I hadn’t really been following the news streams for Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood developed by Techland.  Perhaps this is a good thing, however, because it meant I had no set qualifications when I powered the game on besides “I sure hope this is a good game.”  I’m a relative fan of the western theme, and I’ve noticed a distinct lack of western games in this generation of consoles and even the generation before it.  I’m not surprised why this is the case either, even in Hollywood western films only trickle in these days.  But it’s for this reason I secretly cheer with glee whenever there’s news of a western game coming.  Does Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood deserve any glee?

I’m going to take a step back for a moment and correct myself.  I was actually a little put off by the game before I even turned it on.  Not due to any reports I’d heard, but rather I flipped the game case over like I always do and read immediately the game features no co-op function, online or offline.  I know that some may think at that, “not every game needs co-op!”  In the interest of actually getting into this review, I’ll have to agree to disagree with any such statements and say that a western game prominently featuring two brothers and boasting “cooperative gameplay!” on the back of the case should feature co-op play.

The game opens up immediately with a satisfying cinematic introduction that sets the tone for Bound in Blood.  The McCall brothers are gruff cowboy protagonists, and there are many antagonist cowboys that need shooting.  So far, so good.  The game menu boasts a single player story mode alongside “extra missions” hinting at future DLC.  There’s also multiplayer with up to 12 players, but I’ll focus on the campaign first.  The campaign is 15 chapters, or levels, long and these are divided into 5 story-driven acts.  The game begins in the Civil War trenches.  Wait, the Civil War had trenches?  I double checked with my friend majoring in American History and he was a bit puzzled when I told him the entire first level was a trench warfare scene straight out of the Call of Duty franchise.  After some digging I found out the Confederate forces were making use of some impressive trench systems, but the first level still comes off as a bit much once you also include the cannons that reload as fast as modern artillery (and yet deep down, I didn’t feel like waiting twenty seconds to fire them, either).

Historical accuracy aside, though, Call of Juarez presents itself near the bottom of the spectrum of quality you’ll see throughout the game right at the beginning, which makes it a harder sell until later.  Visually, the game’s environments look quite good, when they’re loaded properly.  Texture pop-in was a problem throughout, and there were a few instances where I caught long distance vistas lazily becoming really tacky repeating textures that brought me back to my Microsoft Flight Simulator 97 days.  Some of the scripted sequences would delay for several seconds, or not happen at all until I moved Ray McCall around frantically.  As I progressed through the game, these problems disappeared.

Call of Juarez is a heavily scripted game.  This makes it feel very similar to any given Call of Duty game, but the execution is just not up to par with Infinity Ward (and others).  Many of the cut scenes are welcome elements that help explain the story and drive it forward, but the characters seem to constantly have trouble convincing me they’re real and not just characters.  That’s not to say I expect photo-realistic sprites, but rather some of the worst graphics in the game are the character models and that makes them stand out.  On top of that, the sprite choreography is all over the place, with characters often twitching, mouths not following along with voices, and eyes rolling back into their heads.  The visuals of Bound in Blood can be great, especially some of the environmental shots.  At several times I really felt like I was in a western game.  But the delivery is ultimately inconsistent.

There’s good news, however.  Aside from a few more gripes, those were all the nasty things about Bound in Blood.  The game takes a lot of inspiration from newer first-person shooters.  There is a cover system, and it doesn’t even require a button to activate.  As I was still coming down from games like Gears of War 2, I found this a little awkward at first, but it ends up working very well.  The cover system feels natural after a time, as if I was actually behind a crate or rock and slyly peeking over to snap off a few rounds.  The musical score is decent, incorporating western-themed tunes with an edge of electric guitar, and shifting if you’re in combat or out of combat.  There’s even a little sound effect when you finish an encounter reminiscent of Gears of War, and I came to like it.  As far as health goes, there is no bar or number, and you’ll have to work through fits of heavy breathing and reddened screens behind cover until you’re ready to fight again.  The enemy intelligence is perfectly acceptable, with cowboys often moving to cover and peeking over the sides of boxes just as you can to fire off a few rounds.

