Call of Juarez started out by saddling some great ideas onto a pretty mediocre first title. It wasn't until Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood that everything fell into place, and Techland managed to deliver a decent Western experience with varied gameplay, nice graphics and some epic gunfights. So it shouldn't come as a big surprise that we looked to Call of Juarez: The Cartel with cautious optimism.
"Cautious" due to shift in era. Gone was the Wild West, with The Cartel set in present day, where the brothers McCall are nothing more than a distant memory. This time we get to play as a trio of cops banding together to spearhead a the war on drugs in California.
It starts out pretty well. The opening is strong, and the following cut-scene suggests an engaging story here; its treatment of time and chronology reminds me of the previous ames and I start to get my hopes up - perhaps this will be a good game after all? Then Ben McCall, descendant of the brothers McCall, steps out of the shadows.
It's not that Ben seems to have taken voice lessons from Christian Bale and borrowed hairstyle tips from WWE wrestler Triple H, with only a shock of grey running through his lengthy locks and beard to tell them apart. We can live with that stretch of believability, but it's more that the promising suggestion of a serious narrative being blown sky high as McCall channels Rambo in this warfare on drugs in both bullet count and cheesy dialogue.
The prequels to The Cartel were, as noted, set in the Wild West. Because of that, it didn't really matter that the controls could be sluggish and the shooting needing more heavy handiness than a canine with a red-hot poker up its rear. After all, you were firing six-shooters and old rifles and when you found a machinegun it was a hand-cranked Gatling gun - hardly the most elegant of weapons. It even gave the setting an extra degree of flavour.
But when we get to shoot with modern weapons, the issue, or excuse, no longer makes sense. Automatic pistols and modern machine guns are something else completely, and it feels like playing a first person shooter from the beginning of this generation; it's inflexible, stiff and lacks any form of finesse.
As a result, the fighting here isn't very exciting, which soon becomes a problem because that's really all there is. The variation from the other titles is gone, and when the shooting is mediocre the whole game becomes mediocre. Where we were looking forward to the next gunfight in Bound in Blood, we find ourselves dreading the next shoot-out in The Cartel.
On top of that, melee combat is horrible. It's more or less impossible to judge if your punches are hits or misses and mostly you just run back and forth and wave your arms in the air. When we think back on how tight Bound in Blood's gameplay, we feel a tear well up in our eyes.
If there's something that's hard to get right in action games it's the vehicle sections. These are usually the worst parts of the games, no matter if the game is Call of Duty, Killzone or Gears of War. Call of Juarez: The Cartel is no exception, but which doesn't stop Techland from cramming a lot of car driving into every level. Every small turn becomes a challenge to navigate.
Call of Juarez: The Cartel feels unpolished. There's texture pop-ups, the collision detection doesn't work as it should, the checkpoints are few and far between and the enemies are mind-numbingly stupid. The musical cues that attempt to merge Old West guitar as we shoot our way through the Los Angeles' criminal underworld simply don't work.
It's not all bad though, and the fact that you got three different characters to choose from (no matter how stereotypical they all are) is a nice touch. The story changes depending on who you choose to play as, while tying it all together in a rather nifty way in the end. We stuck with the heavily armed Ben, but we expect both Eddie (with his lighter machine guns) and the Hally Berry-look-a-like Kim to get their fans as well.
You can also play the game in co-op, which always is fun (and makes the vehicle sections a bit easier to live with, since the other player gets to lean out of the window to shoot). The levels are varied enough and there was a pang of carefully-cultivated nostalgia from seeing Juarez again during the later levels of the game which tethered it the original.
Without a doubt we'd have rather seen Techland stay with their Western-theme and had some extra time to polish The Cartel. There's potential here, but it is never allowed to surface, held down under the weight of the numerous other issues.
It was never guaranteed that we'd see the brothers McCall again, and now it feels like those chances are more or less gone completely. There's still scope for great Western-inspired games out there, but
Call of Juarez: The Cartel isn't it, loosing some of the true grit that marked the series worthy of your money and your time.