Well it wouldn’t be XPNJunkie if we weren’t writing about some old ass game that few people probably even care about anymore. It’s funny to think that Call of Juarez was a thing at one time, a game that not only got a sequel, but got three sequels. There are FOUR Call of Juarez games, and in true wonky fashion, only three of them are available for purchase digitally, the outlier being the original Call of Juarez. To be honest, I didn’t even know there was an original; I thought Bound in Blood was the first. But it isn’t, and Bound In Blood, The Cartel, and Gunslinger are the three we have access to on Xbox, unless you’re a PC gamer in which case none of this applies.
But I digress. Call of Juarez is a dead franchise, from a time when Ubisoft took chances and published games that weren’t exactly considered blockbuster material. Developed by Techland (yes, that Techland), Bound in Blood follows the McCall brothers, on a personal mission to save their family by finding a medallion that points the way to lost treasure. If it sounds like a cool premise, you can relax. It’s a mind-boggling, meandering plot that fails to stick to any one idea long enough for it to be relevant. The plot goes places that require you to care about characters that they never really give you a chance to care about. Antagonists pop up here or there for one or two chapters, just to… well… antagonize you, and you’ll either kill them or they’ll get away and live to antagonize another day.
Bound in Blood has a few good ideas, and the setting is nice, but there are some drawbacks that keep it from being a truly great game. Call of Juarez is a B-tier game through and through, and it’s obvious in the gameplay elements that are repeated throughout the game. The handholding is off the charts, and a lot of the time you’ll feel less like you’re playing a game and more like you’re just following a list of instructions. The game does not like you to play it your way. At all.
There are a few examples of this, but honestly the game is littered with instances where you’ll need to accomplish a certain task, exactly the way the developers want you to. A couple of baddies chucking sticks of dynamite at you? Well, you take them out from the second-floor window. Trying to do it from anywhere else will not suffice. They must be killed from that window.
Another example is traversal. There are moments when Ray or Thomas needs to lend a hand to get up a ledge. I found my own way up, without realize the other character was waiting to help me. Instead of the game recognizing that I was there, I had to drop back down and walk up to the red marker in order to trigger the “climb” animation and thus move the story forward. On a different occasion, I had to go down from a cliff, so I used my lasso to latch onto a tree branch and lower myself down. I died three times, each time when I set foot on the rock at the bottom of the cliff. Finally, I found a path off to the side that walked down, traveling across the exact same rock that I was dying on earlier. Again, it’s not that what I was doing was wrong, I just wasn’t doing what the game wanted me to do.
You’ll constantly be reminded not to leave your brother behind, because while you’re running forward blasting bad guys, he’ll be hanging back shooting at one guy for too long, which doesn’t help to mitigate the feeling that you’re not really playing the game, it’s playing you.
One big part of the game is the Showdown system. This is a duel system, where you need to draw your gun faster than the enemy, and it’s kinda fun – the first few times. But literally every major boss encounter (and even a few side quests) end with a showdown, and when your timing is off and you get killed, repeatedly, it gets really old really fast. The window for success is extremely small, which is understandable, but that doesn’t necessarily make it fun when you’re stuck on one duel, attempting it over, and over, and over. When you finally win, it’s not a feeling of accomplishment, it’s that sense of “about fucking time.” And that’s never a good sign for a video game.
Graphically, it’s a mixed bag. The game doesn’t look terrible, but it falls victim to a very limited color palette. Maybe it was a sign of the times, as “multiple shades of brown” was a very popular trend for a while, or maybe it’s because it was a Western, and we all know color didn’t exist back then. In the desert and town stages, it’s fine, but in the wilderness, it can get extremely difficult to make out the enemies. I died on more than a few occasions just because I couldn’t figure out where I was being shot from.
The final stage cranks the Stupid Factor up to 11, and further exacerbates the lack of clarity. A shoot-out in a temple combined low contrast-low light with a screen blur and shaky-cam. I died SO MANY times during this section because I literally could not see what I was doing. I even cranked up the gamma in the settings and still it was a challenge. It got to the point where I was tempted to give up, but I knew I was so close to the end so I stuck it out.
The game ended with one last showdown, which thankfully, I accomplished on the first try. It was a bit anti-climactic, and did little to offer a true payoff, but by that point in the story, pretty much every major beat had fallen flat, so it wasn’t as if a great story had a bad ending. It was just that, an ending.
Anybody that might have stumbled across this blog a time or two knows that I love to revisit old games and see how they’ve held up. Sometimes the games I play are worth a re-visit, and sometimes they aren’t. This is one of those games that isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just difficult to recommend in this day and age. It was worth the $3 I paid for it, I suppose.
I still have two more Call of Juarez games to get through. Will they get better? Or worse? Only time will tell…
