In the Wild Wild West there are two things men cannot resist: women and gold. This seems fine as long as they are seperated, but what happens if you throw both of them in the middle of three brothers?

Call of Juarez – Bound in Blood is not about booze, but about the three McCall brothers who get into an 8 hour shootout adventure (story) with roleplay-elements (weapons, inventory) all under the watch of a First-Person-Shooter.

Story ★★★★★

During the Civil War the brothers Thomas and Ray McCall fight for their land not to be conquered by the other side. When they get to hear that their family’s house is in danger and the army is to retreat, they decide to desert in order to rescue whats left. So, together you fight through a lot of people to get to your house and finally there, you get to see whats left. That’s when you meet your third brother William, who is a priest and wants to stop all fighting in the world1. After having shoot a whole lot of soldiers and pissed off the colonel, all three of them go to Mexico.

Hanging around in a Mexican bar, they get to see a beautiful young lady who is molested by some greedy guys. One of them kidnaps her and there you go…shooting yourself through hundreds of people again to get the girl back. As Ray claims on the way, he wants to have her, you can already imagine what will happen in the next hours. When you have finally rescued her from the claws of the filth running around in this dirty place, Ray has to stand back, because her boyfriend called Juarez takes her to his side, making the McCall brothers an attractive offer.

This is where I leave you to play through the rest of the story by yourself. If you want to see more of the story, you can look at the screenshots in my game gallery.

Controls ★★★☆☆

At first glance the game plays like any FPS. Running around is with WASD, jumping with Space, shooting with left mouse, crouching with Ctrl. Wait, did I just say shooting with left mouse button? What a terrible mistake! Of course not! A specialty in Bound in Blood is that you can use both hands simultaneously when handling small weapons. For example, you can have two pistols or a pack of dynamite and a pistol. What you see in your left hand is set off with the left mouse button and the right hand item is used with the right mouse button. Funny: The brothers are not only masters in using all two hands, they can even ride a horse with their hands full :-))

Whenever you stand behind a box, your character takes cover automatically. Then you have to move your mouse up and down to get a look at your enemy. This is introduced very early and confused my a lot. Also the crosshair of your gun has a auto-aim feature which you cannot turn of. In my oppinion this automatisms ruin the experience for non-casual gamers2, cause I often was like:

“WOW! Did I just do that great shot or was it the game on its own again?”

When this seems to you as a reason not to buy/play the game, you are wrong. The other modes, called concentration modes are easy to get, but hard to master. When you enter a room with your brother two crosshairs are flying in and you have to try to point them at your targets and pull the trigger at the right time.

Balance ★★★★★

The game mostly remains on the same difficulty level concerning your enemies. However, boss fights become more challenging when the damn finkers draw faster every time. So what can I say? The game is balanced in the way that you are only frustrated by boss fights? Well, I think that is how you can justify a good balancing.

Not everything has to become exponentially difficult the more the game progresses, don’t you think?

Graphics ★★★★★

The game simply looks fantastic. Yes there are a lot of textures that could have been better, but all in all it’s awesome. The faces look totally great3, the water and the objects in the levels is superb.

The overuse of blur in all situation helps not only to keep distant objects distant4, but gives me this warm western feeling of hot sand under my cowboy boots.

Replayability ★☆☆☆☆

A bit of roleplay comes into play :-)) , when you take the money of the dead and buy yourself a brand new Ranger or another weapon of your choice. The weapons in the game have different damage, reload and accuracy quality, and you can get better weapons only at gun shops.

One time, the guy behind the counter asked me, if I wanted to buy the guns or steal them. I’d have preffered the latter.

However, that wasn’t possible. I did collect a lot of money, but I couldn’t afford all the very good stuff. That might be a reason to replay this game. Also, I made this mistake:

One of the things that all of you who already played the game have probably been waiting for is, that before you start a mission you can choose whether you want to play Thomas or Ray. The difference is that Thomas looks better 3-) and can use a lasso5 and Ray is a strong bull who is supposed to make more damage6. My mistake was that I equipped both of them with good stuff at first. But then I realized: This way I would never get to buy the really good guns, so later I stayed with Ray being able to afford what I wanted. As you can see: Being able to choose characters contrasts to being able to equip them properly.

As the story only changes marginally and you get to choose your favourite character anyhow, there are not enough reasons to play through it again.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆

Call of Juarez – Bound in Blood is a great game with a great story that provides a great 8-hour Wild West experience, which is clouded by a lot of predefined shooting patterns that will help casual gamers and that will be cursed by hardcore gamers.

  1. Well, you can’t, can you? [↩]
  2. Casual gamers are people who don’t play a lot, so non-casual gamers are used to playing FPSs. [↩]
  3. However, lipsync in German sucks. [↩]
  4. and the performance of your pc on a stable level [↩]
  5. he is supposed to be handier [↩]
  6. he can kick in doors, but cannot manage to climb up walls on his own [↩]

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