Play Relevant Month: Call of Juarez Gunslinger

Cowboys, conceptually, are not a style I particularly feel overmuch affection for. I'm not a big fan of pistols or duels or anything of the like, or ridiculous hats measured in gallons, but I do consider the Old West environments a thing of beauty. I didn't quite recollect this here thought until I fired up this game and thought my goodness, this here is a pretty gosh darn title.

But no seriously, there really isn't enough variety in the art styles of modern gaming, when you consider how immensely varied the world around us actually is. Think about all the backgrounds and ideas you could do, then thing how similar most shooters or platforming games are to each other. CoJ:Gunslinger, or just Gunslinger for short from here on in, is one of those under-appreciated motifs in action. Even from the get go I have to say I love the stylistic variety, chickens running around, bright red bandanas, dried yellow grass against the blue sky, old wood hammered together - It's gritty and not especially pretty by any stretch of the imagination, but it's different and man shooters could use a great deal more different.

Gunslinger also reminds me, as anyone with half functioning brain will probably note, a great deal of Bastion in its good ways - A slick narrator chatters through much of the game and improves the experience immensely. Narration has always had an odd transition - It's so awful in movies, but it's so underused in games. I really like the narrator in Bastion and I really like the narrator here. Especially since the narrator isn't just concealing the story from you to lead you playing forward, he's an unreliable old chap who has had a couple to drink.

And who wouldn't enjoy a story as told by an old drunk cowboy?

As I implied, the art style and engine to Call of Juarez: Gunslinger are excellent. It is a fantastic looking production, partially by looking so different from any other shooter I've played in years and partially by being so filled with variety in and of itself. You do fight in towns, but they're rustic and interesting looking set ups with far more charm than most shooters bother with, yet once you get outside the town arenas into the wildernesses the game really shines. Though the game does have what I imagine is a south western flair to it, there's such variety to the terrains it's delightful just walking around. Forests, swamps, mountains, gold mines and every other setting you'd ever see in a good western movie. The engine isn't anything mind blowing, but it looks so different from other better production value shooters you hardly notice.

The Narration in Gunslinger is both really good conceptually and upon execution. The narrator talks to the individuals he's telling the story to, and they will often contradict or otherwise sass him which leads to some rapid change ups or just more of a "setting" to the setting. Obviously they're little more than archetypes, but it changes how the narration works and creates a different feeling from the silent protagonist dull beep boop robot man of most shooters. Because the narrator is telling a tall tale you're more willing to suspend your disbelief within the structure of the story. Heck, when things look too silly or too ridiculous, he'll often correct himself or change things up. The audio and music all work superbly with the narration, or in general, and I very much find the game a pleasure to listen to.

Gunplay in Gunslinger is ... Not quite as good as I'd like, but still largely solid. The weapon variety, based on the where and when that it is, can come off as a little limited and there's some oddities in cover. You can shoot through some things, but not others, and at times you can't seem to hit what you're aiming at in cover no matter how much of their body is exposed. It's more or less a spectacle shooter though, so death on both ends of the gun comes fast and furious. It's more "functional" than most other elements of the presentation, so it can feel a bit of a let down, but it's still fine.

There's some little added bonuses to the standard FPS formula. The game includes "duels", which are an odd little mini game that on the most part feels like a very strong attempt at replicating the tension of facing another man down with a pistol. There's a couple other extended out ideas on that as well, which adds to the variety. The game also includes a skill tree with unlockable bonuses - I feel like this could have been measured out a little more, as it feels you level very quickly but then don't really see much in the way of change in your gameplay style. It's still a good feature to have in the game, since it rewards trick shooting and adds that little kick of brain juice to the gameplay, but it could have been balanced a little better.

The game's difficulty, on normal, is very weird to me. It has consistent extremely problematic visibility issues, one of the things I find most annoying in FPS games - I have great difficulty picking out where enemies are and then hitting them before they can first hit me. As with Hard Reset, the difficulty spike here comes from the rush of goop on your screen, dropping what little visibility you might have to absolute zero. In most games this feels somewhat in theme, but here it feels really weird and against the grain. If we talk about the western motif - Poncho wearing, guns blazing, all that - The modern military shooter imagery of "screen covered in raspberry" works against it, because guns blazing usually means bullets ricocheting and flying everywhere. The problem here is one entirely of tone: That sound, of a bullet bouncing off metal or embedding in a hunk of wood, is one interspliced with the desperation of old timey gun battles. The modern military shooter doesn't have that tone and as such it mixes poorly to have the game essentially be a re-skinned shooter in that sense.

Crysis was actually coded to have enemies miss as your life decreased, but I feel like this game should have just had very inaccurate enemies who blast all over. People dual wielding pistols on the move are going to miss many of their shots. It's a subjective quibble but the bright colorful backgrounds mix poorly with trying to track brightly colored enemies as they move around and it just doesn't feel very western to me. You yourself, as well, are way too steady a shot. If ever there was a theme to go with the unsteady aiming of the modern FPS, welp, you're a crack shot with a rifle at almost any range.

gatling gun fights as unfun as you'd think

The game also has check point system problems. I died doing one of the boss fights, or what I imagine is a boss fight, and while it's nice that the game has a check point at the opening of the fight I died more times trying to figure out where the check point put me and being mowed down by the gatling gun than just about anything else in the game for a long time. The whole gatling gun fight was a monstrous low point for the game anyway - Like yes, I understand that the modern military shooter single player experience has that whole stop and pop element but gosh darn it does not work in a western motif. Men with regenerating health won't wear ponchos. Regardless, it carries with it the two checkpoint sins of narration directly following a check point (which isn't quite a FMV, but it's close, fuck you Darksiders) and skill points being unspent when you hit the checkpoint remained unspent afterwards. That's a smaller issue but it can make spending points in a boss fight a bit annoying. Boss fights in general are just very hit or miss. The one boss fight puts you in a pit and has a boss that throw dynamite at you that will one shot you, if it hits you, but it's hard to tell where he is, where it is, and so on, in the short span. As I said, visibility of a brown target hiding behind brown objects on a brown background is ... It's just not good. Some of the other boss fights are great, others just kinda mediocre.

There's also a fair number of points, as with all FPS games, where the level flow is broken by either sloppy lack of conveyance or crappy jumping puzzles. Normally this bothers me a ton, but there's a ton of effort put into trying to make the terrain feel "real world" which always contradicts good level flow, but here the terrain is trains, woodlands and clifftops, so I feel like it's got a bit more leeway with me. The levels really try to look "like something" and that's more than I can say for most FPS games, though I think this generation is better than most for that.

Overall, Gunslinger isn't an amazing shooter, but it's an excellent vehicle for story telling and uses its methods far better than most shooters ever have. I really enjoyed the narration and the twists it added to the unfolding of the game, and the conclusion of the story proper was very satisfying in its way. The game isn't overly long, which I think could have been padded out a little more in a couple places to pace some of the higher intensity set pieces, but you can't quite fault a game for sticking to the best parts of the story and skipping past everything else. Either way, I found it to be an extremely satisfying game and the best narration since Bastion.