Today we’ve gathered here, under the unrelenting heat of the midday sun to witness an execution. The game standing before us is a hero to most. A beloved game considered a kind of “hidden gem” and “the best of the series”. Well, if this is the best, I don’t want to see the rest.
The crowd explodes in protest. “How could you do this!?”, “We love this game!”, “It has fun, arcade gameplay and you’re going to hang it? HYPOCRITE!”. A dusty townsman with a scraggly beard hocks a big, green loogie in my direction. “Sounds to me like this here Roger fella is just being a contrarian”, says a rotund man in a black suit.
This is an unpopular thing to do, for sure. Hanging a folk hero like this, but after I read you his sins, I hope that you’ll understand why I had to do this. From its bog-standard shooting to hallway levels and boring enemy design, this is yet another example of the sort of consolized shooter slop that stained most of the seventh generation.
Call of Juarez Gunslinger is a first-person shooter set in the old west. A time of six-shooters, tumbleweeds and heavy southern accents. You go through levels shooting and getting shot at by various guys with revolvers, rifles and shotguns. One of each, though. Can’t go running around with a full arsenal. That’d be unrealistic.
It’s the usual shooter fare from that time. The post Modern Warfare time, not cowboy times. This game has been called “Call of Duty with cowboys”, and I agree, but not with the same enthusiasm. I see that as a bad thing. It may be full of “yee-haws”, dusty towns and train robberies, but it’s still just another modern shooter.
What do I mean by that? Well, it has all the hallmarks of the genre: hit scan enemies, regenerating health, levels that are just narrow hallways, a slowdown mechanic, set pieces and a lot of yappin’.
The wild success of the Call of Duty franchise, and this game’s general positive reception, means that there is a large audience for this kind of thing. Another bit of evidence for this is the fact that every single shooter released from 2007 to around 2014 followed the same blueprint. Others might like it, but I don’t. I think it’s a very boring subgenre, and I’m glad we’ve left it behind.
Why? Well, let’s start with…
Hit Scan Enemies
A hit scan weapon is a weapon that has no projectile. It shoots and the game draws a line from the gun to its target in an instant. If the line collides with a target, it counts as a hit. A point and click gun. Most bullet-based guns in modern shooters work like this. The opposite would be a projectile, which shoots out a physical entity. Think grenade launchers, RPGs, crossbow and how guns work in real life.
All enemies in Gunslinger are just guys with guns. “What do you expect? It’s a shooter, of course it’s going to be guys with guns”. Sure, that’s right, but they don’t do anything other than shoot at you. They all use hit scan weapons and they’re all human. Of course, it’d be unrealistic to have something like a bear shooting at you, though it’d be hilarious. All enemies act near the same. They all have perfect aim and shoot at you whenever they get line of sight on you. Since their guns are all hit scan, they don’t have interesting attack patterns or offensive styles. Getting shot by a revolver and a rifle are the same thing.
There are some enemies that buck the trend. Some throw dynamite, and a few charge at you, but again, they’re just guys. Guys tend to die when shot in the head once.
There’s nothing threatening about the chargers. Calling them “chargers” or “runners” is an overstatement. They’re speed walkers. Their bright idea is to saunter up to the player with a melee weapon. The same player that’s armed with a gun. One shot to the head brings them down.
Melee enemies in shooters are supposed to be an immediate threat that gets the player out of cover. You can’t sit there and do nothing behind a wall because, in theory, one of those crazy knife-wielding kooks is going to run to where you are and attempt an unlicensed surgery on you, which forces the player to act. These kinds of enemies are usually fast, they’re made to close distances quickly and make you focus on what’s happening in the short range while hiding from the long ranged enemies. If they’re slow, they’re made a lot more durable, so you have a slow, lumbering wall coming to crush you. In Gunslinger, they combine both in the worst way possible, and you end up with melee enemies that are incredibly slow and fragile. To make this enemy even more of a joke, they are thrown at you one at a time, so they don’t even have an advantage of numbers.
