TL;DR – Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a mediocre FPS game that starts off terribly and then gradually pulls itself up by it’s bootstraps to the stunning heights of “alright”. It’s a fairly po-faced contemporary game that tries to take the Call of Juarez series into a new direction. Instead of being about cowboys and er… bad cowboys it’s now about grimy American cops and the evil Mexican cartels. This means you get to use more modern weaponry, but the core mechanics of the game are largely unchanged. There are a few new mechanics and an attempt to make it’s 3 player co-op mode interesting, but these are generally gimmicks. As a consequence it’s an OK/10 FPS game that has some interesting plot twists, but isn’t anything particularly special and I wouldn’t overtly mourn the game being delisted from all PC storefronts. Would I recommend it? No, but if you find it in the bargain bin for Xbox 360 or PS3 then you might get some modest enjoyment out of it.
Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a game that didn’t get off on the right foot, and as a consequence has basically faded from relevance entirely. It was an attempt to gently reboot the series into the frankly crowded field of contemporary FPS games and one that essentially failed. Call of Juarez: Gunslinger would come out a few years later and would actually be a success, both critically and commercially. Which means that Call of Juarez: The Cartel, for it’s merits and (numerous) flaws basically ended up as a dead end and quite possibly killed the series as a serious $60 AAA contender in it’s genre. Remember, Gunslinger was a budget game with budget aspirations, whereas The Cartel was a full budget game with the pre-requisite $60 price tag. So what caused Call of Juarez: The Cartel to be considered such a stinker?
Well to start off, it wasn’t the graphics which are nothing special but again aren’t particularly terrible and are basically fine. It also isn’t the writing, which while unintentionally cheesy and occasionally hilarious (again unintentionally) is mostly fine and actually delivers a surprisingly competent narrative. Of course by the standards of any other genre, Call of Juarez: The Cartel would be bad. We’re not talking about any other genre though, we’re talking about a FPS game, specifically a FPS game during the Call of Duty Modern Warfare era so having some occasionally interesting twists puts this game in pretty good stead. No the main issues with the game are simple and frankly what you’d expect. It’s a FPS game with regenerating health, inconsistent enemy damage, friendly AI that could charitably be described as useless, a strict 3 weapon limit (1 real gun and 2 pistols), wimpy grenades and an incredibly linear experience. To give an indiction of how the moment-to-moment gameplay feels, you are in a back alley shooting at clones of the same 4 guys who say the same handful of lines in every encounter. They will die in like 2 hits, but all the guns are inaccurate and aim-assist is for girls so if you’re playing on console then shooting is slightly tricky. Meanwhile your AI squad mates are shooting at the terrain that the bad guys are standing behind, and every 15 seconds will either say “DO U EVEN PRACTICE WITH DAT PIECE” or “TRY AIMING” if you miss, or “LEAVE SOME FOR US” or “U DONT HAVE TO DO DIS ALL BY URSELF” if you don’t. Rinse and repeat for around 4 and a half hours. Sometimes you drive a car (because the AI can’t) which handles badly and very occasionally you get to ride shotgun during scripted sequences, which are the same as the rest of the game but you can’t take cover. That’s about it.
