Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood

Format Xbox 360

Developer Techland

Publisher Ubisoft

Genre Action, Shoot 'em Up

3 Comments

You have Call of Duty, you have Halo, you have Gears of War and you have Left 4 Dead.

Advertisement:

Those four represent multiplayer shooters on Xbox Live. You're either charging towards Level 65, riding around in a Warthog, sticking grenades into walls or moaning because you had to play as Francis.

It's a tough stranglehold to break but one that every shooter with a multiplayer component needs to try. Some use gimmicks to try and get round the problem (Stranglehold, TimeShift), some attempt to push the boundaries (Battlefield: Bad Company, The Darkness) and some barely even try (Blacksite, Prey).

So what's Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood doing to break up the monopoly? It's got a few tricks up its sleeve, none of which will earn it the crown single-handed but should help.

LOCATION, LOCATION
First, there's the setting. A pretty obvious point but the Wild West is largely untouched as far as games go, with the single-player only Gun one of the few on Xbox 360 that tried to tackle the setting. So Call of Juarez does have the novel location of sandy ghost-towns to run around in.

What does this mean for the gameplay? Lots of tiered gunfights, with players just as likely to be scrambling around upper balconies as they are down below. Long, open streets, where darting across them feels like you're taking your life in your own hands. There are a couple of extra cool touches thrown in too - study some of the rocks lying around town and you might see a spider slowly scuttling across it.

DRAW, PILGRIM
The actual gameplay is different to anything else out there. The pace is quite deliberate, which makes it feel like a console shooter, but the controls (run button, jump button, crouch button) feel like classic PC FPS territory. The resulting multiplayer mode here feels somewhere in the middle, which says a lot about where this game has come from - a console game by PC developers.

That's why the different classes are so important. Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is swamped with classes for you to choose from. Not only does each come with a different weapon (which can't be swapped in-game) but they also have different health and speed ratings.

Pick the Spy and you have a handful of dynamite along with the ineffective 'Lady's Gun' but you can run faster than anyone else. Pick the Ranger and you have dual pistols that work from distance but run at an agonisingly slow speed. Pick the Native and you have a silent bow and arrow that instantly kills but is tough to aim and takes ages to reload. Then there's the Hombre, the Trapper, the Gunslinger, the Gunsmith, the Miner, the Sniper, the Duelist... with so many to choose from, it makes sense to pick one class and specialise.

The game modes themselves are standard multiplayer fare. OXM tried Free-For-All, which plays out as a standard deathmatch mode, and an objective based game where the attackers have to try and blow up areas the defenders are trying to hold onto.

FOLLOW THE LEADER
Another area where Call of Juarez stands out, besides its use of differing classes, is the scoring system. Each player starts off with a certain bounty. When they kill someone else, they collect the price on that player's head and their own personal bounty increases. After a few minutes of play, this shapes a hierarchy - killing those near the top of the leaderboard yields way more cash than those lingering around the bottom. Whoever has the most cash or hits the cash limit first, wins.

Furthermore, you can upgrade each class twice by spending cash on it, so it's not just for winning either. Upgrading will increase the overall health and running speed of that class, and you don't have to spend it on the class you're using. So you could use a Sniper, grab a few quick kills while the enemy team is running into position, then upgrade Gunsmith which you can switch to once you die. That's just one example of how to use the system.

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is damn good fun in multiplayer. That uncluttered level design and slow pace leads to games that feel quite slow, while the scoring system keeps games exciting right up to the end. It's not likely to break the monopoly held by the Big Four shooters on Live but on this evidence, it'll do pretty damn well sitting in the tier just behind them.

Ryan King