There are games that don’t, and games that REALLY don’t. Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is one of those.

I was willing to give it a chance. Western FPS is a fun idea, possibly. But what I got didn’t amount to much.

This time I’ll go straight to explaining why it didn’t and just skip the whole “review” part of the post.

Read on! (I’ll be short on this one)

Why the game didn’t
Well for one the aiming sucked. Your crosshair turns red when there’s a target that you can hit by shooting. Simple enough. Btu almost half the time, even if the target is dead center (unless you’re close to the enemy), your shots will miss. And to add to the frustration, the game features an auto-aim function, which is basically just there to throw off your aim, moving at total random and being confused when there’s more than one enemy around. Fun! I also hate that there’s no button to throw dynamite. Instead, you have to switch weapons, so that you have a pistol in one hand and a dynamite in the other, and then you can use it. That’s pretty stupid if you ask me. Like the PS3 controller doesn’t have enough buttons or something?

Oh, and the one thing I was interested in here sadly sucks. Duels. Old western-style duels. I thought “how can they go wrong?” Well, they did. Basically, you move you analog stick so that your hand gets close to your gun. When the bell rings, you move your analog stick a bit more to get the gun out, and shoot. It’s surprisingly boring.

The game is filled with annoyances. The game constantly having to load for 5 seconds when you reach a checkpoint is the prime example. Since it’s a modern game and modern games=tons of checkpoints(so the kiddies don’t cry that a game is too hard), you’re constantly reaching checkpoints and it will stop the game to load every few minutes at best. Other annoyances include constantly being stuck because the game doesn’t do a good job of telling you where to go, and sometimes goes out of it’s way to annoy you. There’s this part in a mine where you have to use dynamite to clear debris that are in your way. Simple enough, but it’s one of the first times(if not the first time) in the game you actually have to do that, and any other time you wanted to do something like that before it didn’t work, forcing you to take alternate paths. I’m all for puzzles, but when it’s puzzling because of bad design, it’s pretty stupid.

The biggest annoyance is the story. It’s basic western stuff, kinda, but it’s very badly done. There’s no transition really between missions, it’s just “okay, now you’re here, go blow shit up!”. The characters are all lame and annoying (especially that wuss William always talking about God and stuff). They all have a total lack of personality and their character development is non-existent,. And their motives/the way they do things is just completely random and stupid. And their few attempts at comedy are pathetic at best (I did chuckle once though). And the cuscenes… damn they’re boring! It’s always just characters talking about uninteresting things, with nothing else going on. Couldn’t be much more boring than that. But overall the plot is as uninteresting as it can be, and it doesn’t feel like there was an honest effort on making an interesting story.

But the stupidest thing of all? Well, there are 2 playable characters, and for the most part both missions can be played by both, and both characters are around the same place most of the time too. What’s stupid about that? Well the fact that there’s no co-op watsoever! That’s right, a game clearly built around the idea of co-op has no co-op play. I don’t get it.

Overall
This is a very boring game overall. There are some nice ideas, like some side missions, and buying new guns and ammo (though it really sucks that buying guns for one brother doesn’t automatically transfer to the other if you decide to switch on following missions, so you have to buy new guns for the other brother). But the rest of the game is pretty badly executed overall. Bad aiming, incredibly bad story, bad characters, tons of annoyances, lack of co-op gameplay despite the game being co-op. I played this for quite a few hours.

The Save Factor
10$
There’s a ton of FPS on the market right now, most of which are better than this.

(Yeah, another FPS, it seems like a lot of those are “Games that Didn’t”)

jobocan Console, Games, impressions, PC, ps3, Review, The Games That Didn't, xbox 360