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NOW PLAYING: CALL OF JUAREZ- BOUND IN BUGS

Techland’s western FPS Call of Juarez was one of my cheapie surprise packages. That is it was a PC game from a little-known Polish developer, distributed by Ubisoft and ported to 360. It was a minor hit but enough of one to warrant a sequel. The first game was also quite well made and attempted some simple and mostly effective innovations to the relatively staid single player FPS genre. It was $20 from Play-Asia and well worth that money. Here’s our review of that game

Flash forward to 2009 and Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, a prequel to the original game, is released mid year and gets reasonable scores and a PS3 version that’s been the bigger seller in Europe. Unlike the first game, there have been no sudden drops in price so I’ve had to *gasp* pay more than bargain bin prices for it (but still not quite full price).
So we follow Ray (not yet a mad preacher) and his brother Thomas, as they hear the Call of Juarez. You play as one or the other, getting to choose between them most of the time and have the other follow you anyway (though there’s no co-op for those of you to whom that’s important).

So far my impressions (of about an hour or so of play) are:
1- It’s seems a little lacking in soul compared to the first one.
It’s almost as if they made the first one and wanted to do something else, but Ubisoft was waving a cheque under their noses. Of course it is early days and may improve.

2- It’s buggy as all hell. 5 hard locks on two different 360s.

Our next Focus Test subject is, funnily enough, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. It’s an unusual focus test to be sure.

Halo 3 ODST is out, but I will probably wait until the weekend to pick it up.The multiplayer part of it is not essential as I have played all bar the three new maps in this collections when they were DLC. I do like the fact you can install them to your HDD, unlike Halo 3.