Dynamite guys are rarely ever used, and when they appear you can shoot the dynamite out of the air easily, since they lob it high into the sky with moon physics, and it takes forever to land. This was obviously done so that you could shoot the dynamite before it lands even if you’re aiming with a controller.
Later in the game, as in, during the last four levels, they bring out tougher enemies with life bars. The Shotgunner very slowly inches towards you with a shotgun, if you couldn’t tell by the name. They take around four shots to kill, which is a lot more threatening than any other enemy in the game. Thing is, like the chargers, they are slow and come at you one at a time. In the time it takes them to get in range to shoot, you have enough time to kill them, reload, kill them a second time and call them ugly while they’re down.
The fact that they mostly use hit scan weapons and die in one hit makes them all blend together. They’re practically all the same, except for minor variations in how they look.
They aren’t mixed well, either. In most fights you go up against a few gunmen at medium range. They very rarely mix in chargers with the gunmen, or throw in a tougher enemy to lead the way for the others. It’s all very discrete. Now you fight the gunmen, after they’re dead, a lone shielder will appear shielding nothing. Once he’s dead, a few more gunmen appear.
They’re not aggressive, either. Sure, if you pop your head out of cover to take a shot at them, they’ll all fire at you with pinpoint accuracy, but they won’t chase you. Once you find a nice, comfy piece of wall to hide behind, the entire world stops. Enemies will wait for you to act. They know where you are, but they won’t come get you. You can let go of the controller and sit there for an indefinite amount of time, and nothing will happen.
This is by design, since the game is built around regenerating health.
Regenerating health
I don’t like regenerating health. It breaks the game’s flow and turns levels into stop-and-go shooting galleries where you pop up, get shot, and go back into cover to regenerate. As long as you’re near something to hide behind, you’re under no real threat.
Much has been said about regenerating health, but to me the worst thing about it is that it lets the developers get away with lazy enemy design. As I said before, hit scan enemies can hit you as soon as they see you. Range isn’t much of a factor. Since you’re always just a few seconds away from full health, enemies don’t have to take damage into account. In more traditional shooters, there were limited health pick-ups, and this was considered when designing enemies and encounters. Since health is a limited resource, enemies shouldn’t be able to kill you instantly, so they had projectile weapons you could dodge or patterns you could exploit.
With regenerating health, developers can have enemies that do unavoidable damage because the skill check isn’t avoiding projectiles or managing enemies, it’s knowing when to take cover. This sounds like it could be a fun risk/reward system, where you fight until you’re at death’s door and take cover just when you’re about to die to maximize damage, but it doesn’t work that way. At most you’ll fight four or five enemies at once. The rhythm is to pop out, shoot one enemy and take cover because the other four guys shot you the moment you poked your head out. You wait to recover, then pop back out to kill another guy. Rinse and repeat until every enemy is dead.
How do you know when you’re about to die?
Screen smudging
If you were around when Bullet Storm was released, you might remember Duty Calls, the Call of Duty parody game that was used to advertise Bullet Storm. It took jabs at all of CoD’s design elements and overly serious tone. Now, this isn’t the Bullet Storm review, but even though they were mocking a lot of game design trends of the time as if they were better than that, they then turned around and implemented a lot of the same consolized shooter slop in Bullet Storm. Ironic.
Why do I bring this up? Because in Duty Calls, whenever you took damage, the screen would get covered in blood and the announcer would scream “B-B-BLOODY SCREEN! SO REAL!”. This little sound bite is constantly buzzing around my head whenever I play one of these seventh gen shooters, because they all do it. Borderlands, Call of Duty and its hundreds of imitators, Gears of War and yes, even Bullet Storm. They all distort your screen whenever you take damage, and I find that infuriating.
It’s incredibly stupid to obscure the player’s vision when they need it the most. If I’m on the verge of death, getting shot at by a posse of brown enemies camouflaged on a brown backdrop, the last thing I want is to have my eyesight taken. Gee I wish I could shoot at those guys over there and get them to stop trying to kill me, but I can’t aim, not because I have no skill, but because someone jumped on my back, covered my eyes and is asking me “Guess who?” in a flirtatious voice while I’m dodging bullets.
