TL;DR – Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is a solid 7th generation console FPS that is short but sweet, albeit with a few annoying design decisions. The unreliable narration keeps thing interesting, but isn’t utilised to it’s full potential and ultimately I can’t help but feel like this game would have been better served by being a light-gun game (ala House of the Dead or Time Crisis). In spite of this it’s still a decently enjoyable experience and while it has some classic 7th gen FPS issues, it’s worth playing for fans of Westerns or those looking for a simple FPS experience.
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is a modestly interesting game by Techland which tries to break the mould and implements a couple of fun ideas through the course of it’s fairly short duration. The game’s main campaign mode will only take you around 4 or 5 hours to get through as you fight your way through 14 missions, but you do also have some collectibles to hunt down through each level and you’ve also got two additional modes in the form of a score challenge Arena game and a collection of Duels for you to blitz through. Regardless of these additional modes, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger isn’t aiming to be a fully fledged competitor to other contemporary FPS games unlike the other games in the Call of Juarez series, and is instead comfortable to settle down as a budget game. Considering the relatively mediocre reception that both of it’s preceding games received and the perpetual budgetary arms race that AAA games have found themselves in, this was undoubtedly a wise decision. Instead Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is trying to be a short but sweet FPS game with a pleasantly surprising amount of content, but this alone wouldn’t be enough for the game to have earned it’s “Extremely Positive” review score on Steam. So why does Call of Juarez: Gunslinger have such glowing reviews if it’s merely a budget FPS release that is fairly short, at least for the first campaign playthrough?
Well the biggest reason for the positive reviews is the fact that the game is told via the perspective of Silas Greaves, a hard-bitten bounty hunter who is retelling the tales of his youthful gunslinging days to a group of bar patrons. This group includes a young dime-novel enthusiast called Dwight that is practically gushing about your exploits, alongside his considerably more sceptical friend Jack who doesn’t believe in anything Silas is saying. Aside from occasionally dealing with their interjections, you also have to contend with Silas occasionally forgetting details of the story. As a consequence of this narrative technique, there are multiple points in the story where control is either taken away from the player entirely, or the circumstances you’re dealing with abruptly change. Sometimes this is to your benefit as hordes of enemies diminish in numbers or a suicidal attack gets “rewound” and at other points things become more challenging for you. More often than not however, these revisions to the game are used for comedic effect and they do a fair bit to keep the relatively short campaign engaging as otherwise this would be a fairly typical cowboy’s tale of revenge.
This tale of revenge features Silas tracking down various famous outlaws and their gangs which are lifted from the history of the Wild West, all in pursuit of 3 murders who handily enough keep joining these various gangs and managing to escape just-in-time. These 3 murders are especially noteworthy as they killed Silas’s two brothers and who tried to kill him as well, so it’s not just business it’s personal. The story itself is fairly unremarkable outside of the occasional interjection, although it does have some nice touches along the way and picks up massively towards the end of the game. As ever I won’t spoil anything, but I’ll just say that you do revisit some areas across the campaign and that the twists are choreographed in advance with aplomb. This is mainly a tale about Silas however and the various cowboys of legend you encounter are really just a footnote, although the game does featured a bunch of historical facts about various outlaw figures via it’s collectibles system. These collectibles are of interest to all players, regardless of their desire to engage in some reading, due to the fact that they are a substantial part of the game’s skill-tree system thanks to the large amount of XP you receive for finding them.
And yes, you did read that right. This short FPS game has decided to implement skill trees for some reason, but fortunately they are at least impactful and not the +10% damage to hat wearers on Tuesdays nonsense that has plagued gaming for decades at this point. The way it works is simple, you gain XP for shooting enemies and there are various modifiers such as killing them with headshots, killing them while on low health, hitting them in melee and so on. In addition, you also have a combo system that multiplies the XP you gain by the number of enemies killed while the combo is running (you have 4 seconds between each kill before the combo runs out). This means that you’re encouraged to play with some haste, as otherwise your combo meter will run out which is the best way to gain XP. Unfortunately, I found that the game’s Hard difficulty mode encouraged slow and cautious gameplay due to the high enemy damage output, accuracy and the fact that you have regenerating health (it is a 7th generation console game after all!) which puts these two systems at odds. As such I would generally recommend normal for a first playthrough, even if it is a touch easy in my opinion – probably because there isn’t an easy option! Fortunately there is a new game+ system in place so that you can go through the game again on a harder difficulty, but with higher XP gains and the ability to keep your unlocked skills. These skills mainly relate to unlocking abilities, such as the ability to dual-wield revolvers or shoot grenades dynamite in mid-air but some are more boring straightforward such as the ability to carry more revolver ammo or dealing more damage while in precision mode.
