Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood - Single Player Demo

Although the Wild West stories are highly exaggerated and America was most certainly not just a huge free-for-all shooting range back then, Hollywood left its mark and it is almost unnatural to think of the countryside without imagining tumbleweeds and six shooters. Thus, Ubisoft chose not to mess with the legends and depicted the West exactly as it appears in a Clint Eastwood movie, complete with shady saloons and outlaws roaming the streets, on the lookout for easy targets.

In Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, the story follows the lives of the McCall brothers, who are on a crusade to basically shoot anything that can talk and crosses their path. The action takes place during the Civil War era, while the events carry you between a variety of locations, including Georgia and the Aztec ruins found in Mexico. Using teamwork and a lifetime of experience in gun wielding, Ray and Thomas always find creative ways to dispatch those who stand before them, in order to reach their goal.

The fact that there are two of them means that they have different talents, which makes for an interesting combination. The game uses this as a gameplay mechanic, by allowing you to switch between Ray and Thomas whenever you need to make use of one of their special abilities. Hence, while one is crafty with the lasso, the other carries dynamite sticks around to get out of unpleasant situations and you can learn how to use each and every talent to your advantage over the course of the story.

Since the whole idea of a western is to see bearded men shoot their pistols very fast and very accurate, this element is not absent from the game either. With every successful kill, your character gains “concentration”, which, when fully charged, can be used to enter a useful bullet-time sequence. Hence, by activating this, you can select each and every enemy in front of you and see him quickly take them out with one shot each.

The game is worth some praise for its technical achievements as well, since it features beautiful scenery and more than detailed animations for every character. All the shooting that goes about causes a wide variety of environmental damage, including bullet holes, objects that fall apart and more than enough explosions to go around, due to the dynamite that can be seen flying around during some of the more intense fighting sequences.

In the end, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood contains just the right amount of exaggeration and over-the-top shooting scenes to make it extremely entertaining. The scripted scenes might break up the gameplay, but they greatly add to the atmosphere and do a good job at raising your adrenaline levels.