Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

in library

4/5

( 156 Reviews )

156 Reviews

English & 4 more

Posted on: June 9, 2020

polysquirrel

Verified owner

Games: 285 Reviews: 28

A cliche spaghetti western

Whether it's good or bad depends on your taste. While gritty, dark and violent, it's less 'The Wild Bunch' and more the original 'Django' with Franco Nero. For a shooter, the story is certainly at least servicable and should be possible to enjoy without the cringing when in the right mood. Graphically, for a game over a decade old, it still holds. It certainly isn't pretty, but that's the reason: it's the desolate world and simple mexican architecture which is a bleak setting, and it suits the story. The character models certainly are much better than anything from that time period and don't have a 'retro' feel. What however makes o break a shooter is always the mechanics. The game offers here many new, sometimes cool, features, such as quick shooting by fanning the analog stick (hey, the game was developed for consoles!), bows, lasso and of course duels. Last but not least, it has a very good and very natural cover system, which makes you realistically crouch behind anything you can find and stick only your weapon out, barely seeing what you are shooting. Having slow to reload weapons with small bullet capacities offers a change of pace, as you'll spend every second you can spare and many you can't frantically reloading. I deeply enjoyed the first half of the game, as it constantly varied the environment and ticked many 'classic western experience' boxes, but it eventually overstayed its welcome, and that's even before the ridiculous final boss fight. The problem for me was that it is the epitome of a 'shooting gallery'; a slave to the story-driven approach, most of the time I was running behind the second brother completely lost in the chaos. There are some (mostly optional) segments where you have more freedom of movement and at least a sliver of choice of the approach (the last plot location is good for one), but overall it very vividly reminded me of live action shooters from the nineties such as 'Mad Dog McCree' and 'Bounty Hunter'.

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Posted on: August 3, 2023

kkarx

Games: 76 Reviews: 36

Good game with some graphics issues

They tried to top COJ1 by improving the things that did not work, by adding more characters, more interesting stuff and they mostly succeeded in that aspect (apart from the lame comics over the top villain). On the other hand your freedom of movement is more restricted. Yes, the first game was also quite lineral but it could hide that fact rather well. The game suffers from some nasty technical issues. First of all FOV (field of view) is just horrible and will cause you a headache. This can be fixed by installing a patch, then it is acceptable but you will also get some other visual issues (all the guns will look too long for instance). Secondly the muddy grey graphic is just a pain for your eyes and sometimes I could hardly see enemies and again if you are sensitive to this kind of thing it might cause you a headache as well.

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Posted on: July 12, 2021

53P71C

Verified owner

Games: 359 Reviews: 1

Good game worsened by consolification

This is a good game, but it could be better. The first Call of Juarez while not perfect is a better game gameplay wise. There is one thing that they imprved here over the first game: The duel mechanic, it is finally working! I wish that was the only thing they changed. Graphics are better, but this is tainted by effects that make it impossible to see anything on screen. Right at the first level whenever a cannon shoots the screen shakes and gets so blurry that you can't see anything anymore. Bodies are disapearing after a few seconds which kills the mood and which makes it harder to find dropped money and ammunition. The cover system is bad, if you are playing with mouse and keyboard, but luckily you can disable it. Bullettime was better in the first game, sure in this game bullettime is better for controllers, but with mouse it is worse. In this game we have less physics than in the first game. I liked to play around with the physics in the first one. I don't know why, but in this game you can still only use one of the thump buttons on your mouse. This was the same in the first one, would have thought, they'd fixed that for this one. At least you can get around it by creating a macro via the mouse driver. Mouse sens is stupidly high, I have set it to the lowest I am able to set it in the settings and it is still too high. I haven't taken a look at the config file yet, but as this game got consolified, I doubt that there is much that can be done here. I know I could lower my dpi but they are already just at 800. Other than that the game is quite simmilar to the first one and if you liked the first, you are going to like this, too, but probably not as much.

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Posted on: May 12, 2021

SlySylQc

Verified owner

Games: 262 Reviews: 13

Fun story, great music, so-so gameplay

This game delivers on the story with nice voice acting, explosive setpieces and some really great music to help aleviate the pretty standard and dull gameplay. Gunplay feels nice ,but very limited guns + akward cover mechanic dont help a lot. You get some exploration and secrets, but only 2 maps are more open world with sidequests to do. Still really help to change the pace a bit. I wish there was an option to remove bloom. The duel mini-game dont control very well with a mouse. I recommend 100% for the price, got a nice 10h out of it. Could double it for a hard run and using the other brother for slight changes in gameplay/story .

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Posted on: November 13, 2022

Crowcloak

Games: 574 Reviews: 22

Underated Gem

I really enjoy this series. The gameplay is fun and satisfying. The story is good. The graghics and mechanics have held up well. What I like about Bound in Blood is the abillity to choose which character you get to play between 2 of the 3 brothers. The game is not perfect ( none of these are). You cant change the controls because they revert back to the old ones as soon as you enter a new area. The graghics, while still good, could have been a little more polished. If you're looking for a good western style game, this is a solid choice.

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