If only there was a way to communicate that the player was taking damage and about to die. Maybe some sort of indicator of their health in the form of, I don’t know, a bar or something. This theoretical bar of health could be put on screen to show if the player is in danger. I don’t think the technology is there yet.
Movement
I had a whole section about the game’s movement, but then I realized it’s a moot point. You don’t need it. You use sprint to run from one gunfight to another, covering the vast, empty spaces between encounters. Once a fight starts, it turns into Time Crisis, but instead of having fun it’s a cruel joke and standing in place is the punchline. The movement in these sections is adequate. Fitting. Meets expectations.
The expectations are boring, but there isn’t much you can do with movement in this game. You can’t outrun a bullet, can’t dodge hit scan attacks, there isn’t any verticality to the levels. There is no need for movement other than to sometimes reposition in a fight. Its purpose is to let you move from one arena to the next, because once you’re in the thick of it, you can plop yourself down like a rock and you’ll be completely fine.
This is a non-issue, right? Why am I complaining about the movement? Do I want to dodge bullets? Har har har what a ridiculous concept, you can’t move faster than a bullet, only Superman can do that. Except wait, you can. You constantly dodge bullets in this game. You can dodge them in duels and in a near-death situation, which refills automatically over time, meaning yes you can actually dodge bullets (in very specific, scripted sequences).
Enemies don’t move, either. I said this in the previous section when I talked about the enemy design, but I think I have to keep reiterating the same point: enemies are not a threat. I have let go of the controls in multiple gun fights, and they don’t do anything. They don’t have object permanence, because whenever I hid from sight, they thought I had stopped existing. They sit on their side of the arena thinking “gee that was easy he stood next to those boxes and suddenly he disappeared. Guess we don’t have to do anything ever again”. The music is still blaring and every enemy is screaming about how they’re going to fill me with lead, all while I scroll twitter on my phone waiting for them to come get me.
Everything and everyone is slow. You can’t see it but everyone in this game is ankle-deep in molasses. This game takes place during the great molasses flood of 1919. No one can run too fast because their boots are stuck to the sweet, brown tar spread everywhere, but you can’t see it because it’s constantly off-camera.
That’s why you can’t jump, either. You can, don’t get me wrong. When the spacebar is pressed the man jumps and the screen moves a few inches up, indicating that a jump has occurred, but it doesn’t serve any real purpose.
Level Design?
Arenas connected by hallways. Level design was a lost art during this era. I don’t know how it happened, but no one making these games could design an organic, cohesive level for beans. Gone are the interconnected labyrinths of DOOM and Quake, the grand, open levels of Duke Nukem 3D or the monster-filled gauntlets of Shadow Warrior. Now we go through hallways and fight in designated arenas, which are slightly wider hallways.
You’d think that “linear” would be the word to describe them. It sounds like it fits, but it doesn’t. This game brands itself as an “arcadey” shooter. Even the IGN review mentions how the game “…readily emphasizes its arcadey feel”. Why do I bring this up? Because arcade games tend to be very linear. You’d think that arcadey+linear levels= BIG ARCADE DESIGN, but no.
Auto scrollers, like shmups and beat ‘em ups, are very linear. The player is guided through a level that is essentially a straight line. Thing is, in these two genres, you still have room to maneuver. The player is restricted in where they can go in a general sense, they can’t backtrack or deviate from the predetermined path, but they can still move around the screen. There is a lot of room to dodge projectiles, control enemies and there are positions on screen that have clear advantages and disadvantages.
The levels in Gunslinger and these kinds of modern shooters are hallways. They’re linear, yes, but they don’t give you the same breathing room. You’re in a narrow strip of level where your choices are hide behind a barrel one step to the right, or stand to the left of the barrel and get shot. Even in wider arenas your choices are limited to one or two spots, since you can’t push through certain points without getting riddled with bullets.