Now to be fair there are three other mechanics which Call of Juarez: The Cartel brings to the table like an oblivious fat guy bringing hot dogs to a vegan BBQ. The first is that sometimes you kick a door down, which starts a slow motion sequence (just like the Matrix!!!) where you get to shoot some guys with your pistol. Then there are some cover shooting sequences where your heroic partners lay down covering fire while you flank a machine gun, which basically consist of the game saying “GO GO GO” or “NO GO NO GO” at the bottom of the screen. If you go while it says NO GO then you take a billion damage very quickly. Then once you flank the machine gun you uh, shoot the bad guys and the game carries on. These sections have their own unique backing track which gets abruptly shoved into the music mix while they’re taking place, just in case you struggled to read the only text on the screen. Finally the real meat of the game so to speak, is the “hidden agendas” mechanic. In theory it’s pretty cool, in practice it’s badly implemented so… points for trying I guess? The way it works is simple, you and your two shady cop partners each have little side objectives to complete. BEN MCGRAW the stern, angry, cowboy guy is basically stealing things for a prostitute he’s trying to get clean. EDDIE the loud mouthed hispanic is also swiping things because he’s in a lot of debt because he’s a gambler. Finally THE GIRL (Evans?) is swiping drugs because her brother is in a gang or something. What happens is occasionally someone calls your character mid-mission and says “hey bro can u steal something xoxo”. Then you are meant to PRESS X TO STEAL THING while no one else is looking. The problem is that this is the only way to level up your character, which gives access to better guns. Therefore I can only assume that you’d have to be a dumbass to deliberately screw up your buddies ability to have better guns. In practice it doesn’t really matter, because the starting guns are pretty much equal to the unlocks anyway. Also, in reality the AI is really dumb as established earlier. As a consequence, they are either following you (making this almost impossible because you have to do it sneakily) or are really far away. So you swipe things when they’re not up your butthole, which can be triggered by moving forwards to the next batch of baddies. I’m not sure what my partners in crime thought of me randomly running away during a bunch of gunfights only to return 2 minutes later with noticeably enlarged pockets, but hey whatever I wanna level up. I assume when playing with real people you basically steal them to look away for a sec, although my understanding is that you can gain XP by stopping them from stealing things. Again though doing this when within punching distance of the guy who actually bought the damn game is probably a bad idea.
So with the handful of “new” mechanics basically being the same as the rest of the game, we have an issue. Due to the fact that the core shooting isn’t great and that everything else is basically just a novelty, Call of Juarez: The Cartel struggles to really distinguish itself. Which if it were an honest to God cowboy game, wouldn’t be a big problem because there aren’t many of those. Unfortunately the series was trying to become a contemporary shooter, and there were a lot of those. As a result Call of Juarez: The Cartel got middling reviews and was deemed forgettable enough that it’s the only game in the series to be delisted from sale. I would complain about how seemingly every damn 7th generation console game seems to be suffering this fate lately (including Devil May Cry 4 and Spec Ops: The Line at time of writing) but that is par for the course now. If you don’t buy a game within 10 years of it being released, then it’s a total crap-shoot as to whether it’ll still be available for sale, or have received a half-arsed remaster, or just deleted entirely outside of piracy. I guess I should elaborate a bit on the plot, if only because there’s very little else to discuss other than the obligatory 7th generation totally dead multiplayer mode that no one cared about. So I’ll note that your three characters are each from different agencies, all of them are frankly a little but suspicious and all of them specialise in different weapons. In real terms this last bit doesn’t matter at all, but if you want all the CHEEVOS you’ll need to beat the game 3 times (once with each character) and then invent a time machine so you can go back to 2011 and maybe play this game online. The character dialogue is about what you’d expect, in the sense that it’s very silly and trying itself very seriously and has 3 stereotypes (Stern cowboy, goofy Mexican, sassy independent Black woman) yelling at each other because they’re all a bit crooked. Fortunately as mentioned the plot has a couple twists, that aren’t huge but are enough to keep things interesting and ensure that you can’t be certain as to what the heck is going on. It’s not amazing, but having news reports during the loading screens blabbing about what you’ve been up to is amusing and the game does a decent job of conveying it’s central point. Namely that the institutions your characters are serving, are just as dysfunctional as they are.
Now I could briefly mention that the driving sections are annoying because you keep getting shot constantly but can’t really do anything about it, or that the weapon selection is pretty boring, or that you have the ability to dual-wield your pistols (which kinda sucks honestly), or that you have a very limited “slow mo” concentration mode (with laughably bad “quips” that get used when you activate it), but honestly who cares. The game is fine. It’s a 7th generation console FPS with all the issues you’d expect, a slightly above story and the ability to play it in 3-player co-op. That’s about it, the plot is largely what you’d expect from Crooked Cops vs Cartels and neither the graphics nor soundtrack are noteworthy. In conclusion then, Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a mediocre 7th generation FPS with an OK plot and serviceable shooting. If you didn’t play this game, you didn’t really miss anything. If you want to play this game on the back of glowing review then you’ll need a 360 or PS3 (or just pirate it who cares, UBISOFT of all people won’t even sell it on PC). Would I recommend the game? No. Did I have a terrible time? No. It starts off badly and then becomes OK and has some occasionally interesting moments. That’s about as far as I’ll go, much like the series.