Call of Juarez

Exciting, original, captivating, luscious … just a few words to describe Call of Juarez, the new Western game from Techland. A possible contender for Game of the Year?

Those of you who have been keeping tabs on CoJ will be counting down the seconds until it is officially released, jealous of lucky reviewers like myself who’ve already got their hands on a full copy.

Yes, I am lucky – this game is very, very, very good, so good I am desperately trying to stop myself from hyperbolizing and turning this review into a tabloid-style love-in.

Lets start with the plot then – you play both Billy Candle, a put-upon young man whose self-esteem is low and whose prospects seem bleaker than a rainy day in Milton Keynes, and Reverend Ray, a preacher who likes to wield his Bible as much as his pistols. Just as Billy thinks things can’t get better, they suddenly get worse. His attempts to make contact with his family are thwarted by the fact they’ve just been brutally murdered. Worse still, he is spotted at the scene of the crime by the Reverend, who happens to be Billy’s stepfather’s brother.

Thus you find yourself viewing the storyline from two radically different perspectives – sort of a Western Boomtown, if you will (Editor – you know most of the readers won’t have actually seen Boomtown, right?). The visuals are very impressive on the higher settings – cliffs looming large in the distance, foliage thick enough for you to actually believe your enemies cannot see you in it and so on. You will need a fairly beefy machine to cope with these visual niceties, though even if you do scale the graphics down a bit, the game remains impressive.

Stressing the storyline still further, it is important to realise how integral it is to the whole CoJ experience. It draws you in right from the outset, making you really want to find out what happens – a real page turner, to use a literary phrase. Moments of genuine tension abound as both Ray and Billy – Billy with his stealth sections, where one or two hits is often enough to see you dead, and Ray with his increasingly intense shootout sequences. The final battle for Ray is very impressive, requiring real dexterity and skill to complete on the highest difficulty settings.

Fortunately, you have some tricks up your sleeve when it comes to defeating your foes. Ray has a pseudo-bullet time “concentration mode” – essential in the more intense gun battles. Billy has his whip, which he can use to wrap around branches to swing over chasms or to kill coyotes, rattlesnakes and tarantulas. Numerous different guns and weapons help prevent repetition from creeping in.

There are a few niggles though – some loading times, especially on slower machines, are problematic. Very occasionally the game bombed to the desktop, though I suspect this was to do with a corrupted saved game as it did not crash when I loaded a previous save. Fist Fighting is generally too easy, with opponents making little attempt to actually strike you. Lastly, the easier difficulty settings are a little too easy in places. This is just nit-picking though – the game is excellent, no question about it. You’d have to be very, very hard to please to dismiss this out of hand – at the very least, try the demo and see what you think.

I can’t recommend this game highly enough – buy it and reward the developers for providing us with an original game instead of another derivative clone.

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