The Cartel takes a huge risk bring the Western themed series to the present day, and pretty much fails on every level.
Graphics: For a new graphic engine, the graphics are like the story, terrible. The environments are all boring and lack any real variety, its mostly the dirty streets of LA which look very badly rendered and the textures are all bad and look very bland. Now what surprised me was how bad the voice acting was. The first two games had good voice acting, what happened? It also makes it sound worse with the bad dialogue. The animations look stiff, the draw distances are laughable, in the second level (the one when you are in the woods) there is like this mist or haze all around the screen to cover the bad draw distances. The character models all look bland, the facial animations and the lip sync look horrible and hardly even match the right words. The only good is that some of the effects are decent at best. For a new graphic engine this game looks like crap.
Gameplay: While I said that the previous games where by-the-books shooters, they at least had some variation with the setting, duels, and even side missions. This is a poor mans version of a military first person shooter. The game is split into a few sections, driving and shooting. First lets start with the driving. It is not the worst I have seen but it feels... weird I can't describe it but it feels really awkward and it is a nightmare trying to get through tight areas with a bunch on enemies shooting at you. In the game you will have many car chases and the enemies will be shooting at you the whole way, now this wouldn't be so bad if your AI team mates actually fired back. They rarely help in the car chases and only seem to kill the enemies when you get in close enough. Now the core gameplay, now let me say this, it works but it is so generic and unoriginal that it gets boring very quick. The AI both friendly and enemy are not the smartest around and the enemies rarely pose much of a threat unless there are a lot of them. Your allies will kill maybe a few enemies if you are lucky and are not a whole lot of help. Next is the level design, it sucks. It is pretty straight forward and it eventually becomes predictable, you walk around, have a very poor melee fight with the dumb AI, shoot some bad guys, do a million boring slow motion gun fights and then have a bad driving section to finish off the level. The only real original thing I have seen is that each character has their own different goals to do and they have to be done secretly without the other characters seeing you. This adds some variety but is nothing really special. As you level up you can also unlock new weapons which all work fine. While everything works, it is just so unoriginal and boring that it feels like a chore to play this game.
Multiplayer: The multiplayer some what makes up for crappy single player. First is the regular multiplayer, you have some fun objective based matches like one team robbing a bank and getting to a get-away car while the other team tries to defend it, and the other modes are unknown to me because I only got a few matches. Now there is also co-op which sounds like a great idea, but good luck trying to find anyone because the multiplayer is pretty much dead and you would be lucky to find a few matches. the multiplayer can be fun, but it will be completely dead in a short time.
Over all:
Story: 3 If you are looking for another great, emotional, character driven story like the last games, be prepared for a very rude awakening. "Modern day Western" my ass...
Graphics: 3 Why is it that the original game looks better than this?
Gameplay: 3 Has a few variations, and is playable, but it is so boring that it is not even worth it.
Multiplayer: 4 Can be fun, but it is nothing new, and it is pretty much dead.
Enjoyment 2: Why Techland, why? Why ruin what was building up to be a great series? Why ruin all the great stories and characters that I had loved, why? I only hope that your other game Dead Island is damn near fantastic if that was your main intention for your game this year and this was an after thought.
Final Score: 3