• Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
  

  7 hours playtime

  no achievements

I have beaten this video game, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. It has no achievements but I’ve beaten all story missions on the Normal difficulty. I have a screenshot of my stats which were shown after the ending:

Summary:
It’s an action shooter set in the wild west with scripted sequences in the vein of the early Call of Duties. Everything except the story has aged quite poorly, even back in 2009 this was not the best looking game out there. The gameplay is just good enough to keep going, some set pieces impressive while others aren’t, not a lot of variety in locations and ways of playing. The story and setting are great with characters that are not cardboard cutouts, most have some depth and motivations which might not be obvious. If it wasn’t for that, it would have been a pain to finish.

Review:
As an action shooter, it does an okay job. There are guns, explosion, and copious amounts of armed men to shoot at. Maybe too many as it feels like I’ve wiped out the population of two or three villages I came through. There is some variety in the guns but nearly all feel the same to play - the main weapons are revolvers, but a rifle is practically a revolver with more range and damage since the rate of fire, accuracy, and handing are nearly the same. Shotguns have a hilarious lethal range of maybe five metres, most encounters occur at 10-20m so giving it more range would turn it into a weird revolver.

There are two brother protagonists, usually one is selected while the other will be an NPC. While playing they’ll exchange comments based on what’s happening, like laughing at bad aim, thanking for killing someone about to shoot them, complimenting on headshots, etc. The comments repeat eventually but I found them entertaining and immersive.

Ray can pick up heavy machine guns (which I only saw once) and throw dynamite, which is cool, while William can use a bow, which is not very cool, and use a grappling hook to climb onto things. Unfortunately this is almost exclusively a plot feature, there’s no free climbing. Each brother has a skill which is generated by kills. Ray can stop time, select enemies to shoot, and empty the revolver cylinder. William enters slow motion automatically aiming at enemies, the player must move the mouse back and click, simulating cocking the revolver hammer and shooting. Both are good and I tried to use them often, but they’re wasted so much. By the time they generate, I’ve gone through many enemies so I’m not going to see 5 or 6 at a time to make the best use of the skill. By the time it’s available again, the situation repeats. It also last for 60 seconds so if I don’t come across another fight quickly it’s gone.

Most characters have depth. They have their own motivations which are not telegraphed to the player and other characters, and what they actually say or do might not be as it seems. This is what the plot is largely driven by, character want something, shitty things happen to them, and they work around it. It doesn’t feel forced and I is what I liked most about the game, it along with the overall setting in the wild west. The music and world design are great, although repetitive as it’s mostly the classic wild west town or a bunch of rocks in a desert. Ray’s voice actor is great, was even in some Hollywood films, but nearly everyone else really falls flat, especially the two other main characters, they made it difficult for me to not imagine a guy standing in a sound booth talking to a microphone.

I have many nitpicks to do with the gameplay. For one, map design is very lazy. Walk a bit, find an area with lots of cover, kill enemies, repeat. Almost all time played was made up of that, the scripted sequences were not enough to relieve the monotony. There is a cover system, where if we approach a wall or a crate the camera will hide. Moving the mouse moves both the crosshair and the camera out of cover which is disorienting, and not reliable. Some walls don’t work, sometimes the wall/crate is very small and I have to keep my mouse in just the right spot not to peek out. Most of my deaths were caused by the cover system being finicky to use. There is a copious amount of camera shake which also moves the crosshair. With post-processing enabled, there’s motion blur on top which makes it literally impossible to know what is happening. The last level of the game had the shake on nearly the entire time, took place underground with brown walls and brown sand falling from the ceiling, and all enemies were dressed in brown. And all the cover were small rocks barely larger than a crouching man. Not fun.

I’d recommend this game to someone who adores wild-west and eurojank. Probably not to anyone else. I give it a 5 out of 10.