Call of Juarez: The Cartel

The Wild West of yesteryear is a strangely alluring time and place. We tend to look at the period of American history through whiskey-tinted glasses, adding a romantic blur to the whole era. Dusty saloons, busty women of negotiable affection, rusty six-shooters - it seems to speak to something within us. We watch the movies, we play cowboys and Indians with our friends, and we secretly wish we could get away with wearing a massive Stetson cowboy hat without looking like one of the Village People. Strangely enough, Wild West-inspired video games haven’t been anywhere near as prolific as one might expect - the combination of guns and horses and tumbleweeds at dusk should make for epic gaming, shouldn't it?

Techland was one developer who recognized the gap in the market, delivering the imperfect but charming Call of Juarez and its more impressive Bound in Blood prequel. Neither was overly ambitious or wildly successful, but they shifted enough units to warrant another ride out onto the plains. But for some reason Techland has decided that for the third title in the series the way to go is to hack out the very essence of what saved the Call of Juarez series from being instantly forgettable in the first place: its Wild West setting. Perhaps they played Rockstar’s sublime Red Dead Redemption and thought they just couldn't compete - and to be fair, they would have had to pull off something quite magical to overtake RDR as the Western genre leader - but to just abandon the whole setting completely means that what we are left with is a flavorless husk of a game instead of the feisty, rugged shooter that we hoped for.

For Call of Juarez: The Cartel, Techland has attempted to drag the Western shooter into modern times, but you wouldn't say that from playing the game. Besides a repetitive Western-style theme song - one which is surely just a few chord changes away from a legal dispute with whoever owns the rights to Ennio Morricone’s epic The Ecstasy of Gold - there is very little of the old west carried through from the previous Call of Juarez titles. Granted, one of the lead characters this time around is a decendant of Ray McCall from the original, and there are few dusty Mexican landscapes later on in the story to hint at the game's roots, but these links to the past are tenuous at best.

Instead we have a large scale drug war in Los Angeles, spearheaded by the deadly Mendoza Cartel who are running things from across the border in sunny Mexico. Tensions come to a head between the Cartel, various smaller LA-based gangs, and the branches of law enforcement trying to put a stop to the violence when a bomb destroys a government building in LA, killing a number of DEA agents. This is what prompts the formation of a special inter-department task force to load up on guns and take out the Cartel, averting possible full-scale US military action into Mexico. This task force, made up of DEA agent Eddie Guerra, FBI agent Halle Berry - sorry, Kimberly Evans, and LAPD tough guy Ben McCall, will be your comrades for the 13 or so hours it takes to put a bullet in the heart of the Mendoza Cartel. It’s a rough and sometimes clumsy narrative, but the gritty setting and fast-moving plot do make it strangely compelling. I just wish it was all less CSI and more Billy the Kid.

Even the most forgiving audience will have a hard time reconciling this hard-charging, gang-banger narrative with its supposed Wild West origins. No grimy, tobacco-chewing bad guys riding into town guns’a’blazing; no suspicious strangers moseying down the strip at high noon; just a painfully cliche’d impersonation of what LA gangland must sound like to people who’ve never been there. A cast of awkward lead characters and generic, foul-mouthed street hoodlums - hoodies and do-rags firmly in place - make this vision of LA - and later Mexico - a sad replacement for the unrefined charm of the Wild West. Badly proportioned hookers in ill-fitting bikinis, gruff-voiced warlords in cheap suits... it’s just an unfortunate group of people to be spending time with. The three playable protagonists aren’t much of an improvement. Corrupt, bad tempered, double-crossing bastards, each is as bad as the next. I found them all completely unlikeable and unpleasant to deal with, and as such I just didn’t care about any of them.

On the other hand, their crooked demeanors do play a part in the actual mechanics of the game, and in fact are the source of one of the few innovative gameplay elements which The Cartel brings to the party. Basically, all three characters have their own shady agendas which relate to their own backstory in the game. This plays out as a series of unique little side-quests within the main missions - blow up a stockpile of drugs; steal incriminating evidence, and so on - that must be done without the other two spotting you. It adds a bit of a cloak-and-dagger element to the otherwise straightforward action, resulting in a sort of tug of war situation where you are trying to complete your secret objectives while all the time keeping an eye on your partners also trying to complete theirs. Get it right, unnoticed, and you score extra points to level up your character and unlock new weapons. Unfortunately this whole concept really only works properly in the co-op mode, because your AI teammates never try to complete their own tasks. Also, getting away from them long enough to do whatever you need to do in private is all too easy, as they tend to rush to the next checkpoint and just wait there, leaving you free to backtrack.

To be fair, at least this ‘Secret Agenda’ element shows that Techland were at least trying. The same can’t really be said for the overall presentation of the game. If very little of the gameplay shows signs of the franchise's roots, the visuals definitely hark back to uglier times. Textures are rough and repetitive, and much of the game world elements suffer from such severe pop-up that it’s hard to concentrate at times. All of this is built on Techland’s new proprietary Chrome Engine 5, which when put up against the big boys like the Unreal Engine is much like entering a duel at dawn carrying nothing but a floppy carrot. That’s probably not entirely fair, there are other areas where things don’t look all that bad - such as a waterfall cascading on the rocks; stark white light glaring on sun-bleached clay walls - but in general this game is a far cry from the likes of Far Cry.

A crew of unlovable gunslingers shooting seven shades of hell out of a bigger crew of even more unlovable bad guys, The Cartel builds a lot of hope on its shooting action - and for the most part it delivers. In fact, the actual run’n’gun gameplay is one of the game's more endearing elements. There is a fair selection of weapons to unlock, each with a pretty solid kick, and the ability to go guns akimbo with two UZIs adds a bit of heavy handed fun to proceedings. It’s a pity that the enemies are rather useless though, and that your squad mates (in single-player mode at least) are immortal bringers of death, meaning that you are often marginalized, or worse, tempted to hang back and let them dish out the pain. In the interests of being thorough I have to mention that there are a number of rudimentary car-chase sequences here too, most of which put you in the drivers seat but occasionally asking you to do the shooting instead, but these are forgettable at best.

The surprisingly complex storyline and the solid shooting action - definitely the stars of the show here - are most effectively combined in The Cartel’s co-op mode - undoubtedly the best way to experience the campaign. Since this is an FPS though, the inclusion of a competitive multiplayer component should go without saying, and in this case could just as well go without playing. It doesn't try particularly hard, and the result is a generic online shooter which doesn't do much to deserve your attention. The one noteworthy gameplay mechanic which Techland has thrown into the mix is the concept of a Partner - essentially a system encouraging you to work together with a selected teammate. Stay close to your partner and you heal faster, rack up bigger scores and a few other bonuses. It’s far from a game-changer, but it’s a worthy addition to the otherwise unremarkable multiplayer component. Much like the rest of the game, the online portion of The Cartel here isn't terrible, but is underwhelming in the face of so much top quality competition.

That right there is the root of the problem, when you whittle it down. There are just too many impressive shooters out there begging for your attention to make space for a barely average one. By entering the realm of the modern day shooter and abandoning the charm of the Wild West, The Cartel has now lined itself up for comparison to a long line of absolutely brilliant games - we’re talking about Modern Warfare and its comrades. And up against that sort of competition this game was always destined to fall short.

Pros: