Call of Juarez Is... Weird

For the sake of my integrity, and sanity, I'll only be talking about the three mainline Call of Juarez games. The Cartel is essentially a spin-off that Techland, the developers and owners of the IP, permanently delisted under mysterious circumstances. Obviously it's because the game is atrocious. But, this means I can't get my hands on a copy without throwing away forty Goblin-Dollars on a PS3 or Xbox 360 copy. I could use unscrupulous means, but I'm pretty sure the game just isn't worth stealing.

Anyway, the Call of Juarez trilogy came out between the years 2006 and 2013 on seventh gen consoles and PC. Before Techland started batting a thousand with the Dead Island and Dying Light games, they were a weird little company pumping out games like "Indiana Jack" or "Xpand Rally Xtreme". Generally, just shovelware type games. Their first Call of Juarez game seems to be their initial success that sprang them forward into Ubisoft's crusty hands and then eventually WB. For the trilogy's full life cycle, it seems they were all relegated to being B games made on a double-A budget. With that lowered notoriety comes lowered stakes and more room for creativity. And they meant that. Despite looking alike, none of these three games feel or play like one another. So I'll start at the beginning, and describe each game's minute stories, followed by some personal thoughts. As always, I'll drop any essays I've watched or read below for you, my wonderful reader. All opinions and mistakes are mine.

So, in Call of Juarez, 2006, you jump between two characters: Billy and Ray. Billy being the nephew of Ray. Ray being a devout preacher. After constant verbal and physical abuse from his step-father, Thomas, Billy runs away at fifteen. You start the game two years later with Billy reminiscing about the ancient tale of the city of Juarez and the Aztec gold hidden somewhere underground. We’re told that only Billy can unlock the secret to the treasure with his mother's medallion. That being the place he spent two years searching for. In a wrong-place, wrong-time situation. Billy's parents get gunned down just before he arrives to find their bodies. Ray, hearing the action, becomes a little less "Love your neighbor as yourself." and a little more "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword". Ray, seeing Billy holding a gun and standing over his parents bodies, is mildly peeved. The next 3/4 of the game alternates between Billy Running from Ray and Ray getting sidetracked with helping citizens out while still hunting Billy. After train hopping and seeing his lady friend, a working girl named Molly, Billy is caught by Ray who, at that moment, realizes the lawmen he had been aiding and abetting were low-down gangsters who work for Juarez Mendoza. They make off with Molly while Ray has a sort of moral panic about whether Billy was truly guilty. Meanwhile, Billy got away from his uncle, but almost drowned. Shortly after, he's saved by a Native man named Calm Water (we'll hear about him later). He also mentions losing his medallion in the river. Not two hours later, Calm Water is assassinated by Juarez's gang who kidnap Billy and bring him to the city of Juarez so he can meet up with Ray and Molly in the final act of the game. Now in Juan Juarez Mendoza's custody (we're not told why the city he's from is part of his name, maybe he's Italian), Billy gets tortured by Juan to tell him the secret of the medallion's power. It is revealed Juan Juarez is secretly Billy's real father and he gives a rendition of Darth Vader's speech about sharing the gold and ruling as father and son, I'm not kidding. Molly is held captive while Billy is let out to find the treasure before sundown. He stumbles onto the answer, meaning that you don't actually need the medallion to get the treasure. He finds the gold and Mendoza obviously double crosses him because this is a game from the mid 2000's so those Mexicans can't be trusted. Billy tucks his tail and runs again, right into Ray. This time, Ray is just happy to see Billy alive. He also proclaims that Billy must be righteous to have lived as long as he has. Then Ray storms Juan's fortress, killing absolutely everything inside while rescuing Molly and Billy. He dies in the process, taking Juan Juarez with him. In the end, he's buried in Juarez and the moral of the story is that Billy needs to stop running from his problems and be more like Ray. Okay, so, the game has a lot going on and also not much. Of the main characters: Billy, Ray, and arguably Juarez, Ray is really the only one who inspired any intrigue for me. Billy works as the protagonist boy character. He's a Schofield Kid, a Mattie Ross. His role is to be a kid dealing with matters of ugly and angry men who kill people for sport. It's implied that he had various adventures off screen while looking for the treasure of Juarez. But, aside from the obvious nod to Indiana Jones with his bull whip, nothing about Billy's character tells you that he's any kind of treasure hunter. Perhaps leaning more towards Mattie Ross would've worked better for lil' Billy, since it would be more interesting and realistic for him to be wise beyond his