Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
After
Call of Juarez: The Cartel turned out to be the most racist AAA game ever made I was pretty much ready to call off this series. The first
Call of Juarez game was one of the first Xbox 360 games I ever played and while it looked pretty, the stealth mechanics were balls and the shooting was also balls (although kind of cool how you could read bible verses while gunning down bandits). 2009's
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood was another very pretty game that fixed a lot of the gameplay mechanics from the first game and had a pretty well written story and will probably go down as one of the more underrated games of last gen and there's not much else I can say about
Call of Juarez: The Cartel that hasn't already been said in dozens of videos and articles ripping that game a new one. So it's no real surprise that when I saw the little mini game
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger I wasn't holding out much hope.
Well... I was wrong. Not only is
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger the best in the series, it may have also been one of the best FPS' from last year, along side
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, which came from the same publisher along with the same $14.99 price tag. Basically it's like an arcade shooter where you play as an old bounty hunter in the last days of the old west as he recalls stories of his past to a group of people in bar. The game does a voice over narration and parts of his stories become harder to follow as he gets more inebriated and you start to wonder if he made the whole thing up. It's a pretty cool framework for a story as it gets to explain away the weirder parts of video games (killing hundreds of enemies, surviving multiple gunshot wounds, etc.) as exaggerations of the truth from someone who's place in life no longer exists (the time period is 1910). There's also hidden collectibles that provide "nuggets of truth" about the people and events from that time period and were interesting enough to make me hunt them all down.
Definitely one of the more underrated games from last year and definitely worth the price of admission.