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.

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Nail’d is a 7th generation racing game brought into the world by Techland (of Call of Juarez and Dead Island fame), which came to my attention due to a combination of three significant factors. The first was that it was aggressively cheap with a sale price of around $1, the second was that it promised an earnestly unironic and heartfelt attempt to deliver a relentlessly energic racing game based around EXTREME off-roading action, and the third factor was that it somehow maintained a very positive average review rating on Steam. It’s definitely an obscure choice for a review considering the fact that it came and went without leaving much of an impact or fanbase behind, but I’m a sucker for bargain bin games from this era and honestly the fact that they managed to persuade Slipknot to put their music in the OST spoke volumes. Sadly they were only able to get 1 Slipknot song and one Rage Against the Machine Song, which I feel is honestly emblematic of how the entire game panned out. You see, the game itself is enjoyable but it definitely feels as though development time (or budget) ran out midway through the project and as such Techland panicked and desperately tried to pad out the game so that they could punt it onto the market as a fully priced AAA game.

Now that’s not to say that Nail’d doesn’t have it’s areas of refinement and effort, as the tracks you race on are generally pretty good and both the racing AI and soundtrack are par for the course with some nice touches. The tracks themselves fit into 3 broad clusters, each with equal-ish amounts of courses and they include off-road American desert tracks, off-road Andes mountains/woodland forest tracks and finally Mediterranean Grecian ruin tracks. Each group has it’s own biome and lighting and each track has it’s own hazards and moving parts, generally designed to make traversing them chaotic and to provide racers with ways to bash into each other and force their opponents to crash. The game also places a surprisingly large emphasis on aerial jumps, with most courses being absolutely ridden with ramps, jumps and hair-raising falls. To it’s credit, these jumps are often spectacular and are often just the right amount of challenging, requiring a bit of knowledge or skill to traverse successfully lest you smash into the side of a cliff or spend far too long airborne while your competition speeds off into the sunset. To keep these tracks and the ensuing races interesting, Nail’d also provides you with a Nitros boost ability which passively regenerates and which can also be increased quickly via performing one of a series of “Feats”. These include performing wheelies, causing other players to crash, nailing a perfect landing or driving through flaming circles / checkpoints. While these may sound like a silly little side activity, most of the tracks are built with them in mind and learning how to master them will give you a significant edge thanks to the nitros boost that they provide.

As for the AI, it’s often in the goldilocks spot of providing an acceptable challenge without being too perfect and has a surprising habit of making mistakes while the player isn’t looking. For most racing games you’re safe to assume that the AI is frankly cheating when they’re off screen, as they’re often immune to course hazards at best or actively gaining speed boosts via the tedious “rubber banding” effect at worst. Yet in Nail’d the AI can and will make an absolute mess of things while they’re far in the lead or eating your dust in the rear-view mirror, which gives the races and especially the tournament cups a much needed dose of unpredictability. Opponents that were placed 1st in the last race will suddenly drop down to 6th without any input from the player, or vice-versa which prevents the feeling that a cup has already been decided only a race or two in. There are one or two quirks to the AI though, such as the fact that it definitely has a pre-determined racing line (which is common to the genre) that it will follow even when it’s a really, really bad idea. You can also cause it to commit suicide at multiple points, as the AI will boost when you’re boosting near it but there are some jumps that it just doesn’t know how to handle while boosting and as such you can force it to over commit 100% of the time. Finally as for the soundtrack, it adds an air of cheesy metal rock which is era appropriate and that features some original pieces which serve to fill in the gaps between the bands that you might have heard of. While you’re not going to rush out and buy the Nail’d OST, the tracks all fit the game well and help push the game’s overall atmosphere of unabashed high-octane thrill seeking with an edge of the EXTREME

Alas this EXTREME feeling is hard to sustain in any game, and as mentioned above Nail’d has the definite air of a game that ran out of something during it’s development. While the OST is great (at least within the context of the game), it is relatively skimpy and will loop frequently even before you’ve raced all of the tracks that the game has to offer. And even though those tracks are almost all good (one or two feel like they were designed by malicious designers who want to see you crash and revel in your frustration) there just aren’t enough of them to sustain the game. For context the campaign is split into a series of events, starting with a tutorial and then gently easing you into a series of “tournaments” that each feature multiple events that correspond to a race or maybe two that have the same rules. This section of Nail’d is great fun as you’re constantly encountering new tracks and learning their tricks, but then it abruptly ends around the 3 hour mark and you’re then asked to complete multiple of the aforementioned courses per event with multiple events per cup. If you’re like me you’ll initially assume this is a heightening of the stakes and a way to introduce the cup mechanic, wherein winning one race isn’t enough and now you need to prove your mettle against the same racers in multiple races at a time.

Alas the majority of the game takes this format, as you’ll have done every course before you’re even halfway through and then burned through the “mutators” in no time. These mutators are ways in which the game influences the courses so as to spice things up and introduce new goals, but there aren’t many of them and most of them are fairly rudimentary. You’ve got “no collision” mode, which disables collisions with other drivers, a max boost mode which means your nitros boost is always full, a “stunt” mode wherein the “feats” mentioned earlier add to your score with the highest score winning and finally a time attack mode where a timer is ticking down and you need to race through the checkpoints in time. In other words the mutators are go fast because no one can hit you, go fast because you have infinite boost, perform feats or lose and go fast against no opponents or lose. I’d be fatuitous if I said they didn’t change how the game feels, but when you’re doing the same course multiple times per tournament and there are multiple tournaments with those same courses it does start to feel extremely repetitive. All the higher difficulties do is increase the number of courses per event, culminating in the GRAND FINALE where you do 8 courses back-to-back. The same 8 courses you’ve been racing since the campaign started…

And honestly that’s about it, as the game has very little else to offer once you’ve cleared through the initial wave of tracks and played through the handful of mutators that are on offer. There is also a time trial mode which involves, err, racing on the same tracks against the developer times but that’s basically the same thing as the time trial mutator mode you’ve already played through in the campaign (albeit harder). There was a multiplayer mode for this game, but as stated the game came and went without causing much of a fuss and as such the game died years ago and even if you still found people who cared it’s too late as the servers are down. I suppose there is a modest customisation aspect to mention as you can choose different parts and liveries for the vehicle of your choice, but honestly these parts don’t change much and I was able to breeze through the entire game with the stock setup as the parts have a modest impact at best. You can increase handling in exchange for acceleration/boost, or vice-versa and that’s about it. The game does differentiate between ground and air handling, but really it’s all very minor stuff and I didn’t notice much of a difference to how my vehicle controlled even after I picked all of the +boost -handling parts.

In conclusion Nail’d is a fun little racing game that spreads itself too thin in the pursuit of the AAA price tag. Had it been released as a humble XBLA game, or a budget release then it would have been commendable and a fine example of a racing game that makes due with a modest amount of courses and a short soundtrack. The boost feats are fun to go for, the courses themselves are largely enjoyable and the AI is surprisingly honest for a racing game. Yet sadly this was not a budget title and was instead an example of an overly ambitious developer attempting to compete with the big boys, an attempt that leads to an unflattering conclusion. Nail’d is a decent game but one that quickly wears out it’s welcome and which needlessly prolongs it’s presence in the vain hope that you’ll consider it a worthy competitor to the bigger games of the era such as Motorstorm and Need for Speed (hell even Fuel has more content). Instead it merely highlights it’s own insecurities by forcing you to beat the same courses a dozen times each before dumping it’s half-assed ending onto you. Which I will unceremoniously share below (look away spoilers haters!)

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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.

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