years. Juan Juarez Mendoza is just a buy-one-get-one El Indio from A Few Dollars More. The most interesting thing he does is provide a plot twist parodied more times than "Who's on first?" since the early eighties. He's only made a little better with the knowledge brought backward from the next game. On the other hand, Ray is a fascinating character, and not just because we see him before he turned away from violence in Bound in Blood. He is batshit insane. He preaches sermons to enemies while splattering their jam across the room and believes himself to be the actual hand of God. Anytime he helps anyone, say stopping an active train robbery or defending a farmstead from bandits, I couldn't tell if it was from the kindness of his heart or because God wills him to do it. An underrated part of his character is that he always has a bible in one of his weapon slots. At any point, the player has carte blanche to read scripture with their right hand and pepper box injuns with their left. Speaking of, it may be apparent that the only Native American character I mentioned was Calm Water. Is he the only Indigenous character in the game? Absolutely not. You kill Apache Natives by the truckload. You blow them apart with your six-shooters and steal their bullets. You're not Manifesting Destiny, you're Manifesting Inevitability. Genocide rhymes with McCall in this timeline. However, having a white preacher blow nameless Native Americans apart while citing Matthews may be a little on-the-nose Techland. Does this mean that any instance of Indigenous people being portrayed as antagonistic in any time period is inherently evil and bad? Absolutely not. America's armed forces did unspeakable evils to the Native tribes and families of the American west. Genocides and tragedies that the country barely even takes accountability for, much less offers compensation for. But it's important to realize that every river has two banks. The Jamestown Massacre and similar, smaller, conflicts occurred with the Natives being the aggressors over the next two-hundred years. Not to mention the many wars held between tribes like the Seminole, Cherokee, and Red Sticks that had a lot of political intrigue behind them. Context is important for these historical encounters. The Powhatan didn't wake up that day with the overpowering male urge to glass a colony of innocent people. After seeing what happened to their neighbors, and seeing the colonists encroaching on their land while stealing food and resources, the Powhatan lashed out in hopes that other colonists would get the message and stay away. So, with all this historical context, it is just a bit depressing to see random brown people shoot their bows at you while you mow them down with ease. The only reasonable one being Calm Water, in that mid 20th century way of saying "This one injun is cool, so we'll allow him to live and carry on as either a fun sidekick or a wise shaman guy." It's old hat, but if we replace these disposable apache warriors with gun-toting middle aged men wearing Borsalinos on their heads with big noses and curly hair, the issue starts to get a lot clearer. As expected from a conventional western, the one named female character is a MacGuffin at best. But, that issue will become more pertinent in Bound in Blood. As for the gameplay, it's both very standard for what one might expect, and also completely unlike most wild west video games that came out before or after. The shooting is fine. It’s Definitely passable for a 2006 game made by a small Polish team. I expected far more Slav-jank for what it was. I also thought it was pretty inspired to have two separate characters that play nothing alike and have equal screen time. The game could have easily felt like Shadow of Rome (if you get my meaning), where half the time is spent as a badass barbarian crushing your foes, and the other half is spent as a Mark Hamill look-a-like going through tedious forced stealth missions. In reality it worked perfectly. I think, without Billy's time altering longbow, his sections would have been significantly worse. But, just like Ray, he gets that edge in combat he needs to outplay his enemies while also making his stealth gameplay feel fair and rewarding. Appropriately, Ray is a rampaging grizzly bear and Billy is a panther dragging unsuspecting victims into the woods and occasionally charging full-force at the enemy. Also, the stealth mechanics are more engaging than I would've assumed at first. By that I mean the game never forces Billy to remain in hiding. Just like every good stealth game (Metal Gear, Mark of the Ninja, Splinter Cell, and what have you) the game itself can't punish you if you don't want to be stealthy. Bill can dual wield like Ray, just without any fancy tricks. Also, Ray has a conquistador's breastplate (no, we don't find out why) that protects him from bullets to the torso. Billy is just a squishy boy, so any head-on conflicts he steps into are bound to end up messy for both parties. Personally, of the Concentration modes in the series, the one Ray has in the original is easily the worst. You can really only shoot enemies on either side of your screen, so you basically have to do a little duck