Calderas
This is a quirk that, as far as I know, is exclusive to this game, and that’s the Caldera. Modern shooters have been criticized for having very distinct arenas for combat. You know a gunfight is going to happen, not because there are enemies placed naturally along the level, but because you finish a section of hallway and see a section of slightly wider hallway with some bits of cover thrown in. Gunslinger does this, but it also has these weird arenas I call “Calderas”. A caldera is the name for the crater of a volcano, and these arenas are craters in the ground where you jump in and get surrounded by enemies from above. It happens enough to be noticeable.
Some boss fights take place in these, and you get thrown in them constantly for cheap ambushes. The way they work is that you see a huge hole in the ground with no real way to get out. You jump in and enemies start spawning on top of the surrounding walls. Once you find a piece of cover, it becomes another shooting gallery where you sit and wait for someone to pop out of cover before you hit them.
Waiting is the key word here. Sitting there, aiming at a bit of cover, hoping the enemy chooses to expose himself (not in a perverted way). Like in every other part of the game, if you find a solid piece of cover where you can’t get hit, you can stay there indefinitely. All your enemies are up above you; they can’t go down into the caldera so you’re nice and cozy under no threat.
In one caldera, the game mixes things up by throwing some melee runners at you. Again, one at a time. Very slowly. They spawn in, do a war cry and slowly jog at you. It’s about as threatening as those letters internet providers send when they catch you pirating.
Boss Fights
Speaking of boss fights, they stink. They behave like a regular enemy: hiding behind cover, shooting at you from afar, never posing a real, immediate threat. Except now you can’t put them down in one clean headshot. In fact, it’ll take a few dozen headshots to kill them. They’re so tanky that by the end of the fight they die of lead poisoning. 99% of their head’s total mass is bullets. They are completely unphased by this, too. They don’t flinch or react to any of your shots. If it wasn’t for the health bar depleting a little and the hit marker, I wouldn’t know if I was damaging them or not.
There’s the fight against one Henry Plummer. This no-good varmint sits on top of a wall throwing dynamite down at you while you sit in a caldera sucking your thumb. The same pattern emerges: he sits behind a plank of wood, you take pot shots at him when he peeks out. Except this time, he’s chucking dynamite at you. Two bundles of dynamite thrown slowly in the air into a huge arc, with plenty of time to shoot them down harmlessly. This repeats for around seven minutes, but it feels like hours, of you whittling him down with shots and him running around throwing explosives.
At one point he calls for back up and some of his buddies show up. They take their place each behind an individual piece of wood and sit there waiting to be shot. It’s about as exciting as watching paint dry. Hell, I think there was a watching paint dry mini game planned for Gunslinger, but they took it out because the focus group thought it was too thrilling.
Another one of these captivating boss fights is against Emmett Dalton. It takes place on a rock, and I thought “Wow a fight against a guy who doesn’t take cover and is actively trying to kill me. This might be fun”, but I was wrong, as I often am. He walked at me, and I shot him, then I hid behind a rock. Then I noticed the area was surrounded by equally spaced chest-high rocks that I could take cover behind. So I sat behind a rock, waited for him to mosey on over to me, unloaded six shots into his head and ran to the next bit of cover.
This idiot ballet continued for a few minutes. I ran from one rock to the other and he chased me in a circle. It was like some bizarre clock where the second hand kept hiding from the hour hand, and they were both armed. After filling him with several tons of lead, the fight stops and the game continues. I say stops because apparently, he survived despite having every cell in his body replaced with a bullet.
This isn’t a shooter crime, since most of these modern shooters did away with bosses, unless it’s a helicopter, but I had to mention it since they play a role in Gunslinger, and they’re not very good.
Weapons
You’re reviewing a shooter and you mention the weapons near the end? Yeah because they stink. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, hits scan weapons all feel the same. You have a rifle, some six-shooters and shotguns. You can carry 3 at a time: a primary (rifle or shotgun), and a secondary (six shooter or sawn-off shotgun).
