I hear good stuff about this, but I didn't love the first two (19th century-set) instalments so I'm keeping my expectations low.
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The storytelling and presentation is certainly fun - you're a bounty hunter telling tall tales to a group of saloon patrons, playing through them as you go. New pathways drop out of the sky, enemies change when you're challenged on the historical facts, and sometimes you'll die in an extravagant action-movie moment only for your narration to clarify that's what would have happened if you'd taken the wrong route, and a quick rewind to plonk you further back in the level with a new pathway appearing. The only issue I have with it really is that it can overshadow and break up the gameplay a little - it'd be nice if I could just get a long level to shoot through occasionally.
There's a bunch of energetic editing razzmatazz too, with all the character name-slamming, split-screening, illustration-overlaying freeze-frames you could wish for. It has a kind of Borderlandsy feel to it, especially with a slight tinge of cell-shading and bloom to the in-game aesthetics. As per usual for a CoJ game, it looks nice enough without really blowing you away.
The gunplay generally feels good, too. The old concentration mode is here and still fun, though perhaps not as generous as I'd like. A judicious use of that, cover and dynamite creates some great Western shootouts, especially with AI that hits a good balance between taking cover and getting reckless. It can sometimes feel a little fiddly, and the boss fights have been uniformly irritating so far, but overall it's really solid.
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I'm on the final level already, apparently. The levelling system only just recently kicked the game up a notch! A bit of a shame really - it's one of those RPG-lite systems that, rather than create a few different play experiences, only really lets you enjoy the game for the second half and also forces you to level up stuff you don't care about in order to get to useful skills. Still, I'm really enjoying it for the most part - using all the little special powers in the right combination is really satisfying, and they have some cool levels like the steamer wreck half-sunk in a swamp, the tilted town or the turret sequence on a train-heist gone wrong where you rack up kills in slow-motion as burning dollar bills float past you. The narrative gags are still fun, too (though I'm not sure whether it's supposed to be blindingly obvious that Ben in the present-day saloon is the guy I've been looking for all through the flashbacks).
There's a game+ mode, and I don't normally go for those but it might be fun to blast through the levels again with superpowers, as long as I don't have to stop every minute or so for the story again.
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I finished the game. Unfortunately, the last section was a let-down, with an arena shootout with a bunch of ghosts then a two-way showdown. Considering this game works best when using a mix of cover and timing, and the showdown mechanics are frustrating as hell, this was not a good end section. Then it's revealed that Ben is actually Bob and you get a choice whether to kill him or not ("Revenge" or "Redemption"). I chose redemption, and it turns out that the young boy who's been listening to your story is Dwight Eisenhower and I tell him not to give into vengeance and bloodlust. Looking at a video of the Revenge choice: you get a showdown (a good reason in itself to choose peace) with Bob, you kill him, and the Dwight reveal is made - this time he leaves without learning a wholesome lesson. I'll leave it to historians to discuss which universe we're in.
Game+ lets you play through again with all your gained skills and allows you to keep building them up, but does force you to stop for all the story bits. There's an arcade mode that lets you play through some of the levels, but starting off vanilla again, which wasn't that fun.
So no perfect option, but I played almost the entire game again in game+ so I guess that's a good indicator of how enjoyable it is overall. It's telling that it takes two whole playthroughs to get completely levelled up, though, and even then I didn't feel like I'd had enough chances to use all my new stuff. The game could have done with racking XP up a lot sooner and then having a couple more towns to work through without lots of narrative interruptions near the end. I never got to throw someone's dynamite back at them! Still, despite a few that and a few other small issues (unusually for an FPS, the shotgun is pretty much useless and I barely touched it; boss fights are never fun), it's overall very satisfying to play and the storytelling has a lot of flair. Aside from more showy stuff like a spinning time-lapse sky or weather and vegetation changing with the narration as you walk through them, it also has some great atmosphere. Silas sings a song about death at one point as you walk through a valley; rain and lightning starts up and then a giant landslide tumbles past you, held in a freeze-frame as the level ends; the abandoned town falling apart and sunken at angles deep into the mud also acts as a nice reflection of Silas becoming a husk of a man, still seeking revenge while the 20th century rolls on and he gets ever older and more irrelevant, cars buzzing past him in the street and enemies wondering who the hell this old coot is.
Rating: Green.
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