walk to hit everyone in the room. I would've preferred budget Bullet Time. For me, the most interesting aspect of the game was its level design. It's honestly fascinating how much the game feels inspired by classic Far Cry. You are intended to approach levels from one direction, but you can walk around the area as much as you like, and the game doesn't feel as nearly as linear as either of its successors. A lot of that seems to come from the game's engine, the Chrome Engine. Unlike its contemporaries of the era (Source, id Tech 4, and OG Unity) Call of Juarez was afforded wide open spaces. There is a carriage chase that takes place, in real time, from central Texas to the northern border of Mexico. There's also a more casual mission in which Billy wanders off to get food for Calm Water and the entire area is open to the player, for no reason. I wouldn't be surprised if the total area made up a quarter of Oblivion's map. Don't forget, this game only came out ten months after Gun on the PS2. So they had no one's homework to copy from except for, I guess, Red Dead Revolver. Playing that mission, I could imagine being a little kid sauntering around the wilderness on horseback, taking in the mind-blowing graphics on my dad's Pentium 4 computer. Oblivion was still too expensive, so I took a sandbox game experience where I could get it. Something about that magic is lost in the sequels.

Alright, Bound in Blood is the most interesting game in the series. A lot of that oddball feel comes from the story. There is actually a lot more ground to cover, but for that reason I'll see if I can condense it even further. You once again divide your playtime between two characters, that being Ray and Thomas McCall. Ray is still batshit insane and Thomas is alive. They're confederate soldiers that defect so they can go home and defend their plantation. By the time they arrive, Union soldiers have already destroyed the homestead, killed the cattle, and released the slaves. Escaping with William, their kid brother and amateur preacher, they go on the run with hopes of rebuilding their plantation. For a few years, they get chased out of towns and take odd jobs to survive. The three go to Mexico in hopes of finding the "Gold of Juarez" and meet with a man named Juan Juarez Mendoza and his girlfriend Marisa. Juan is planning on trading a bunch of firearms to an Apache tribe in exchange for both the medallion and the secret to uncovering the gold. (They got the medallion from a Mexican priest and gave it to the Navajo, and no, neither the Navajo or Apache tribes are related to the Aztecs. So, we don't know why anyone would understand the significance of the medallion.) First, the two McCall brothers have to rescue Juan's arms dealer and meet up with Seeing Farther, an Apache brave (which just means scout or warrior) who is the son of the Apache leader they aim to do business with. After pulling the arms dealer from the clutches of the damn dirty American government, he reveals to Juan, and the player, that he was secretly Barnsby, the McCall brothers' former commander. Barnsby makes Juan betray the McCalls and soon finds out about the medallion and its significance to the game's plot. Meanwhile, Marisa tells Thomas she is in love with him and not Ray, despite Ray's advances. The McCall trio catch up with Juan on his way to sell the guns and they patch things up just in time to meet the Apache leader Running River. Another plot twist happens, to meet the quota I suppose, and it's revealed the guns never worked. Execution for their treason is ordered, but Seeing Father gets his father to stay the punishment. Instead, the McCalls and Juan are allowed to stay the night but will be banished afterwards and Marisa is taken as ransom. Seeing Farther and the McCalls go hunt down the medallion and steal it from Navajo hands so his father can't use it to bargain for guns in the future. Right after returning, Barnsby attacks the Apache village, looking for the amulet of course, and kills Seeing Farther. Dying, he explains that Juan had betrayed them all and had kidnapped William, Marisa, and himself. Juan took the first two with him and handed Seeing Farther to Barnsby as a distraction while he took the medallion. The two McCalls apprehend Barnsby and let Running River do what he wishes with his son's killer. In the one moment of character growth and introspection, Running River becomes Calm Water (I told you he'd appear later) and refuses to spill any more blood to honor Seeing Farther's desire for peace. Barnsby escapes and goes to the same place as the McCall brothers, Juan's fortress. It's like poetry. It rhymes. Juan tortures William McCall for information, as he, Calm Water, and Seeing Farther are potentially the only people who understand the secret of how to use the medallion and uncover The Gold of Juarez. The two gunslinging McCalls make their way into the fort and kill absolutely everyone but get split up. Thomas meets up with Marisa and she seduces him into betraying his brother and making off with the Gold of Juarez (she just knows how it works shut up). Ray, after saving William, finds out about this treachery and kills Juan and all of his men in a