Since most of the fights in this game take place at medium range, I used the six-shooter. You can’t get too close to enemies to shotgun them down, at least not on Hard mode, and the rifle reloads too slowly for my taste. Every gun hits its target accurately, and one shot to the head kills everything except bosses, so the guns’ damage doesn’t matter. The only outliers are the shotguns, which have a short range.
This hom*ogeneity in the guns is bad, but they lack variety because the encounters lack variety, too. You never have to fight a threat that’s right around a corner or take shots from further away than a couple of yards. The game doesn’t have an arsenal of weapons, like grenade launchers, rocket launchers and the like because it never presents you with any situation where they’re necessary. All the guns solve the one problem you’ll encounter over and over again: How do I shoot those guys standing there in front of me at medium range?
What guns you have access to varies from level to level. Sometimes you have your shotgun, sometimes a rifle. You don’t have a persistent inventory. You can find different weapons in ammo refill stations, but you can’t always have the one you want.
I bring this up because the game has a progression system with unlockable classes. You pick from three playstyles: Revolver guy, Shotgunner or rifle guy. As you gain points in the story mode, you level up and get access to new perks. These are things like “get access to a new shotgun” or “dual wield revolvers”. I played as a shotgunner, and a lot of times I started a level with a rifle and had to wait to find an ammo box to switch to a shotgun, if it was available at all.
Quick side note, playing as a shotgunner in Hard mode is a bit of a waste of time. You can’t get close to enemies and blast them down without dying. I had a shiny silver shotgun that sat on my belt through 98% of the game because the revolver could handle any situation.
Very few of these perks change the way you play. Most are passive increases, such as “take less damage” or “hold more shotgun ammo”. Boring number stuff you don’t notice. Taking less damage doesn’t matter much since you can always recover all your health with a quick break and ammo is plentiful. I never found myself running out of ammo and having to think on my feet and improvise. Other perks provide your guns with more damage, which is also pointless. What do you need more damage for? How can you do more damage when you can already kill in one shot?
Turret sections
A modern shooter isn’t complete without a turret section. They happen later into the game, but I was waiting for them since the first level where they stuff you into a house and have you shoot at dudes for a while. I could smell the turrets coming up. I didn’t know when, but I knew they were an inevitability. It’s a checklist item in every modern shooter, and they suck here just as much as they suck in every other game they’re in.
Near the end of the game, they pull them out. You stand at a turret, stationary, and shoot at a few waves of helpless thugs with zero challenge. It’s about as bog-standard as it gets.
I dislike turret sections because they’re boring. You sit in one place and shoot at targets that come out into the open. You can’t move, although moving in this game isn’t that great, you are limited to one weapon (that being the turret) and they usually take forever. At least the ones in Gunslinger are mercifully short. Hey, a positive!
Speaking of…
Positives
DUELS
If there’s one thing I liked about the game, it’s the duel mini game. It’s fun, tense and does a good job of “gamifying” a classic cowboy duel. The way it works is you have to shoot your opponent before he shoots you. You can pull a Han Solo and shoot first, but you’ll be branded a coward. If you wait for them to draw first, you can shoot with honor. That’s the first little touch.
The next is the hand placement. During the set up for the duel, when both combatants are eying each other down, you place your hand near your gun to draw faster. The better the placement, the higher the speed bonus. It’s shown in a percentage, the closer to 100%, the faster you’ll be. You tap left and right to move your hand. You know when you’ve placed it correctly if the percentage goes up. You keep tapping in either direction, making micro adjustments to maximize your potential speed.
The other part is aiming. Your cursor starts off massive, showing your “focus”. As you keep the cursor on top of your target, it gets smaller and your focus increases. Keeping it on target is harder than it sounds, since the cursor has weight to it. If you move it up, it gains inertia and keeps going up, and if you want to move it back down you have to really push the mouse down, which then gives it downward momentum which you then have to correct for and so on.
The genius of these systems comes from how they make the player focus on multiple parts of the screen. Your hand is on the left, you’re trying to keep it centered above your gun, while off on the far right you’re trying to balance the cursor on your enemy. All the while, you’re waiting for him to reach for his gun, so you can react in the few milliseconds it takes for him to take aim and pop him.
