The last of the games that I played on my recent efforts to clear through some of my PC backlog, this is yet another game that I was curious about for ages, bought it on sale years and years back, and have only just finally gotten around to playing XD. I’m not usually one for FPS games, let lone one tied to Ubisoft, but the premise of this one had me so curious and the praise it received was so great that I just had to check it out. It took me about 5.5 hours to finish the game on normal mode.
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger follows Silas Greaves, an old cowboy just looking to stop into town and get a drink. Once he sits down at a table, he strikes up some conversation and the patrons quickly recognize his name as one of a famous gunslinger about which there are no shortage of unbelievable tales. Demanding stories straight from the source, Silas begins telling them stories of his younger days, and that is where you, the player, come in. Inspired by the way that Bastion’s narrator affected its gameplay, the narrative conceit of Gunslinger is that you are playing through the stories Silas is telling as he tells them, and revisions to the story or folks jumping in with their own details will change the game as you play it. It’s a super cool way to design a game, and they pull it off really well here. Being a game about the old west, there are certainly marks of the genre (especially regarding racism), but I think the game does a pretty darn good job of striking a balance between making the characters feel appropriate to the world they’re in while also incorporating many more modern ideas about the culture and stories of the old west. This is a game whose story is a love letter to old west fiction, and it has a lot of fun playing with the notion of storytelling and how the stories we tell affect our perceptions of both history and the present. It’s simultaneously a big, dumb cowboy story that features every famous and infamous cowboy who ever graced a Hollywood screen as well as a thoughtful contemplation on what these kinds of stories mean to us. It’s not the most deep dissection of those things, sure, but it does a great job at what it’s trying to do, and I loved every minute of it. The gameplay is pretty standard for an FPS of this time, but it has a few things here and there to make it special. On the more typical end, you can carry two guns at a time, you’re going through levels following objective markers and shooting enemies as they come, and you even have a bullet time mode you can activate once you’ve killed enough enemies. This definitely has the feelings of a budget title, in a sense, with how relatively few guns it has and how often locations are reused, but both of those aspects serve larger purposes. The guns are all relatively cowboy appropriate, for starters, and the reuse of locations is a bit more than meets the eye, and it’s honestly an aspect of the narrative device that I respected the most by the time I was done with it. On the more special end, you have little six-shooter inspired skill trees (which isn’t that unique, sure), as well as how the story changes depending on the flow of the narration as I mentioned earlier. The most unique part of the gameplay is how they’ve conceived boss fights in this game. In grand cowboy movie fashion, no matter how many unimportant enemies get taken down, a showdown against a bad guy almost always ends in a one-on-one showdown of reflexes. The way the game does this is with you seeing Silas’s hip holster and his hand as well as the enemy in front of you. Your goal here is to focus the reticle on the right hand side with your right stick (or mouse) on your enemy’s head to increase your zoom in for an easier shot, and you simultaneously use your left stick (or WASD on the keyboard) to keep Silas’s hand near his gun to increase the speed you draw your weapon at. The way you kill normal enemies already gets you points and EXP for both score and leveling up, and the better you do in these duels, the more EXP you’ll get for them. You get an extra big bonus if you win the duels honorably (by letting your enemy draw first), though it’s obviously a lot harder to do that. It’s a bit of a jank mechanic, but they do some really fun stuff with it and it helps the silly cowboy-ness of it all come alive that much more. My one main comment here is that these work WAY better with a controller, and I ended up being really glad that I still had my Xbone controller plugged in, because I’d play the normal game with my mouse and keyboard and then swap to the controller (which is a really nice, seamless transition) as soon as the duels started, because these control WAY more easily with joysticks than they do with the WASD keys and mouse. The aesthetics are really fun as well. The voice acting is really well done as is the sound design in general, with lots of fun, very cowboy-feeling music underscoring the action as it happens. The graphics also fit the game really well too. They’ve gone for a cell-shaded, vaguely realistic graphics style that gives the whole game a somewhat comic book feel without feeling like a comic book game. It lends itself really well to the hyper-reality of the action at hand, and it makes the whole thing that much more fun. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a really awesome game! I went in expecting to like it okay, and I came away loving it. If what I described about the storytelling intrigues you, or you’re someone who likes westerns and/or FPS games, this is absolutely not one you want to miss, because it’s a real treat on all levels (and I’m saying that as someone who’s never even seen a western movie <w>).
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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