fit of rage (at least it looks like Juan dies, because he takes a .45 to the chest and immediately drowns in three feet of water). They all converge in the Aztec cave from the first game where Ray intends to kill Thomas for his betrayal. William steps in the way, dueling Ray, but ends up dying while unveiling a Holy Bible rather than a pistol. Ray looks pretty upset but Barnsby sours the moment by reinserting himself into the story, hoping to kill everyone there and take the gold to reinvigorate the Civil War and defeat the Union. The two remaining McCalls off him and it's a happily ever after. Thomas and Marisa get married, Ray becomes a pacifist preacher, and Marisa gives birth to Juan Mendoza's bastard. Except, maybe not. If you don't remember, Thomas goes on to beat the dog shit out of both Billy and his mother every day of their lives in the prologue of the first game. It's so rough that Billy runs away at fifteen and Thomas really doesn't seem to give a shit at all. The game itself makes no mention of any of this and it does feel like the developers just crossed their fingers, hoping the player doesn't remember. Thomas never learned a damn thing. He began the story as a slaver and murderer who shot or fucked anything he pleased and that's how he stayed until the day he died. His wife, Marisa... I just hate Marisa. She doesn't really do anything worth hating, I just think Techland didn't try at all with her. She's just a foil for the McCalls and Mendoza to trade back and forth, like the medallion. This definitely could've worked in her favor though. She tells William that every man who she cared about ended up using her and violating her, making her more of a commodity than a person. But this aspect is totally fumbled when she ends up with "the right guy", being Thomas. That already feels insulting, but even that's wrong because of what we learn about Thomas from the first game. Right near the end of the game, she also tells William "I'm not strong like those men. I need someone to protect me." That's right about the time I turned my back on the game's story. Honestly, Ray seems to be the only one who learned anything (besides Calm Water of course). After murdering his brother, he actually does try to make amends and hangs up his guns indefinitely. Though his brother was also kind of a dick. William is a boy that constantly quotes bible verses and is supposed to be the voice of reason. I want to say that an unwavering belief in a power beyond yourself is inherently a noble idea. William holds onto his faith right up until the end and, as a non-religious goblin, it is nice to see religion portrayed as an anchor for a character rather than zealousness or a cover up for something sinister underneath. Even when insulting the Native people's culture, he seems more confused than spiteful when calling them "savages". He has a good relationship with Seeing Farther and we know for certain that William is the only person he trusts of the entire Mendoza party. However, his moral center basically doesn't mean spit in the wind with the knowledge that he was the son of a wealthy slave owner. With that in mind, he comes off more as a brat instead. He aims to lecture everyone around him about the good book, but profited off of suffering his whole life and continues to do so, as his brothers mow down the hordes of lawmen and Navajo chasing them. The phrase "little shit" comes to mind. Speaking of the Navajo, the Indigenous tribes represented in this game actually come off a little better. Which is weird. After the whole "unrepentant murderers and slavers" thing it's rational to assume the characters and story wouldn't give a flying fuck about Native culture at all. But more than just one Indigenous character gets to have a name and a character arc. It definitely doesn't help that the Apache are the good guys and the Navajo are bad guys you can shoot all you like. And, the McCall brothers treat ancient Navajo customs and burial rights like a tactical advantage with no fallout afterwards. But, just having an acknowledgement that the Apache are a group of individuals with inner conflicts and relationships just about barely lets the game hit the bare minimum standards of 2009. If you've been taking notes, and are well versed in old westerns, you have thought at least once "Hey this is kind of like Outlaw Josie Wales." Yes and no. Josie Wales has a lot of similar elements: a story from the purview of a confederate soldier, the protagonists make an unlikely friend of a Native American man, and they're actively being hunted down by their former commander. The fumbling of the bag comes when Outlaw Josie Wales had both the decency and the cowardice to not say the words "negro" or "slave" at any point. It's pretty obvious Josie couldn't give a rat's ass about that and he only joined the cause to fight the Union mercenaries that murdered his wife and child. Also, Josie didn't desert the confederacy because he was too cool for school, the confederacy was disbanded and the only war he could fight anymore was the one he carried. Only by letting go of the rebel cause, and understanding that the one thing that pissed off the American government more than