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First of all, I need to point out the User Interface. A black and white Killer7 style gun with a DOS font menu highlighted in bright yellow. I want to use the gun to whack the graphic designer in the face who thought this looked good. It doesn't look modern, it looks like a dying Gameboy screen shot in 3D. The rest of the game is just as bad, if not a hell of a lot worse.You play as one of three characters: Ben McCall, relative of the McCall's in the first two games, now a cop who paraphrases Revelations by adding in random curse words; Kim Evans, an Yale educated FBI agent/ex-gangbanger; and Eddie Guerro, the drug dealing DEA agent who may or may not be a mole for the Cartel your going after. Of course, none of the characters are innocent, one kills an informant, and Ben is, I kid you not, both a cop, and a pimp. Through the course of the game, you'll have to frame other gangs for burning drug stashes, chase after a Vietnam vet/rapist/drug dealer and shoot lots of guns. If this were any other game, like Max Payne, competent writing may have be able to save the game. Unless it's by the same geniuses making Max Payne 3, but I digress. The point is that the story is uninteresting and cliche, so much so that the story gets sick of itself a few times over the course of the game. I went from chasing a drug cartel to a sex trafficking cartel to an illegal weapons cartel, all of them being the same damn gang. Its like the writers didn't know what one another was doing.
I rarely talk about graphics, but it needs a mention here. They're god awful. Pop-ins abound through out every level, including a level that has you driving through a forest as it magically disappears and reappears in front of you. In the same level, a rock was rendered with a side that was invisible, allowing the player to see through one end through to other like a two way mirror. In another level, it was raining, but instead of water hitting objects, there was a visible texture above the tallest object that you could see against the wall. My favorite would have to be the seam for the trailer that let me know that it was going to blow apart... way before it was. I'd say these are amateur mistakes, but that would be offensive to amateurs.
Gameplay could be the most competent aspect of the game, except the fact that the controls are too loose, and the game, being fast paced, seems to love to hinder your progress every chance it gets. Grenades knock you down, leaving you about 45 seconds of time to get back up, if you don't die first. Behind cover, it takes you a minute to regenerate. My personal favorite would have to be when the game glitched after I passed a checkpoint, told me that I need more players to progress, only for it to work when I had to go all the way back to the checkpoint, to the new checkpoint, and then physically grab the AI partner stuck in a fence. I still want to know what happened to the cover system from Bound in Blood. Frankly, I thought that game was boring storywise, but had a damn good cover mechanic. This one, enemies shoot through your cover as if you were behind butter. With as bad as the textures are, it wouldn't surprise me.
You also have driving segments. Here's a science project for you: attach a small fan to a cinder block. Then put an RC car engine on it, throw it, then try to steer it back to a precise point (like on top of the disc of this game). This is easier to control than the driving segments. If you actually did this (what the hell is wrong with you?), you may be saying its impossible. Exactly. The driving controls are intolerable. What's worse is that if you want a trophy, you have to not get hurt in the car... that is magnetically drawn to any object in a ten mile radius.
The theme for the game is even screwed over by itself. It's supposed to be a "modern wild west shoot out." It's another modern shooter, but with stereotypes of Mexicans, and bad guys that looks like an Italian Pimps. Seriously... what's with this game and pimps, were the writers bitch smacked a lot by them? Even better is the fact that no one in the game is likable, period. McCall is an abrasive, abusive ass, Kim is obnoxious, and Eddie is just a scuzball, constantly hitting on Kim. This leads to one funny part in a brothel, where Eddie gets them in by saying him and Kim are married and Ben is there sex therapist. Then it's ruined by the realization that Ben is wearing a bulletproof vest.
In speaking of writing, I have a theory on this. The game was written to be about cowboys, but changed in the middle of production to be about modern police agencies. That's the only excuse I can think of for such subtitle and voice over mismatches such as "It's dark as cow's guts" and "It's dark as fuck." This happens every five seconds. Seriously, I timed it. Towards the end of the game, it happens so often that I wondered if they even bothered rewriting the subtitles at all. Other than the subtitles, the only thing vaguely western is the soundtrack. That is, until the electric guitar steps in as if it was drunk and went to a country music concert and went with the flow anyway.
Everything about Call of Juarez: The Cartel screams of half-assed workmanship. The engine is unpolished to say the least, the sound and voices never sync up (even after the thousands of stutters the game has at points), and even the glitches try to run away from it occasionally. Even after Saw II, I have to say that this is the first game I felt that the developers sent the beta version as the final version. This leads me to wonder why the publisher even approved of the final product that was so blatantly unfinished. Save your money for something more worthwhile... like a root canal.
Overall: F
- Bad Gameplay
- Bad acting
- Half-assed script
- Half-assed subtitles
- Glitches upon glitches upon glitches
- Saw II is better
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