A recommendable game which still has some flaws.
The Good:
-The visuals are beautiful. Character models are detailed and believable but they are not great.
-Despite the heavy visuals the game runs smoothly and the loading times are at a minimum.
-The voice over job has been done brilliantly. The voices match the faces and they are so sharp and add a lot to the experience.
I also enjoyed the brothers' ranting on each other in different occasions. They were fun.
-The gun play mechanic is nice and fun. Specially if you're playing with Ray.
-Buying new weapons in the game has a high effect on the amount of fun you have. There's a distinct difference between different gun models and types.
-Nice difference between Ray and Thomas in terms of abilities and gameplay. Ray has the deadly double pistols and dynamites while Thomas is good with his rifle, bow and knives. He can also climb stuff (sometimes using his rope).
The Bad:
-The drawing distance is low making plants and objects appear in your path out of nowhere when you're riding in the desert.
-The textures used in the background (for example for the faraway mountains) are mostly weird.
-It would've been brilliant if you could destroy a building or two with your dynamites. The surroundings are not destructible.
-The Normal and Easy difficulties are way too easy. The Hard difficulty is inconsistent, being easy sometimes and at other times mercilessly hard.
-The covering system tries to be innovative, but what is the use of taking cover when they can hit you even when you're down and behind a big box??
-The gameplay suffers from some depth. The enemies spawn from special places and when you kill someone another NPC takes his place on the same spot. Where was he when I killed his friend?
-The dueling showdowns are mostly annoying rather than being fun. Trust me on that ;)
-The story is predictable. I had played the original Call of Juarez before this game. Unfortunately if you finish that game you will know the ending to this game. So it sucked out the little excitement that the story might have had in it.
-From a game that boasts high production values you expect to see more attention paid to the details. For example you see a book landing vertically on the ground and not opening. It was like a metallic cube hitting the ground rather than a book. And that's just an example.
-Complete lack of multiplayer campaign. Just raises the question why?
Summary:
Despite all the Bad points and short comings the gun play is actually fun enough to get you through the campaign and the shallow story won't get in the way much. After that you can enjoy some multiplayer time in the wild west online.
My System Specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 at 2.17 GHz OC
nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512 MB DDR3
3 GB RAM DDR 2
Windows Vista Ultimate Service Pack 2
Thanks for reading and I hope that this review has been helpful to you.