anything was living life on his own terms, does he find any peace. In contrast, Thomas and Ray are big hairy boys that are every cliché of the revisionist western protagonist, with none of the nuance. They take women as they please, they see people as tools (as demonstrated by their owning of slaves), they don't respect Indigenous traditions, and they don't see a comeuppance for their actions. Stories like Blood Meridian and High Plains Drifter don't say "bad people can get away with bad things" or "if you're a big enough badass, all past and future sins can be forgiven". They're stories intent on pointing out that as much as the American identity is built on lawmen like Pat Garett, just as much is built on terrible men doing and stealing whatever they pleased, especially when minorities are involved. Deification of a cold blooded murderer is almost always wrong, but in that case why do we romanticize so much about Bob Bryant and Billy the Kid? Bound in Blood could examine the "why" of these issues and give a realistic conclusion to the story that acknowledges how awful Ray and Thomas really are, but that would seem like a nullification of the player's work I suppose. So, it's just better to wrap up with a Disney ending and forget all the wretched things we had to do in order to get here. At least the gameplay is really good. I mean it; everything about how Bound in Blood plays and feels is an elevation over the previous game. It even seems to have solved the concept of first-person cover-shooting in a novel way that I can't believe isn't just a staple now. Instead of having your character just hit Q or E to lean left and right, you move your mouse in the direction of the cover you're trying to peek out from. This allows you to orbit around the object's side and peek out from cover as much or as little as you like, and it feels totally organic. At least it feels more organic than hitting a shoulder button to super glue one of your butt cheeks to the cover and hit the fire button to completely reveal yourself to the people trying to kill you. I wish that mechanic came back in Gunslinger. Also, Bound in Blood opts for a more linear level design, but all of the open-ended levels of the first game are condensed into little vignettes between certain missions where you get to roam free in your environment. They all feel like stop gaps to put a few hours in exploring the environment, like a prototypical version of Red Dead Redemption from the next year. Each open-world segment has three side quests for you to go on, mountains to climb, shops to buy guns from, and settlers to save from bandits. Since these bits are completely optional, I'll just take it as a little treat from the developers at Techland. Like I said up top, this game also has a playable duo you swap between. That's mostly where my main issue with the gameplay comes in. Since the McCall brothers will spend ninety percent of the game working through the same levels, and you can freely pick which one to play at the start of each level, they feel much more similar than Ray and Billy did. Ray still dual wields pistols and has his Concentration mode (thankfully in this game it's a straight rip-off of Dead Eye from Red Dead Revolver), but he can also carry dynamite to set traps or take out enemies on turrets or behind cover. He also has his conquistador's breastplate (I told you we wouldn't find out why) and is more of a meat wall than Thomas. His brother Thomas, however, can't dual wield but has access to Billy's whip for platforming (though it's a lasso in this game), the slow-motion longbow, a set of throwing knives that serve no purpose, and his Concentration mode that effectively lets him target every enemy immediately visible on the screen, and kill them. It does add a bit of replay value that each brother has a role in each stage while the other one lays down cover fire. Only Ray can man Gatling guns or destroy things with dynamite, while Thomas can mantle up ledges, use his lasso as a grappling hook, and shoot down at enemies from up high. I didn't even mind the lack of co-op play because the AI-controlled brother never felt like dead weight. The game nails the "Army of Two" vibe it was trying for. But, it ultimately feels like a bit of a waste that Thomas never got a stealth focused mission to shine, or at least one purely bent on platforming like Billy had. Another thing about the Concentration system, it refills with every kill, more so with headshots than body shots. Once full, you have one minute to use it or lose it. The first game's Concentration system was okay. Because of how awkward it felt to use, and how incredibly fast it charged, I felt comfortable spamming it wherever I pleased to really feel like the Man With No Name. In Bound in Blood, this timer, and the fact that the linearity of the game can cause you to go minutes without combat against your will, really ruins the system's flow. I genuinely think I dropped more Concentration mode opportunities than I used. Even then, I'm almost certain that I only killed more than two enemies while in Concentration about twice in the game. Thankfully, in the next game, they went completely back to the drawing board.

