06.15.07

Call of Juarez

Posted in Games at 22:10 by Jonas

I just finished Call of Juarez. I’ve been very impressed with the game throughout, and allow me to now summarize my opinions of it without any spoilers.

The narrative is very satisfying. Although just as linear as most of the level design, it manages to stand out by having two protagonists that it switches between. The game consists of 15 chapters, each of which has several missions, and generally it goes by this: First you play as Billy, the vulnerable Mexican kid who must sneak through an enemy camp or a ranch armed only with his whip, hiding in bushes and creeping behind his enemies’ backs. Solid stealth gameplay where your nerves are sometimes worn on the outside of your skin. Then in the next mission, you play as Reverend Ray, who seeks to bring justice to Billy for the murder of Ray’s brother, Billy’s foster father. Ray is armed to the teeth and wears metal body armour with a cross on it, and his chief weapon is the dual-wielding bullet-time quick-draw of death. No, it’s not as much of a Max Payne / The Matrix ripoff as it sounds, and it works very well.

As the PC Gamer review mentioned, playing as Ray is pure catharsis: You meet the very people you had to painstakingly avoid, vigilantly keeping an eye on their movement as you snuck past them, ever fearful of being discovered; only now, you can just blast them to Hell! What’s not to love! It’s like following a Splinter Cell mission up with a playthrough of the same level as Serious Sam!

One thing that let me down at first was how linear everything is. To quote the cover of the game:

“Like a more refined Oblivion”
PCFormat 81%

First of all, Oblivion got way more than 81%, so clearly some parts of the review are being left out here, but that’s just PR and so be it. Most of all, my problem with that quote is that Juarez has nothing to do with Oblivion… well, apart from rideable horses. Billy’s levels are often pretty open at times so you can pick your own way through bandit camps or Apache territory, but you always go from point A to B and you get to decide neither of these points yourself. As for Ray, his inability to jump decently (ostensibly because he’s old and wears a heavy-as-hell body armour) has allowed the devs to confine him to extremely linear paths through the levels, meaning Ray’s parts are your standard FPS fare.

This may sound bad, but honestly that in itself is pretty impressive. We have here two characters that move through the same areas, and yet they visit different parts of these areas and play the game in completely different ways. It’s doubtlessly taken some serious planning, and I am deeply impressed by it. Juarez does have a few really open levels though, such as a level where Billy meets an Indian and has to run some errands for the old coot. This takes place on a series of islands in a huge and beautiful delta, and your horse can easily cross the streams between these islands, permitting you to go wherever you please. It’s very nice. The same level also contains a pretty awesome mission where you must climb a tall and imposing cliff armed only with your whip to steal a feather from a sacred eagle’s nest. But the nonlinearity is only in that particular area, and there’s not much to do there except what the Indian tells you to, so it’s definitely not very Oblivion.

My biggest problem with Juarez is that in the final level, you get a bow and arrows and two really awesome golden pistols, but there are no stealth sequences to use the bow in (what is up with that!? That bow just screams for stealth gameplay!) and after you get the guns, you meet a total of… four enemies, if I recall correctly. It’s Alien vs. Predator all over again, where you got that kick-ass sniper rifle right before the game ended! The least Techland could’ve done to make up for this blunder is to unlock the pistols for your next playthrough, but as far as I can tell, that doesn’t happen.

Speaking of stealth killing, all of Ray’s levels are great, but my favourite level was taking Billy through Apache territory. It started out as I stole a horse from a small group of rogue Apache, who had attacked a stagecoach, and simply outran them, which was pretty cool. Then I passed another couple of Apache groups on horseback (Billy is pretty vulnerable, so taking up the fight is probably not the best idea, running definitely worked for me). Then I had to climb over some cliffs to proceed, so abandoned my horse. And what followed was a long sequence of sneaking around and assassinating the Apache with increasingly efficient weaponry - first a rusty hybrid revolver, then a shotgun I picked off an Indian, then a rusty Winchester, and finally a good accurate rifle in fine condition. There were some amazing situations there, including one gunfight where I took out 4 Apaches, getting the last of them with my final buckshot shell.

Before I end this already very verbose post, I just want to point out a few more great things about Juarez. First, they implemented a pretty neat system for Leone-style duelling, which actually worked really well once I figured out how to do it (about 4 duels into the game >_<). Secondly, the game starts out with some really great mood-setting non-combat sequences that simply serve to tell a story, and which have convinced me that it's possible to make a great game without all the rampant killing you see in every FPS. And last but probably most importantly, every feature in the game - and it has many! - are used prominently at least twice. The game begins and ends with fist fights, the first-person jumping/climbing/whip-swinging is used heavily in Billy’s sequences, and even such a silly thing as being able to start fires or put them out by throwing water at them is actually an integral part of two missions. So the game feels very tight in that regard.

Here’s the mandatory, arbitrary rating to sum it up. I should probably mention that I played the final mission just after watching Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and I can highly recommend this procedure. In fact, watch a Sergio Leone film before you begin the game and watch a few more as you progress through the game just to keep yourself in the right mindset.

You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig.

Call of Juarez

Note that I just had to go back and change my rating of Tomb Raider: Legend to 3 paws because Juarez really seems like a four-out-of-six game, but it’s clearly more unique, atmospheric, and impressive than TR:L

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