Call of Juarez: The Cartel Full Game Review For PC

Call of Juarez the cartel often hailed as being one of the worst first-person shooters ever made, it's the sequel to bounding blood taking place in current day Los Angeles and Mexico as you play as one of three characters in a campaign that covers such themes as drug-dealing, human trafficking and corruption. I think it's unarguably the worst game in the entire series and yeah it's a pretty crappy shooting game overall but is it the worst FPS game ever made? Well let's just find out shall we.

THE STORY

The story in this one centers around the three main protagonists Ben McCall, Kim Evans and Eddie Guerrero. At the start of the campaign, you're given the option to choose to play as one of the characters with each of them having different advantages with certain weapon types. Ben for instance reloads revolvers faster than the others but also each character has their own separate side plots where you have to accomplish a series of hidden tasks, this is what the game calls secret agendas and secret items now for Eddie he's trying to pay off some bad debt so he goes around collecting drugs throughout each chapter.

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This kind of fills in the collectible aspect of the gameplay but also gives the game a bit more replayability as you want to replay the single-player campaign and save from the alternate angles of each character. I say single-player even though the whole game is designed around this co-op model with the areas in between missions having lobbies even if you're playing by yourself. Anyway aside from that each character plays out mostly the same aside from those few key differences in how they each use certain weapon types and they've all got access to concentration mode which is your standard bullet time feature.

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What I think is most interesting is that the cartel is a very story driven game with frequent and lengthy cinematics. At times it's more like you're watching a movie than playing a video again because some of these feel like they just go on and on. And in all honesty, it's actually a pretty neat story inaccuracies aside. Ben Kim and Eddie aren't really clear-cut good guys and they've all got their vices and questionable moral standings. Also this idea of the DEA the FBI and the LAPD joining forces to take down a Mexican drug cartel sounds like something from a cheesy 90s movie. There's hookers, strip clubs, gangbangers, drug dealers and all the characters use four-letter words like their fault stops.

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The game starts off in Los Angeles before eventually heading to Mexico for the last few chapters which is where the Western theme finally rears its head. The only issue is that the whole thing takes itself way too seriously and the voice acting and animation isn't really of the high standard so it does come off as a bit ham-fisted.

The storyline is really probably the strongest element of the game at least it's the area that feels like it's had the most attention put into it. The gameplay is where the whole thing just falls apart like a dried dog turd. Now this is really just a standard boring modern shooting game with the tacked on regenerating health and checkpoint system. Regardless of who you play as you're just going to be shooting the same generic bad guys with guns over and over and it's just that kind of lazy boring gameplay where you kind of shoot at things for a bit until the game informs you you're about to die then you hide in cover for a few seconds before popping out and doing it all over again.

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Occasionally, you'll break your room which is where you and another character kick a door down and it goes all slow-motion is you kill a group of enemies in quick succession. There’re times too when the game kind of defies its own logic and makes little sense for instance most cars will explode if you so much as even aim your weapon at them causing massive damage to nearby enemies. Then other cars, you can empty an entire magazine into and they still don't blow up. There’re moments where you have to rush from cover to cover to avoid gunfire and during these moments for some reason you take damage like 5 times more quickly and die super easily.

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The game is heavily designed around co-op player but it seems they didn't think about how it would affect you if you're playing solo so during the frequent driving sections where you're like chasing another car, you can't even fire a weapon and just have to sit there getting peppered with gunfire from nearby enemies. There is a shitload of guns you can use in this game most of which you'll have to unlock by reaching certain chapters the game or by leveling up through collecting secret items in completing the secret agendas.

There’re short rifles, shotguns, sniper Rifles, submachine guns, pistols and revolvers and they're all more or less the same. I mean a couple of shots from a pistol will kill an enemy and so will a couple of shots from an assault rifle so that doesn't really seem to be all that much difference between the gun types. One thing that did kind of Earthmen was how ammunition is the same for submachine guns, assault rifles and light machineguns which doesn't make a sense. So equipping both an SMG and an assault rifle for instance is kind of pointless if you're hoping to use the submachine gun to fall back on - when you run low on ammo.

I also found shotguns and sniper rifles kind of useless shotguns are useless because they have a really piss-poor range and crappy rate of fire and with the sniper rifles it's really rare to find ammo for the damn thing and you're never really taking out enemies at such a great distance that you can take full advantage of the scope.

SOUND AND GRAPHICS

The sound is also liable to glitch out a fair bit as well and this cinematics where the game was completely devoid of proper sound effects which I'm not sure was a bug from the game or just sloppy design. At times you'll notice a few other ways at the game drops the ball for instance there's a character that shows up in one of the earlier cinematics who's some kind of prostitute the team questions but then the character model pops up later in the game as a sort of background NPC and also in another cinematic in Thailand it's kind of jarring because you would first think it's the same character but then you just realize they're recycling that character model due to laziness.

For a game that's so story intensive, this kind of thing is just confusing with all the secret agendas each character also has for their backstories it can be often hard to figure out what the hell is going on at times.

Visually, the game isn't amazing but it does look pretty standard for other games at the same time period. It's really a game that's been made for the consoles first and foremost with the PC as an afterthought. I played this on both the Ps3 and the PC and they do look almost the same though obviously the PC version has a high resolution but it's still neck and neck. I didn't go so far as to say that this one looks worse than bound in blood at times. I will say that the music is still pretty damn good in fact the whole Call of Juarez series has always had an awesome soundtrack so at least if nothing more they've nailed one aspect of the presentation.

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

OS: Windows XP/Visa/7
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz, AMD Athlon 64 X2 2Ghz (Intel Core 2 Duo 3GHz, AMD Athlon 64 X2 3Ghz or better recommended)
Memory: 1GB for Windows XP, 2GB for Windows Vista/7 (2GB for Windows XP, 3GB for Windows Vista/7 recommended)
Graphics: DirectX 9.0c compatible - Nvidia 8800GT /ATI 3850 (Nvidia GTX 260/ATI 4870 or better recommended)
DirectX®: 9.0c
Hard Drive: 8GB
Sound: DX 9.0c compatible
Multiplayer: 512kbs(broadband)

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REVIEW/RATING

Graphics 7/10
Sound 7/10
Gameplay 6/10
Controls 6/10
Effect 7/10

OVERALL REVIEW/RATING

6.5\10

DEVELOPER

Techland

PUBLISHER

Ubisoft

GENRE

Action, Adventure

MODE(S)

Single-player, multiplayer

RELEASE DATE

8 Sep, 2011

CONCLUSION

There are some genuinely good moments in this game though I won't lie, there's a really cool chapter where you get to revisit the fort from the first Call of Juarez game which is pretty neat, but overall it's got a real “been there”, “done that” feel to it. The generic shooting doesn't really help alleviate the tediousness of the whole thing.
As a result, the cartel is easily the worst game in this series and I don't think anyone can really deny that. All the TNA and the four-letter words can't really save what's a run-of-the-mill shooter.

Thankfully, it is kind of short coming at around 4 or 5 hours for a first playthrough and there's a bit of replayability with all the secret agendas for each character and also the multitude of achievements you can earn in this game. But if you do skip this one, you're really not missing out on all that much.

This brings us onto the final game in the series; ”Call of Juarez: Gunslinger” which brings the series back to its Western roots. In the next review, we'll take a look at it and see how the whole series comes to an end.