Call of Juarez Gunslinger is easily, unmistakably, inarguably the best game in the trilogy. Thankfully, there isn't much to summarize. In 1910 Silas Greaves, a fictional elderly bounty hunter, stumbles into a bar with only two goals: find the bastard that killed his family and avoid paying his tab. We won't find out about the former until about five hours later, but the latter he accomplishes by mentioning "Billy the Kid" and "Pat Garrett". The rest of the game takes place across disconnected verbal stories that span the entirety of Greaves' life while he takes bounty hunting jobs in hopes of one day getting a bounty for the men Johnny Ringo, Jim Reed, and Bob "Rustling" Bryant (all real world outlaws). Each diversion is a different story that Greaves begins with "did I tell you about the time I met --" and the player is dropped in the scenario. In another story, the only one that is completely told through cutscenes, the bar patrons find out that Ringo, Reed, and Bryant tried to kill Silas Greaves, and his two brothers, over a game of poker. In a scene replicating Once Upon a Time in the West, Bryant gives Silas an Aztec coin (the only nod we get the Call of Juarez in the whole game) to keep in his mouth as he hangs. Silas was lucky enough to survive since both of his brothers broke their necks while he suffocated until the branch broke beneath their weight. The next forty-two years of his life are spent hunting those three men. In the final mission, we find out that Bryant was the bartender they were speaking to the whole time. In an early 2010's move, the player gets a final choice to complete the story of Once Upon a Time in the West and duel Bob to the death, or let Bob walk free. That's basically the whole story. I could go into the point by point beats of the stories that Silas Greaves tells, but the sole purpose of them are to be stories. Silas wings it sometimes, makes up events that factually never happened, flatters himself one moment and tunes it down the next so he can keep the bar patrons' suspension of disbelief going. He says he was the one who gunned down Henry Plummer but, like, was he? History says he was hung high with his gang members. Was that a cover up so the lawmen could boost their image? Because someone is lying about his death in this scenario. All that's to say, recounting the whole story for the sake of analysis is like putting a critical eye on your grandpa's hunting story where he totally shot a grizzly's eyes out with a single bullet. So the only things worth taking seriously are the beginning and the end of Greaves' tale. He swore revenge on the men that killed his family, and revenge has now come to Bob Bryant's door without him realizing it. At the end of True Grit, Mattie Ross can't think of much else to say to Cogburn's grave than "Time just gets away from us." And it's true. Can one man actually, truly, stay mad for forty-two years? I would argue no. At first, I thought killing Bob Bryant was the only sensible conclusion. But, now I think that the question wasn't "Is revenge worth it?" it instead became "Who are you getting revenge on?" Bob Bryant is an old man now with forty years of experience. He got his life together and hasn't killed a tenth of the people Silas has. Killing Bob Bryant essentially confirms that, even if Bob was a senile old man in a wheelchair, Silas would've executed him on the spot. Afterwards, I felt like I understood Once Upon a Time in the West a little better. Harmonica gunning Frank down in broad daylight wasn't a righteous act meant to make you cheer, it was self indulgent violence that didn't teach him anything. I think it's easier to forgive Bob when the Bob Bryant that hung Silas as a kid had died many years ago. That being said, the meat of the story happens within the moment to moment gameplay. By which I mean, Gunslinger is the perfect example of a Tabletop RPG in video game form. Prince of Persia Sands of Time has a similar slant to its story by making it a tale the prince is telling to someone. But, in that game, it serves as a framing device above all else. He'll interject occasionally by pointing out details or retconning the player's death, but he never gains control over the game's pacing. Instead, Silas