In short: Modern day cowboy-like protagonists in a First Person Shooter that doesn’t really manage anything original.
Developer: Techland
Publisher: Ubisoft
For fans of: Torturing oneself with a sub-standard game.
Reviewed on: PS3
Also available on: Xbox 360 and PC
If we had to give it a numerical score: 4.5 out of 10…
What I liked
- The game’s title font is nice.
- I finished it in a weekend.
- Shooting targets in the lobby’s shooting range was mildly entertaining.
- …
Not so much
- Last generation graphics.
- Poor voice acting.
- Been done a thousand times before. And always better.
- It’s not really cowboys or the Wild West is it? Nice try though.
Overview
A Mexican drug cartel has the jewels to blow up a DEA office in Los Angeles on July the 4th. America decides it wants to blow up Mexico in retaliation. Common sense prevails and a three-man taskforce made up of an ancient LAPD detective, a good-looking female FBI agent and a clearly dirty DEA agent (he did survive said explosion…) is established to dish out justice – Wild West style…And if that wasn’t enough of the clichés, there’s some conniving politician types behind the scenes too. Wow. Class.
Gameplay, Graphics, Sound and Features
OK. There’s a little more to the story than that. Aging LAPD Robbery and Homicide detective, Ben McCall (hey, that was clever – he has the same surname as the brothers in Bound in Blood…) is an ex-Vietnam (or Viet Nam as the game’s sub-titles call it) soldier whose friend, Patrick Stone, was killed in the explosion. Said Mr. Stone and a certain Mr. Alvarez served together with Mr. McCall in Vietnam. Mr. Alvarez is a nasty piece of work who raped and killed a villager and got away with it when Mr. Stone decided not to support Mr. McCall in the military tribunal.
Still with me? Good, because there’s more.
But I won’t bore you with it. Suffice to say, each and every one of the protagonists has a history of some sort. Now, if only it had been translated into decisions in the game, it may have been worth it. Instead, the only marginally original gameplay mechanic to be seen involves you essentially picking up ‘secret’ items unseen by your two team-mates, and in return trying to catch them doing the picking up. That’s it. After that it’s shooting, driving, shooting, driving, shooting, driving, shoot…
That might have been fine if the game had something worth looking at while playing, but frankly, this game looks more unattractive than its predecessor – Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. And before you laugh that off, I popped in the game to check, and at least Bound in Blood’s settings had more character than The Cartel’s. Maybe I’m being overly harsh, but there is no reason a game has to look so… boring.
And that’s the problem there. Bound in Blood stood out for being different. A game based in an under-utilised setting (America’s Wild West) and with weapons that felt different from each other. There was six-shooter, shotgun, bow and arrow – and they all felt unique. The Cartel runs screaming from the setting (probably afraid of Red Dead Redemption) and offers modern weapons and generic gangstas that are repeated constantly. And to hide it all they chuck in a few car chases.
The game also adds a few slo-mo room entries that its predecessor did better and Call of Duty rules at. There’s also concentration mode, which fills up as you kill enemies, and once activated slows everything into bullet-time. Just like Bound in Blood and pretty much every other game since The Matrix hit the big screen. A new feature that’s been borrowed from Army of Two (to a small degree) is the co-op cover system. Essentially, your two team-mates lay down covering fire and you move to spots marked out by a ghostly image. The idea being that you flank the enemy who are better entrenched than you. Except it doesn’t really work. Your team-mates never draw the enemy fire enough or even get their heads down. You still need to storm through a hail of bullets to get to the next cover point. It’s easier just to chuck a grenade over their cover and watch the red barrel or car explode.
So, we have, poor graphics, weapons that look and feel like pea-shooters, a generic setting, generic characters and generic enemies. So maybe the sound and voice-acting will help push that clichéd story along? Sadly not. I cringed pretty much every time a character spoke. No-one sounded like their heart was in it at all. Or it simply came down to each actor getting only one take to nail their lines. The game just feels that rushed. Or like a poor quality downloadable game.
Now, the game sells itself on its three player co-op, and if I could’ve found two other people to play it with, I’m sure it would’ve been a laugh. I didn’t. And if I had, I’m sure the game would not have improved.
There is an intriguing looking four cops against four criminals multiplayer, but I spent around half an hour in the shooting range (a glorified lobby) unable to join other people’s games. The multiplayer may actually be brilliant, because one of the best thing about the game was shooting the targets in the shooting range while waiting – so if that’s worth measuring the multiplayer by, it’d be awesome.
Final thoughts
Save yourself the money and wait for any other (better) First Person Shooter to be released. Or for this one to have its price slashed. Of all the disappointments this year, this is the one game that didn’t even live up to my rather low expectations…
Zombiegamer rating:
