someone cleverly (or irritatingly, depending upon your perspective) dropping that screenshot onto GTAforums this time last year, it sparked a lot of interest, enough that the developer DJ2 Entertainment no longer needed to crowdfund financial backing.

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