will say some shit like "They were firing down at me like Apache's are known to" to which a bar patron says "I thought you were fighting the Cowboys." And Silas replies "Did I say they were Apaches? I meant they were attacking me in an Apache style." And the enemies peppering you with bullets change models accordingly. The Baldur's Gate games may market themselves as "digital Dungeons and Dragons adventures" but they're more sandbox adventure games with a focus on character customization and turn-based combat. I'll give them that honor when the game itself misspeaks and the whole party has to rewind a few rounds so we can remember who it is we're actually fighting. There was nothing more D&D than the time Silas said "I was taking dozens of Apache head-on" To which the working girl asks "Dozens? Literally dozens?" And he admits "No, maybe not. But there were a lot!" In the way a Dungeon Master does once realizing he may have made the encounter too much and took the first off-ramp to remove some enemies. Once the storyteller leaves the table to piss, the player character is free to wander in limbo eternally until they come back to set the scene and allow the adventure to continue. Also, killing Apache warriors by the truckload is significantly easier to swallow when framed as the ramblings of an old man flattering himself while half drunk in a bar. So, I'll give the game a point for finding that clever workaround and avoiding that uncomfortable vibe. More points for using pun names for missions that reference movies like Fistful of Dollars and They Call Me Trinity (my personal favorite), to the book Death Rides a Pale Horse. On that note, Gunslinger's actual gameplay loop is great. I can kind of only talk about it in reference to the first two games. Without that point of comparison, Gunslinger is just good. It's rad, bitchin, totally badass. That's all I can say about it in isolation. Instead I can talk about what was added or changed from the last game. The game does have three skill trees, a fad at the time, but these are actually really well implemented. The game has a runtime of four or five hours if you're playing leisurely, so you're never gonna max them all out. The three trees are dual wielding, sniping, and explosives/ shotguns. Every skill tree will synergize with parts of another. In my first play through I cloned Ray by focusing on dual wielding and explosives. In my second playthrough on hard mode, I went for a Clint Eastwood build. Every time I drew my revolver, I got one second of Concentration mode. Also, every six kills gave me a full Concentration meter and I got Thomas' ability to instantly target every enemy on screen and kill them with a fanning of the hammer. If I killed at least six people, the meter would just recharge itself and the rampage continued. Thankfully, the basic Concentration mode is just Bullet Time and you can upgrade it with abilities from the skill tree like: seeing enemies through walls, reloading all of your weapons instantly, and making every kill increase your combo by two instead of one. I think every player's Silas Greaves will feel and play differently to each other.

If Gunslinger is this good, got so many good reviews, and was the third best selling game on the PS3 for the first half of 2013, why hasn't anything happened in eleven years? I won't pretend to know. It seems that Techland is fine with resting on their Dying Light franchise for now. The Beast was just announced recently at this time. I don't particularly mind, as I love both of the Dying Light games and I wouldn't be terribly bummed out if that's all they ever made. But, they have a winning formula. Their Chrome engine is built for open world exploration and they seem to have perfected it. Implement a skill tree that can support a thirty hour game instead of a four hour one, bring back all of Gunslinger's mechanics, and use their finely honed skills at world design to make an awesome western setting you're free to ride around in. They're just sitting on an IP that could potentially have Rockstar looking over their shoulder. What Saints Row two was, they could be to Red Dead Redemption. I'll just hope they release a trailer tomorrow that invalidates this entire paragraph.