First episode (basically the tutorial) completed, and so far seems pretty cool. Looks nice enough (I'm playing the DX10 version!), there's some fun cheesy Western storytelling (though the start-to-blowjob-from-whore time was about 3 minutes) and the idea of playing a different character from the town in each episode is cool. Seems to be setting up some nice mechanics, too, with the double-handed set-up and the mantling and whipping handy for chases or finding good rooftop positions.
Unfortunately, not everything seems to work too smoothly - whipping and even walking down cliffsides is far too tricky (I've already learnt to quicksave before every one of these), the run button doesn't seem to work, and there's platforming and fucking stealth mechanics (which also don't seem to work). If the player has died or hit a failstate twenty times in the tutorial, you're not teaching them properly or your game is janky. Hopefully it'll not insist on these being used too much...
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Looks like this game's modus operandi is 'introduce a cool mechanic, make sure it doesn't work very well'. Lots of nice ideas here, like the showdown mechanic where you have to draw your gun, lean and fire, the bullet-time move and even some of the stealth stuff like lightning revealing you but thunder covering the sound of your whip. Unfortunately, they're all either a bit fiddly or just plain don't seem to work - that whip one especially. So far the atmosphere and general Western fun of kicking through a door then taking down two bandits at the same time with your dual pistols is just about making up for the sloppy execution though.
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I'm out of the mines (ugh, mine levels) and onto the train bit now, which is quite cool. I've just got to a bit where I'm supposed to shoot some lock off the train, but despite the objective marker I can't figure out where this bloody lock is.
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Turns out the lock was on the other side of the train! I probably could have figured that out myself if I'd realised the logs also record what NPCs say to you - the cavalry dude did say it was on the right side. It might have been a previously closed-off path that confused me.
Anyway, this game is really starting to take the piss. After another extended stealth sequence and another shitty melee sequence, I've now met up with an old Indian who has so far tasked me with killing three rabbits (which required a good five minutes of horse-riding over open terrain), putting out a fire (which required walking back and forth about five times to the river with a bucket, all to a thrilling countdown timer!) and now I've got to go climb a mountain to get an eagle feather. Tommy Tawodi never had to do this shit.
The cut corners are starting to show as well, with re-used character models and, most cheekily of all, re-used levels as you take both characters through the same exact route, one after the other. Also there's far too much glitching and jagging for a game this recent, especially as I'm playing on Windows 7 and a PC that I bought in 2012.
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That eagle feather cliff-climbing bit: the scale is effective, but the fact that it's about ten minutes of mantling (which is very slow and involves a constipated-sounding voice clip) and swinging on your whip (which is, surprise, fiddly).
I then went through a load of boulder-pushing puzzles and a fucking temple filled with fucking booby-traps that require precision platforming (guess how easy that is in this game) and fucking swarms of poisonous fucking spiders that you have to whip to death. After that, the game started to show its potential - a pretty fun shootout in the treasure room, then an amazing section at the villain's villa where you're running around slow-mo killing bandits as you dive in and out of room, swap weapons and use a cannon to blast the door down. If the game had been more like this I would have loved it.
Unfortunately, I'm now stuck in a boss fight where you have to chase this guy in between three little rooms filled with fiddly boxes, and try to get shots off at him while he chucks dynamite at you and seemingly uses teleport technology. Then it crashed. I'm very close to the end now, so I'm going to try and push through it tomorrow, but this boss may just induce a rage-quit.
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Finished. After the boss-fight there was another boulder pushing puzzle and an annoying final bit where it wants you to use your quick-draw mechanics rather than the usual ones, but doesn't tell you, so you have to sit through an unskippable 1 minute cutscene over and over to get back to the 2-second gap where you have control, until you figure it out. Call Of Juarez: Cool Ideas, Fluffed.
I'd love to play a tightened version of this game, hopefully Gunslinger is that game. The villa condensed down everything good about the game by sticking to the shooting and providing a relatively open, well-designed level. Other stuff I forgot to mention - jagging and pop-in are fairly heinous and the writing is pretty dreadful. Tropey but not in a fun way, and so long-winded and repetitive. The overlapping characters shtick was fun throughout, though, even if it was a cheap way to use a bunch of levels twice.
Addendum: I noticed that Bound In Blood got a demo, so I had a go. Sounds like they've tweaked at least a couple of the mechanics from the original game, like bullet-time and quick-draws. (I also found out that the guy who plays Reverend Ray is Gul Dukat from DS9 and, more excitingly, the Mars security guy in Total Recall who shouts "THEY'RE ALL CONNECTED!" and has a brief pock-faced character actor stare-off with Michael Ironside.) Looks a bit nicer though the Chrome Engine - which apparently was a bit controversial at one point for some reason - is now making shadows and heat shimmer look ugly. Has modern auto-regen health, confusing HUD damage-reports and the new cover mechanic and quick-draw mechanic are fiddly. Hope Gunslinger is better than this, frankly.
Rating: Orange.
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