The game’s “cooperative play” comes in the form of allowing you to be one of the two McCall brothers, either Thomas or Ray, in each chapter.  Thomas is a specialist at rifles and he’s simultaneously more speedy, more stealthy, and more prone to being forced to climb things with his lasso.  His ‘special’ weapon is the bow and arrow, which quite frankly is a weapon far more powerful than even upgraded pistols or rifles.  Ray returns from his jaunt in the first Call of Juarez and his role is similar in the prequel.  He’s better with close range combat, he’s a bit tougher (though you’ll be hard pressed to notice most of the time), and he has access to his own special weapons: dynamite, dual pistols, and the portable gatling gun.  Overall I preferred playing as Thomas, but the game will force you to play as either brother for at least a level or two.

Y’all gonna be dead within the next second, y’hear.

Bound in Blood offers up two more interesting features, Concentration Mode and Duelling.  After accumulating several kills within a certain frame of time, Thomas or Ray can enter Concentration Mode.  Each brothers gets their own variation and each mode is useful depending on the circumstance, but again, I preferred Thomas overall.  Thomas will lock on to nearby exposed enemies and with the flick of your right analog stick (apparently much like cocking the hammer on your revolver) you can kill one enemy with one bullet, until you’re out of either enemies or bullets.  Ray is given a free aim in his Concentration Mode that reminds me of the Dead Eye lock-on feature from Rockstar’s Red Dead Revolver.  It’s good for dispatching several opponents too, but unlike Thomas it can also pulverize one tough enemy (such as a boss). When enemy numbers are overwhelming or your health is low, the Concentration Modes will save your life again and again.  More importantly, you’ll feel proud at least a few times as you kick down a door, shoot two or three guys, take a few hits yourself, and then enter Concentration Mode and drop the entire room.  Duelling is a more scripted affair that occurs half a dozen times throughout the game.  Arguably the most innovative feature in the game, duelling is a mini-game all its own.  You face off against one opponent and the objective is to shoot your opponent before he shoots you.  You circle each other, trying to keep your target in focus, until a classic high noon bell chimes and you both draw.  The system is flawed, because it seems like no matter where I am or what time it is, that faithful bell is still around and worse, the same amount of time seems to pass before chime, so duelling became less skill and more ‘wait 15 seconds then draw.’  It also seems to suffer from small control glitches, because there were many times where I was sure I was pressing down the right analog stick to draw my gun, and Thomas McCall’s hand would not move.

I need to take another minute to gripe about cooperative play now.  Why wasn’t this a co-op game?  It had all of the elements of a classic co-op first-person shooter: either brother helping each other get by obstacles, double Concentration Modes when entering some buildings, and brotherly taunting.  If I may be frank, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood was a better co-op game than Army of Two was, and it doesn’t even have co-op!

But Colonel, without co-op, how will we defeat the forces of evil and save the United States from complete destruction?

The campaign will have you fighting Civil War soldiers, cliché cowboys, and even the Comanche and Apache.  While I won’t start a rant about why Resident Evil 5 caused a hubbub of racial considerations and Bound in Blood will not, I’m going to conclude it’s because the Comanche and Apache tribes actually forged the most powerful weapon in the game.  The bow and arrow turns the game slow-motion whenever you aim down the sight, and this makes it all too easy to score one-hit kills.  Moreover, as long as you hit your target and kill him, walking over the body retrieves one arrow back.  The levels and environments change steadily and while the premise of moving from encounter to encounter stays with the game and nothing ground-breaking ever occurs, Bound in Blood never feels like a chore.  There’s even currency in the game that you pick up from dead bad guys or loot from chests.  The accumulated wealth allows you to buy and upgrade your weapons which each have several levels to them.  The system becomes a little ridiculous when the best weapons are reloading about as fast as modern weaponry.  The earlier weapons felt right at home in the western theme, but you’ll be more forgiving as the enemy weapons upgrade over time and killing them faster becomes a necessity.

