CALL OF JUAREZ
Reviewed on Xbox 360. also on PC. Dev: Techland. Publisher: Ubisoft
Developed by polish developers Techland and released for PC in 2006, this was picked up by Ubisoft and released in 2007 on Xbox 360. It’s a Western, a setting that has not done all that well in games. Sure there were levels in the Duke Nukem games on N64 and in Timesplitters. And there was Red Dead Revolver (decent), Dead Man’s Hand (awful) and Gun (good, but not great). Call of Juarez is actually pretty good.
It didn’t score well on PC reviews but did better on Xbox 360. The demo came out on LIVE last year just as games such as Bioshock and Halo were about to hit so the timing of the Xbox 360 version was poor. But now that I’ve played my way through Bioshock (Bioshock? Bioshock!), Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Mario Galaxy, Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted and Orange Box, I picked up Call of Juarez on the cheap. I thought “for 30 bucks, if I at least get 4 hours out of it, I’m fine with that”. So anout 12-13 hours later, I finish the thing on medium and enjoyed it a lot.
It’s a first person shooter set in the wild west. You play as two different characters throughout the game. First, there’s Billy a young half-breed who’s accused of a murder he didn’t commit and goes on the run from grizzled Reverend Ray, who you play for the other half of the game.
Billy can climb, use a bow and hide from those following him by hiding in bushes and use a whip as a weapon or to climb and swing to new areas. Rev Ray can’t climb, but has “concentration mode” which is like a poor man’s bullet time and can stun some enemies by reading a passage from the bible (after which you shoot them). Throw some platforming, stealth missions, horseriding and a lot of shooting and you have a fairly varied set of gameplay dynamics.
Most of it is done very well. Except for the platforming. I must say there’s a reason why most FPS’s don’t have platforming elements in them any more and its a lesson that the Call of Juarez creators seemed to have missed because they are easily the most frustrating parts of the game. And these aren’t skippable bits of the game either so you end up jumping and hoping for the best quite often. I also found trying to negotiate a horse down a steep slope not to be all that much fun.
The presentation is excellent. The graphics are very good apart from some draw-in issues with the grass and some pop-in in the large outdoor areas. The framerate is smooth though there a degree of screen tearing. Audio is excellent with great music (that ultimately gets overused) decent voice acting (Reverend Ray is voiced by Marc Alaimo from Deep Space Nine) and nice sound effects. The story and cutscenes are pretty well done. They’re aren’t fancy but they get the job done well.
Overall – if you’ve played all the big FPSes you’ll probably enjoy Call of Juarez. It is definitely better than the Western themed games of last generation even if it’s not Bioshock great.
C1 Rating: 2/3
