Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is the prequel to the 2006 game Call of Juarez. A first person shooter that takes place during the American Civil War.
You select your character at the start of each mission, picking one of two bothers, Ray or Thomas. The Story Mode differs slightly depending on which brother you choose, battles are also different with each brother having a specific task, such as one driving a stage coach while the other shoots.
Deserting from the Army, Ray and Thomas rush home to find the Yankees have over run the family home. With their mother dead, they grab brother William and head for Mexico. From here you enter an open world where you select side missions for extra cash then buy better weapons before continuing with the main story missions.
The game is largely similar to other first person shooters, select the right weapon and shoot. There are of course added features, when you kill enough people you get a death's head appear on a revolvers chambers in the top right corner, pressing z allows you to slow down time and select certain characters (and how many times you will shoot them) before regular game speed kicks in and you shoot 3, 4, even 6 or higher people in an almost instant.
When you reach the end of a mission, you meet a "boss", instead of shooting him as you regularly would, you stand on either side of a road and dual. The fastest to draw the weapon and accurately shoot of course will win. If you are too slow to draw at the chime of the church bell, you will be quickly gunned down. If you're not positioned correctly adjacent tot he enemy, your aim will not line up to the target and you will be slaughtered. The trick is to keep moving and the hand close to the gun, but not to close.
There are a variety of old west weapons to have a crack at. fast loading pistols, slow ladies guns, rifles, shotguns, Gatling guns and the odd cannon. Bows and knives are readily found as well as tools such as the lasso. Each brother handles tasks differently. Thomas can get up high rather quickly with his lasso, where Ray will need a hand being pulled up onto a roof. Ray has a tendency to kick in a lot of doors, Thomas prefers dynamite.
The game uses the Chrome Engine 4, Techland's game engine. The graphics are realistic enough of the time, the real problem lies in the movement, while riding a horse and turning left the horses head seems to disappear in one frame and reappear on the left in the next frame. This smoother scrolling and a few other annoyances would have given this game a lot better rating, although the gameplay mostly is easy to navigate after small amounts of interaction.
Multiplayer is available in a team based format. Lawmen and Outlaws, the more enemies you kill the higher your score and the higher the bounty on your head. The downloadable content when available will allow for extra maps.
Its great to see a game set in the old west instead of the tiresome World War II games that developers and publishers seem to think are what people need more of. The Developing team of Techland and publishers Ubisoft have the right idea. There are plenty of areas that could be improved on but there is a high enough playability for a good release. Worth a shot if you feel the WWII shooter genre is stale.
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