Each of these elements drift, meaning that you can’t lock them in and leave them unattended. You can reach 100% speed bonus on your hand, but if you’re not maintaining it, it can easily go back down, same with the cursor that’s always bobbing around on its own.
This dueling mini game is completely anathema to the rest of the game. Instead of sitting around passively waiting for enemies to do something, you’re actively managing multiple things under a strict threat of death. The enemy in front of you wants to kill you, and you need to kill him. The wait here isn’t just lollygagging and time wasting, you’re actively running against the clock trying to line up a perfect shot. A clock which isn’t shown on screen. You never know when your opponent is going to draw, you have to watch his hand and make sure he’s going for his gun so you can draw. That’s if you want the bonus points for being honorable. If not, you can be a real sumbitch and shoot him as soon as you’re ready.
Arcade mode
Gunslinger likes to style itself as an “arcade” shooter without really committing to arcade design, but it includes an arcade mode. In this minigame, you run through a modified version of a stage and compete for a high score. There are no story sections, no yapping and no filler. It’s just about getting to the end of the stage, which I really appreciate. This mode gets pretty close to being fun. Pretty close.
It has two things I’m a sucker for (other than the wild west setting): Score and combo. The scoring is very straightforward: you get points for killing enemies, with some very situational modifiers that add bonus points. Stuff like killing an enemy while they’re running, or by shooting through soft cover. These are at the mercy of the game since there isn’t much of a way to influence enemies to act. One modifier you can get easily is the “last breath” modifier, which awards more points for kills you make while an inch from death. That means running around the level with your screen covered in two pounds of distortion.
The combo system is where all the points are. The higher the combo, the bigger the score payout at the end. Getting through a level with a full combo guarantees a three-star rating. You keep a chain going by killing enemies, and when there aren’t any, you shoot the environment; bottles, explosive barrels or pumpkins. Mostly bottles. A lot of bottles.
The bottles have a few problems. One is that they’re small. When you’re running around a level looking for something to keep your combo going, you’ll have to keep an eye out for a tiny mass of dark brown pixels that represents a bottle. The levels are full of random props that don’t refresh your combo, so I constantly found myself playing “Where’s Waldo?” trying to find a bottle in a mess of pots, pans, empty cans and rope. The second problem is that enemies can shoot them down, too. There’s nothing like losing a combo because the bottle you were about to shoot was executed by some mook just off screen.
A personal gripe with the bottles is that they’re just not fun to shoot. They don’t offer any cool feedback when shot. They don’t explode in a visually interesting way, or make any impactful or satisfying sound when shot. Like I said before, there are also a ton of props in the levels which seem like they should be able to keep your combo going, but they don’t.
One thing I really do like about the combo is how the concentration mechanic works with it. The concentration mechanic is your typical slowdown/bullet time mechanic. In the story, it’s just there to help controller players make shots. Not trying to hate on console players, that’s what the mechanic is used for in these games. In the arcade mode, it also significantly slows the combo timer, meaning that if you’re running low on time and about to lose the combo, you can pop Concentration and extend that last second.
It turns the mechanic from a simple aim assist to a resource you have to manage to keep the combo going. It’s still simple. I usually popped it whenever my combo was running low and used it to look for a bottle to shoot, but it’s more fun than using it to line up a shot on a stationary enemy.
Another use it has is to reload. Activate Concentration and use the time slow to reload your weapon safely without dropping the combo. These simple little mechanics add some much-needed decision making into the game.
This mode is my favorite, but I say it’s almost fun because it still works using the game’s systems. The same slow movement, the nonexistent enemy variety, shooting galleries, regenerating health, hallway levels, etc. The same stuff I dislike about the game is still here, but with some tweaks and improvements that don’t elevate the experience enough for me to really enjoy it.
The level design is a real sticking point for me. It doesn’t have that constant forward movement of an arcade game. You’re still in the same cramped hallways. One level shoves you into a house and you stand there fighting off waves of enemies from the attic window. The regular game is a burnt steak and the arcade mode is that same steak but with some barbeque sauce. It’s better, but it’s still not great.