The cast of supporting characters that come with the story range from cliché to agonizing, but I’ll let you decide for yourself and avoid spoilers.  I will say that by game end, despite some annoyances, I was feeling more empathy for the characters than I normally do in other first-person shooters that try too hard.  Moreover, the storytelling throughout remained pretty consistent.  One interesting moment that occurs several times during the campaign is a brief pause between levels where you’re allowed to free roam on a horse through a large desert, taking on jobs as side quests for extra gold.  It was a welcome change to the otherwise linear affair Bound in Blood is.  It was also a brief glimpse at extraordinary execution of a Wild West game.  I managed to do about half of the side quests in the game and it afforded me some better weaponry, but when all was said and done only six hours had passed and I was finished the single player campaign.  Bound in Blood definitely qualifies as too short, even for a shooter, and it’s not due to difficulty either.  I played on the Medium difficulty and died dozens of times, but the game just isn’t very long.

Luckily, Call of Juarez offers up to 12-person multiplayer, and I spent a few days deciding whether or not online western shootouts were worth it, or whether they boiled down to every other online shooter, but with more cacti.  In theory, the possibilities are numerous.  They could have stage coach chases, or defending/assault moving trains, or randomized duelling.  The latter game mode has the plus of already being programmed into the game.  Call of Juarez is probably not going to be the blockbuster game title of the summer so something in its multiplayer will have to set it apart from the teeming hordes.

This didn’t seem to be case.  My first impressions weren’t the greatest; I was kicked out of five matches due to inactivity or lag before I even played my first game.  Once I was finally in, I played several rounds of “Wild West Legends.”  The game mode, and all of the others, are really just minor variations of Deathmatch.  Of the available modes, I was immediately drawn to Wild West Legends anyway, because multi-point objective-based missions are my thing.  As my team and I moved  to plant three bombs consecutively in three important structures (for example, a town gate, a bank, and a church), the opposing team was tasked with stopping us.  Yet, even once I was in the game, I found myself varying from full strength latency to game-stopping lag.  No surprise, the game host was the player with the highest bounty in every game I played.

The maximum player count of 12 actually feels right on, since a wild west town would look really strange with 64 players running around shooting wildly.  With only 12 players running around shooting wildly, things are slightly more tame.  I will give Bound in Blood credit for delivering an interesting array of classes such as rifleman, gunslinger, or native that use different weapon load-outs, can be upgraded with play, and each with varying health and movement speed.  I was immediately drawn to the native, who is fast but carries the ever-silent bow and arrow.  Take that, gun wielders.  It immediately came to my attention that the high powered rifles and volcano pistols may be slightly overpowered, killing opponents in one hit where other weapons can take upwards of three shots.  Normally I would blame it on my lack of skill, and this is probably partly the case, but in three different ranked matches I found myself up against a team of 6 riflemen, in a row.  Offering a variety of classes is great, a la Team Fortress 2′s flawless implementation, but the classes should all be attractive in some way.

No, really, things like this happen all the time in multiplayer.  We never get mowed down like tin cans or nuthin’.

On top of the classes that ship, there are also several classes you can unlock by accumulating money in multiplayer rounds (which you gain by, mainly, killing).  The kill/death system is apparently done away with, and refreshingly revamped with a Bounty system.  As you score each kill, your bounty increases.  Whenever someone kills you, they gain money equal to your bounty.  It works well, because if there are exceptionally good players, when they finally go down the lucky shooter will get hundreds of dollars instead of just one hundred or so.  As you play the round you can upgrade the classes you’re playing using the amount in your Wallet (which is the sum of the bounties you’ve collected).  At the end of a round, whether you win or lose, money based on your overall bounty is calculated and added to your bank that allows character unlocks.   It would take considerable investment to unlock all the classes, but they all seem fun from a glance.

I can say with relative safety that Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood will be the most impressive western-themed shooter to grace the PC and consoles this summer.  Overall, the game was enjoyable and I would recommend it at the very least for rental to any shooter fans, with a double recommendation for western fans.  However, the game came short of setting itself apart from the many other shooters available.  The game offers up a Very Hard difficulty mode after the first play through, but only hardened fans will stick around for that.  The multiplayer element lacks the sheen of other games on the PC or consoles, and while it makes up for some of that with its class system, it ultimately reveals itself as average.  It’s likely Ubisoft will offer up some DLC for the game, and that’s their chance to add in some truly innovative western-themed gameplay, but given the history of DLC in general, that I may be getting overly optimistic.

Call of Juarez delivers gameplay and story solid enough to save it from total failure, but it remains a renter at best.  I give it two and a half Clint Eastwood Stares out of five.