Precision mode is another of the ways in which Call of Juarez: Gunslinger attempts to differentiate itself from the other FPS games on the market when it came out, alongside the ability to dodge lethal shots and a “reflex” system wherein you occasionally gun down multiple enemies in short succession so long as you succeed in a quick time event (QTE). Precision mode is the most prevalent of these mechanics and essentially functions as this game’s bullet time mode, as it slows the game down (particularly enemies) and so lets you rattle off a succession of shots without being at too much risk. It also highlights enemies in red and with the purchase of a skill, shows the location of nearby enemies that aren’t currently on your screen. You gain precision in much the same way as you gain XP, with more “skilful” kills gaining you more precision than normal ones. Initially you don’t have much precision to use at a time, but there are multiple skills which improve both the duration of the precision you have and the maximum amount of precision that you can store at any given time. The other two major mechanics mentioned above are, much like precision, fairly straightforward to understand but do fit into the game quite nicely. You’ve got the lethal shots system wherein enemy shots that would otherwise kill you occur in slow motion and you’re able to dodge them, by either moving to the left or to the right. In spite of what you might be thinking, this isn’t an entirely free get-out-of-jail card as you do have to dodge in the correct direction and should you fail, you’ll die anyway. Additionally this ability is on a cooldown and regenerates at a fixed pace, so you can’t expediate it by playing in a stylish but reckless manner. Finally you’ve got the reflexes system, which is tied to certain sections in the campaign and essentially functions as a QTE multikill system, although it does require you to have ammunition loaded in the gun(s) you’re using. Once you’ve unlocked a certain skill, you can also trigger this power on demand albeit at the cost of your precision as it occurs during it and eats up the bar at a fast pace.
There is also one other way that Call of Juarez: Gunslinger differentiates itself from other FPS games, although it is a returning feature from the rest of the series. Throughout multiple points in the campaign, you’re forced into a duel with one of the head honchos that you’re fighting against. The way it works is simple and yet irritating; essentially you need to keep the target in your crosshairs, while moving your hand left and right over your gun with either the keyboard or thumb-stick. Doing these two things will increase your Focus % and Speed % respectively. Focus refers to where your cursor will be once you start shooting, while speed refers to how quickly you’ll draw your gun and both are pretty important. In addition to juggling these two %’s, you’ve also got two other things to bear in mind. Firstly you need to keep your eye on your opponent so that you can draw your sharpshooter as soon as they go for theirs, as otherwise they’ll just shoot you. Secondly, you also have a heartbeat mechanic that acts as an indicator as to when you’ll be able to draw your gun, but doing so before your enemy draws theirs is considerably dishonourable and thus cheating. This doesn’t impact much within the game, but it is tracked and if you want to get 100% completion becoming dependent on this will cause you trouble in the later Duelling mode. Oh and if all that wasn’t enough, there is also the bonus complicating factor that some duels feature more than one enemy to gun down! Opinion is relatively divided on this mechanic & mode and from what I can tell, console players (or those using a gamepad) have a slight advantage as they get haptic feedback when the various thumb-sticks are in the optimal places – whereas mouse & keyboard users need to watch those percentages like a hawk. The duels do get easier as you get more practice, but honestly I’m not a huge fan of them as they are an abrupt break from the rest of the game and the control scheme feels a bit like patting your head while rubbing your tummy while jumping up and down.
On the subject of duels, they comprise one of the two additional game modes that exists within this game. Aside from the campaign, you’ve got a duelling focused mode and an arcade mode which is essentially a retreat of various locations that you fight through within the campaign. The duelling mode strings together the duels from the campaign and scores you based on your focus %, speed % and whether you completed them honourably or not, with the only main difference being that you have 5 lives in total to beat them all. As for the arcade mode, it’s a selection of areas from across the campaign but with the twist that you don’t have access to your skills and weapons. These are instead unlocked separately within this mode and are split into three separate load-outs, which loosely correspond to the three skill trees from the campaign. In this mode you’re tasked with clearing through these areas while trying to gain the highest score possible, which is primarily done via racking up those combos and thus requires you to burst through them pretty quickly. In addition there’s also a par time and beating it will increase your score substantially, further adding to the need to act fast. These arena levels have 3 stars that correspond to the score you receive and you are encouraged to try and beat your friends scores within them, but otherwise there isn’t much here that’s unique or new. Ultimately these two modes add some further meat to the game but are almost entirely a retreat of existing content, so most players who don’t care about 100% completion will probably skip them.
Even if these additional modes are a bit basic, I’m not going to get worked up about them as they’re bonuses to what is explicitly a budget game and they do help give the game a bit of extra depth. The real meat of this game is the campaign, and while it does have some minor issues such as the 2-weapon limit and regenerating health system I found it to be a decently enjoyable yarn. The gameplay is fairly typical for 7th generation shooters for better or for worse (outside of the bullet sponge boss fights), but the scoring system and combo system encourage and reward skilful gameplay while the skill-trees do help you feel more powerful as the game progresses. The story while nothing exceptional has it’s moments and the narrative framing device is great for adding some amusing and un-expected moments, including flash backs and even ghosts. One of the best things I can tell you about this game is that the developers clearly enjoyed working on it and this comes through regardless of what game mode you’re playing. In summary I would tentatively recommend Call of Juarez: Gunslinger and would encourage those playing it to stick it through to the end, as while some of the boss fights can be tedious due to their high health bars the game continues to improve as it goes on.
