Trapping Chipmunks In My Backyard Is More Challenging... And Fun.
http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/action/callofjuarezboundinblood/player_review.html?id=667733&tag=player-reviews;continue
Now that my views on that review are out of the way...
Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood = Great Rental Game
Total game play = 6 - 7 hours
Replay value = No Desire
Graphics: I'm not sure where everyone is coming from that says this game has graphics that show off all the power of next-gen gaming consoles. Sure, there are a few cool scenes, but on the whole... it's really not all that I have seen some other people reporting. Trust me, I really was hoping this game would be visually stunning. It far from stinks; but it's definitely not even close to awesome.
Gameplay:
- I can report that the game is fairly glitch-free. That's always a plus.
- The game play is very easy, which brought on game boredom with me.
- The weapons are very basic. You will not get a woody in anticipation of upgrading your weapons.
- Interaction with the environment is nearly non-existent, which was a let-down for me.
- The duels against head villains throughout the game are mindless.
- The Concentration feature, while cool, rarely gets used because once you shoot enough people to get this feature charged up, you already have killed everyone that you could use it on. Unfortunately, you can not save your earned Concentration mode for later use because it is time-based. You have roughly one minute to use it or lose it... but you already killed nearly everyone in order to get it.
Enemy A.I. = Not very challenging at all. Again, making the game fairly mindless.
Wild West Ambient Sounds & Tunes = Pretty dern solid.
Storyline & Voice Acting = Both are fairly ridiculous. So close, yet so far away from what it should have been. The McCalls consist of three brothers: two gunfighters and priest. Unfortunately it is the brother that is a reverend that narrates the entire story... and the dude is a limp-wrist, whiny, wuss-bag. It's fairly irritating to listen to a wild west story being told to us by a country accented paste-eater. The voices used for the two gunfighting brothers isn't bad, just the scripting is.
Overall: It's a real shame that they didn't wait a few more months to release this title. Ubisoft / Techland were really onto something with this game, but I feel that they fell short. I had just shy of 7 hours of game play in upon finishing it (which I find somewhat insulting when $60 is laid out for a game with a very low replay value).
Now... with all the above being said, I am sure there are many people who are having fun with this game because of the whole Wild West thing going on. It's different than most other themes that surround shooters and I will not fault the game, nor the players, for wanting to be dirt-eating cowboy with an itchy trigger finger.
The one feature that I would have liked to have seen in this mundane game would have been an online co-op mode. I believe it would have been fun to wild-west-it-up with a friend.
I'm not into the gang bang multi-player mode that this and many other games possess, so I really can not comment on this for Call of Jaurez. It appears that some people are enjoying themselves with it and others do not find anything spectacularly great about it.
I say, if you like a good shooter (much like I do), save your hard earned cash for the purchase of another game, but definitely give this one a shot from your local rental store.