Great graphics and sound, but mediocre gameplay

In “Call of Juarez” you play as two characters, Billy and Ray. Billy is an indian who flees from his family ranch after having a violent argument with his stephfather. When he decides to return home two years later, gunshots are heard at the ranch from the neighboring town. Reverend Ray, the brother of Billy’s stepfather, is informed of this. When he arrives at the farm, Ray discovers the bodies of his brother and wife, and then spots Billy with a bloody whip in his hand. Billy sees Ray and flees the scene. Ray lays the blame for the murder of his brother and wife on his stepson and vows to avenge their deaths, and sets out to pursuit Billy.

Graphically, the game looks great. It really has the look and feel of the wild west, and the developers have done an extraordinary job with the character models. They have also modelled the player’s body, so that when you look down, you see your arms, torso, and legs. On the downside, the animations are not that great. Especially the facial- and walking-animations could have been done better, it looks a bit funny when people are talking to you, and when the enemy is running but his legs are running at a different speed.

The voice acting is also nice. Billy sounds like a whimp while Ray has an older and tougher voice. You get to hear Billy and Ray talk about their story in-between each of the chapters while the game is loading. The musical score is also great, and complements the gameplay while you are playing through the missions.

There is a nice change of pace between playing the two characters. When playing as Billy you have to sneak, explore, jump, use your whip, and ride and shoot with a bow and arrows. When playing with Ray you get to play through some very action-oriented missions, they involve a lot of shooting with weapons like sixshooters, shotguns, rifles, and some other weapons. You also get to engange in duels with several people throughout the game, although the controls in the duels really suck, because the game autoaims for you, all you have to do is to time the shots.

The gameplay is severely flawed. The game takes place outdoors, and as such you would expect some level of freedom, like deciding if you want to enter a town from the left or right, taking different paths between houses, entering any house you like and snipe from a window, and so on. But you will be able to do none of this in “Call of Juarez”, as every possible way you could have gone has been fenced in or blocked by other means, and when you are travelling in the wildlife most of the locations consists of canyons to easily narrow down the path you can go to into a single one. You have to go exactly from point A to B in a way the developers decided. They did not even try to hide the scripted sequences, or at least make them in a more natural fashion. At the second you go across a line in the map, you see a cutscene and more enemies are spawned in from nowhere. Another example is when you have to go from point A to B to C killing all enemies in your way, sometimes you have to backtrack to C, then a load of new enemies have magically appeared from nowhere to make your life miserable.