Call Of Juarez: Bound In Blood

Review from Cav - Friday, 14 August 2009 @ 11:53am

Coffee or Tea?

Chicken or Fish?

Heavy or Light Beer?

Great storyline or unpolished game play?

Now, the One Hundred Dollar Question: Which one of the four statements above is not, and should never be, valid options? That last one nearly... I repeat, nearly, wasn’t there, but I came up against some things which made me shake my head in disappointment.

I so wanna make a slave joke here - Can I please, masser, sir?

When Yug emailed me and said that Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, was in the mail, I jumped on the net to find out a little bit more about it. Seeing I was at work when Yug contacted me, the only site that I can really find out about games on, that hasn’t been blocked, is Wikipedia. Yes, it sounds stupid, but thems the breaks. Hell, even the Wikipedia page for this place AND the wiki search for Guy Blomberg is blocked at my work! All that aside, amazingly enough, the Wikipedia page had a great description of the storyline, which made me even more anxious to play it. Now for me to get anxious about a game as of late is a rather hard trick, but I knew seeing that I had a week off work at the same time this was coming in, it gave me some motivation to get in there, belt through the game and share my thoughts with you. ‘Belt through’ was actually the best description my performance with this title. The game arrived in my mailbox late on Monday afternoon, just before 5pm. It is now 2:22am on the following Wednesday Morning and I have managed to play through the game on Medium difficulty with the total play time measured at about 9 hours and 15 minutes.... which is not quite long enough for this game if you ask me. For those of you who played the first Call of Juarez (no, that doesn’t include me) you would be familiar with the lead characters the McCall brothers. Ray, who looks like Owen Wilson after three rounds with Chuck Liddell, and Thomas, who looks like a Jackman/Mortensen mix. There is also their little preacher brother, William, who for some reason reminded me of a Bam Margera who owns a hairbrush and knows how to use it.

...why do I have the song Woody’s Round Up from Toy Story 2 in my head right now...

It's real purrdy like, ain't it?

Anyway, I am not going to tell you much about the storyline, other than there are horses, cowboys, Indians, women and treasure. That’s all you are getting out of me, because the storyline is one of the main reasons that you will go and play this game: The story is great, I really enjoyed it. This is well complimented by the graphics, although they were very dark in some places and, as always, the lip sync needs a little work. You actually feel a little dusty after playing this... or maybe that was from the wife being away and me playing more videogames and doing less housework. The environments within the main game are brilliant, as are the multiplayer maps. But with beauty comes the beast. There are some really strange physics that comes with CoJBiB. While riding across the plains I came across a small canyon with a ridge not for from the top, maybe 30ft. So I kick old Mr Ed in the guts to see if he’s game to take the jump – hey, no problems! Later in the piece, me and Ed are galloping across the fields, flying past Cacti and rocks, when up ahead there is another small ridge, this one no more than 10 feet and there is a mass of open land at the bottom, not a hazard to be seen – Off we go horsey! – CRUNCH – Horse and I get a face full of dirt and another six feet of it poured on top of us... Game Over. Umm.... What just happened?

Hey! I can see my house from here!

Checkpoints and loading seem to happen all too often and when you least expect them, but never in the middle of a gunfight, tahnksfully. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I thought a few recent games managed to let a player traverse across a large sandbox type game without loading all of the time. If this could have been mastered for this game, it may have been a lot smoother. Saving games isn’t hard and autosave kicks in at the end of each level, for you forgetful types. But be warned; don’t stray too far from your objective point at the end of a cutsceen. I did just that and found that when the next level started I was too far away from my brother and I instantly lost. I was so overjoyed to have to go back and do everything over again..... Don't worry, the controller is still in one piece. PS3 controllers are so much more expensive than Xbox360 ones. There are quite a few points in the game, where you have to interact with your brother, assisting one another to reach high places and kicking in a door an' fillin' varmints full o' lead! Also when I complete a level, really don't need trophy achievement, I think that was just a bit of a filler. There are plenty of other trophies to be won, but these were just a little lost if you ask me.

The controls are relatively easy to get a grasp of, but switching weapons in the heat of battle can become a little clumsy. Speaking of battles, the stand offs are pretty intense, while you try and prep yourself for the bell. Maybe a few years of playing a little too hard has done a little more to theCAVman than reduce the amount of hair on his head, as I only won one stand off at the first trigger pull. Let me tell you now that we reviewers have it hard. You guys probably don’t know that 70% the review copies of games we get don’t come with instructions books or fully fledged covers like the retail versions, so sometime the lack of instructions available within a game sees us flailing around like idiots trying to work out what to do. With the game putting you in different scenarios other than the standard FPS set up, some instructions in the main menu might have been nice.

Where the hell are we gonna buy our dynamite now?

Multiplayer is something I really enjoyed... as long as I could get on a decent server. If that was something I failed to do, I was faced with huge lag and constant freezing, where as I couldn’t move my player, but dust blew past me, trees and grass swayed. Actually my player did do those “if I stand still long enough, I might twirl my pistol or swing my rifle” type actions, but I couldn’t sight up, reload or anything. When I did get on a good server, the game play was great! The maps were just the right size, with buildings to run through (or camp in) and heaps of stuff to hide behind. There were some great game types as well including Manhunt, which had players split into two teams, with each team alternating having one wanted man on their side. You could kill the other team members, but got a bigger bounty for killing the wanted man. There are also Wild West re-enactment scenarios, which are much like a Headquarters match. There are free for all and team death matches too. You start with only a few available classes. More can be unlocked as you earn money in ranked matches. All in all, the multiplayer element of this game makes CoJBiB a keeper for me.

Pros

Multiplayer is great, servers considered - Visually pretty - Great story - Random encounters while riding across the plains`

Cons

Really should have local 2 player split screen co op - A little short - Missing instructions in main menu - Some physics issues