Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

One thing I did really like about the game was the plot. It explores brotherhood vs. lust in a cowboy setting. It really catches the tone of old Spaghetti Westerns where the plot is easy to follow, as it's mostly about the action. The gunplay is split into two halves, because most chapters you get to choose which brother to play as. IMO Ray is very fun and action-packed. Thomas is focused on stealth & sniping, which the game isn't really designed for - it's more of a cover shooter. Overall though, I'd say the gunplay has aged well. At the end of most chapters you are forced to do a duelling minigame. When I did it the first few times it was frustrating - then when I got the hang of it, it became boring, the same thing every time. Conclusion: Good gameplay, good story. Enjoyable... and forgettable.

The first game was good, and this one has almost everything to be better, however, this feels like a giant escort quest, if you get more than 5 meters away from your brother the game will let you know with a giant sign and you will fail the mission if you don't "behave yourself", that detail alone ruins the game for me, I wanted to love this game, but all I can say is "it has potential" I had to quit at the 4th mission out of frustration

Although this game is released at January 2009 and the game is not that long, it is still one of the best western shooting games with interesting stories, awesome music and emotional moments.

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'.

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.