Call of Juarez: Gunslinger Review (LordSithaniel)
Review
I’ve played previously all the Call of Juarez games on Steam. As I have heard a lot of good things about Gunslinger I checked it out as well.
Gameplay
And, although I wasn’t surprised, the game basically has nothing to do with the Call of Juarez franchise. You could have just named it Gunslinger. Juarez is named once, but neither the character nor the place has any significance to the story.
The game rather plays like an arcade shooter, focusing on abilities and combos to gain more points and xp. There is a slow motion mode, and many abilities and skills to unlock that change some aspects on your weapons, like being able to zoom in farther, extending slow motion upon headshots, dual wield revolvers or even double barrel shotguns.
It’s a short game, 4 hours and one of the very few cases that I wasn’t bored halfway trough the game. The new abilities and therefore different playstyles add a lot of variety to the game, there are two endings to replaying the game on a higher difficulty to unlock all skills is totally worth it.
Balancing wise , the main aspects of the game is racking up your slow motion meter, trying to get a higher score (if you care about that) , not dropping your point modificator. You can choose between two rifles, regular Winchester and sawed off version which has higher firing rate but less ammo capacity, shotgun for short ranged although the longer you aim the more the range increases, which made me initially hate the gun as I never knew about this. Although still I prefer mostly the rifle. You can choose to use a sawed off version, even dual wield it later instead of a revolver, but for that one I had even less use due to the long reload time and short range.
Mostly you use the revolvers, with 3 version of them, a quickshooter, and a stronger but slower firing ranger gun, and one that is a middle ground between those two. You can dual wield them or use a single one which is quite useful especially on the true west difficulty which disables crosshair.
Back are also duels and bosses, especially the duels have a fun minigame, improving the one from bound in blood a lot. After finishing the game, you can do a duel minigame or a really cool arcade mode, with three classes. Its basically a game to compete against your friends list.
Story
The story is rather neglectable, as its basically a tell-tale of the various gangs and bosses the main character has destroyed while also telling a slightly bigger plot. The storytelling is slightly different, interesting due to the various conversations and banter between the people listening to the main characters story. Intervening and even changing things on the get go, which has effect on the gameplay.
Sound
While I don’t really remember any of the soundtrack, the soundeffects are well fitting to the game, not only has it fantastic gunshot sounds, but also just sound effects for everything, slow motion, combos increasing and expiring, explosions, storytelling with its voice acting. The amount of sensational overload is making me be nostalgic about old cabinet arcade shooters.
Graphics
Timeless classic, cell shading with highly contrast colours. Everything is bright , colourful and good looking although shooting at people will cause huge blood fountains sometimes. Pretty neat, especially the reloading animations are great. Although due to the very bright visual style, the visibility of enemies can be at times rather bad.
Conclusion/TL;DR
The base gameplay is one of the most fun and addicting games I’ve ever played. Even if you feel like the story is slowing you down, there is an arcade mode that focuses solely on certain parts of levels to give the ultimate gameplay focus. Satisfying combat, especially great sound effects although the shotgun didn’t find much use for me. I really like the skills you can unlock. Personally, the only thing I didn’t like was the story, although the storytelling was rather unique.
8/10 fantastic game