1. This is one of those games where you shoot at people until you are almost dead and then hide behind a rock for five seconds while your health regenerates so you can pop out and shoot at people again.
2. It's great fun! Fast, arcade-like levels, numerous checkpoints and waves and waves of human beings hell-bent on being murdered keep the action flowing.
3. The developers, Techland, have about three hundred employees and their games are distributed by Ubisoft but it still has something of an indie feel to me. In this case, that's good thing. It feels streamlined and too-the-point. It doesn't wallow in over-the-top cutscenes and boss intros but lets you just play.
4. Not that there isn't a story. It is told through brief comic-book inspired cut scenes and narration over gameplay. It works really well, esp. w/ the game's gimmick.
5. The gimmick is the storyteller, Silas Greaves, is an extremely unreliable narrator. He tells the story of his bounty hunting days to a group of people at an old timey western saloon and you play as him in his reminiscences. Frequently, Silas changes the story as he goes or another patron in the saloon will recollect the story as they heard it and you play through many of the scenarios once getting different sides of the story. It's just a little wrinkle in how a game's story is normally told and it helps draw you into the western themed world.
6. The gunplay is also excellent. You can only carry two weapons at a time plus have the option to double-fist it w/ handguns. No particular situation requires a given weapon and there is almost always ample ammo to be found so you really just get to have at it. While there is something to be said for a more methodical approach to combat--and I am glad there are games that do this--the thrill of just getting to aim and kill enemy after enemy is something I can appreciate. If you get shot up and have to pop behind a rock to heal yourself, well, it is your own fault for slowing down the fun.
7. I would up playing this mostly w/ a controller because I'm just not a mouse and keyboard kinda gaming nerd. The setup was effective but I did find myself wishing for greater precision a few times. Specifically, there are some enemies that throw dynamite that you can shoot out of the air if your aim is good enough and there are some sections where just so many enemies come up on you at once that better twitch shots would be huge.
8. This game abides what I feel should be considered a rule of thumb: if the player comes upon an enemy firing a Gatling gun, the player gets to use that Gatling gun at some point.
9. This game is mostly a cakewalk on the default difficulty but there are a few annoying spikes. Specifically, some of the boss encounters are kinda over-the-top w/ the amount of BS they throw at you all at once. I don't mind tough boss battles and actually some of them here are quite good. The issue is they are tough just because they are so frantic they make the cover mechanic nigh worthless. It is not a matter of finding a pattern and exploiting it; you basically just have to memorize what's going to happen and then shoot the lights out.
10. In addition to regular boss battles, there's these dual scene mini-games to finish levels. These serve as an initial difficulty spike as well but that is just because the mechanics are poorly explained. Once you have it down, they aren't too hard but still the slow concentration based pace of these duels breaks the flow of the otherwise action-oriented gaming.
11. The treatment of Native Americans in this game is not the best. The rank and file Native Americans are just blood thirsty idiots which is the same as the white mobs so I suppose that's fine. But the only one who is any kind of character at all and he is portrayed as a mystical shaman who speaks of ill omens and so forth--sort of a magical Native if you will. I get that this is in keeping w/ Western genre tropes but I still feel it's a bit problematical. There was honestly no reason to have any Native Americans at all and the one story bit that includes them is outside of the general scope of the narrative so it seems almost like they were thrown in just because they are part of a genre trope I'd be happy to be rid of.
12. Playing through the story mode in this is going to be under a dozen hours in the best of cases. If you need more, there's several collectables on each level you can go back and get and also a hard mode that disables the HUD which really lends a different gameplay experience. If you just want to get to the shooting, there's an arcade mode that has you try to string together combos for a high score and if you want to replay the worse part of the game there is also a mode where you only do duels.
13. Call of Juarez: Gunslinger delivers. If you like Westerns, if you like shooters, this is a game for you. It is not the longest or most immersive experience on the market but w/ little exception, the time you spend playing it will be fun.
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