Arcade Design?
Like I mentioned previously, this game says “Hey, kids! I’m an arcade game! Check out my score system and big numbers that pop up when you shoot someone! Beep boop beep arcade ahoy! Remember Pac-Man? Go for the high score, bro!”.
Since it’s necessary for the player to be able to hide and recover health as much as they need, the player never has to act. You can sit behind cover for extended periods of time doing nothing. Enemies will never rush you, pressure you or force you to adapt. They are perfectly content standing behind their own little piece of cover, and don’t ever feel the urge to make you actually play the game.
That goes against arcade design. Arcade games are about constant, forward movement. Not in the literal sense, but there is always something pushing you to act. You can’t let go of the controls and sit there doing nothing. There’s always a timer counting down or aggressive enemies itching to kill you. They need to keep people putting quarters into the machine. They can’t have someone hogging the game for hours. You get in, play the game and get out. Just because you throw in some point pop ups here and there doesn’t mean it’s an arcade game.
This game’s easy, too. It isn’t a bad thing necessarily, if the game is fun, but arcade games tend to be challenging to keep players coming back and wanting to improve.
I hadn’t mentioned this but I played through the game on Hard. I don’t bring this up because I am a big, hardcore gamer man, but because apparently this game was meant to be played on normal, and a lot of people play it on normal.
On normal mode, you’re an unstoppable behemoth. You can take about twice as much damage as you can in hard before dying. Couple this with the regenerating health and completely passive enemies, and you have a game that’s somehow even more boring than what I played.
Conclusion
That’s Gunslinger. A bog-standard modern shooter that does all the same things its contemporaries did, but with a brown coat of cowboy paint. It doesn’t matter how many duels, accents or varmints you throw in, it’s still a modern shooter. Running down narrow hallways, taking cover, fighting enemies that have their boots nailed to the ground and provide no challenge. An arsenal of boring hit scan weapons.
It has its charms, sure. The sound design is incredible. Excellent voice acting, great ambient sounds, a rootin’-tootin’ soundtrack with some appreciable bangers that will have everyone in the saloon dancing. The weapons all sound great. Powerful, bassy booms that sound authoritative. Every pull of the trigger comes with satisfying feedback. The entire game is a treat for the ears.
The way the story is told is fun, too. It’s told from the perspective of Silas, who is constantly misremembering and embellishing, which leads to levels changing in real time to match what he’s saying.
If this were a TV show, I’d probably enjoy it.
Too bad it’s a game, and in a game, I put a lot of stock in the game play, and I think Gunslinger is just average. Middling. Average might sound good, but it’s an average seventh generation console shooter. I hate those. They’re boring.
I bought this game because I was told by the general Internet that it was good. The best in the series. Multiple forum posts, YouTube videos and Steam Reviews praised this game as “a hidden gem”. They all touted it as an “arcade” experience. Like siren song of the snake oil salesmen of old, I was suckered into buying a big bottle of nothing. This isn’t an arcade experience, no matter how many score pop ups you put on screen. It’s another modern-shooter snake in the boot that is gaming. That’s a tortured metaphor. If you’re expecting an arcade style game, look elsewhere. I paid $2 for this and it was too much.
If it sounds interesting to you, check it out on Steam. It usually goes on sale for a fistfull of dollars.
For these crimes, I sentence Call of Juarez: Gunslinger to hang!
I pulled the lever, and the floor of the gallows gave way. The crowd gasped, a woman in a poofy, frilly dress fainted. Some men took off their hats and bowed their head in prayer. “LOOK!” shouted a toothless prospector. “There’s nothin’ there! That dang noose is empty!”
The crowd gasped, again. The woman who had fainted got back up. The noose was indeed empty.
“I got it on Steam.” I said, suddenly embarrassed by this pageant I had put on. “It’s a digital game. There’s no- there’s no body or anything to hang. I just uninstalled it from my computer.”
The crowd dispersed, awkwardly shuffling off to do whatever it is people do in the west.
