Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Well, after finishing with Six Gun Saga, I felt like playing more Western-themed games, and Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is it. I believe that this is the first time I’ve played a Western-themed shooter and since Rockstar doesn’t appear to have any plans for porting Red Dead Redemption to the PC, it’s probably the best one we’re going to have for a while. Some thoughts:

• The name is very obviously an allusion to the Call of Duty series and that’s where it takes all its cues from too. It’s mostly a corridor shooter that tries very hard to be cinematic and epic. There are a couple of open-world sequences where you have some choice on what to do and where to go next, but it’s very perfunctory. That apart, it’s all very formulaic, down to vehicle chase sequences, scenes where you need to man a fixed emplacement machine gun etc. There’s even one scene in which you’re on a stagecoach, which behaves for all intents and purposes as if it were a tank.
• I played through the entire first level without first going into the configuration screen and thought the graphics were terrible. The textures were all low-res and so muddy that I couldn’t even see the snipers shooting at me. Then I realized that this was a console port and I probably need to tweak it for my relatively high-end PC. ‘Lo and behold, it’s a pretty game after all, with impressive scenery and good animations. The open-world levels may be empty but they sure look good!

• The single-player mode is essentially coop with an AI partner which is a bit different than the norm, so that’s good. Most levels let you choose which of the two McCall brothers to play as, so there’s an extra bit of replayability as the levels are slightly different depending on who you’re controlling. Ray specializes in dual-pistols and wears a cuirass, making him better at short-range fights. Thomas specializes in the rifle and has more mobility, so he’s good at sniping. I really like their cover system, which is both intuitive and feels realistic. Nearly any object can be used as cover, and you move in and out of cover using the mouse, but cover never provides perfect defense. So much better than the static positions in the Mass Effect games.
• By contrast, I found myself disliking the bullet-time powers so much that I basically never used them except when they were mandatory in the coop sequences. The two brothers have different powers but they’re mostly useful at short ranges only. The basic gunplay alone, popping in and out of cover, works just fine and is far more satisfying. Since this is the 19th-century, all the weapons are slow to fire and slow to reload, so you can’t just fire off quick three-rounds and hope to hit something. You need to take your time to aim carefully and duck into cover to reload occasionally. It’s a nice change of pace from shooters set in modern settings.

• The story was much better than I expected. It has actual tension, drama and character development. The western theme is fantastic too. Desert landscapes? Check. Cowboy towns? Check. Old mines? Check. Tumbleweeds in ghostly towns? US Civil War, Indians, stagecoaches, bandits in bandannas, Pinkertons etc., if it’s a Western trope, it’s probably in here. I especially liked how religion plays a rather big role in the story. It’s very thematic and appropriate to the setting. The whole thing has a decent length too, longer than you’d expect a typical corridor shooter to last.
• There’s a bit of an upgrade cycle here because you can buy weapons of different qualities, with the best ones, Superb Classic Revolver, Superb Quickshooter etc. being naturally the most expensive and available only near the end of the game. I can’t say that I cared much for how clumsily the gun stores were implemented. Here you are on the run with the whole town after you, but you can casually walk into a gun store and the owner will happily sell you a weapon. But I did like the weapons. It’s astonishing how much individuality they managed to give each type of revolver, complete with unique reloading animations. My favorite one is the volcanic pistol for which you actually twist off the barrel to reload. Just badass.

All in all, a much better shooter than I expected it to be. Hey, it even has horse riding and lassoing. What more can you ask of a Western game? Too bad the sequel after this totally tossed the Western theme and was so badly reviewed that I’ll never buy it.