This game is an absolute fever dream story, and even gameplay, wise. A man chases a criminal who has killed one of his family members for vengeance, while narrating the story to a future US president while the criminal is currently in the bar, resulting in a final confrontation with multiple endings.

An arcade shooter like this presents many flaws, the dialogue is incomprehensible through the constant gratuitous action and the quick-draws are tedious and un-fun, also I'm pretty sure some boss fights are bugged, yet this game still stuck with me in some way. The narrative of this game can only be told through the intractable medium of video games. The story consists of how our MC manipulates and over-exaggerates details in his convoluted story. He rewinds, changes details, and adds hundreds of combatants in his story. This story is the quintessential critique of western legends, showing how mixing fact and fiction can change the meaning of a story forever, something incredibly common in western films/media even to this day. So the next time you're in a hangout, and a military veteran of sorts or a friend is recounting an epic, please take it with a grain of salt, both for your ego and your conscience.

Have a nice day!

Score: 77/100

(P.S. updated review from my backloggd)

This is what I would call just a fun game. It isn’t trying to be some GOTY contender or push the limits of gaming, it’s just here for a good time. Ubisoft was just like. “You know what’s cool? Freaking cowboys”. I realize this game is under the Call or Juarez title, but it has very little to do with the main series of games.

The gameplay is a pretty standard FPS setup. You can carry two guns with you, a long gun & pistol, and you’ve got regenerating health. Aiming down the sights works great and you can shoot an enemy through a hole in the wall, no invisible barriers to stop your bullet. The selection of guns isn’t too deep. You get a rifle, pistol, shotgun, or sawed off and that’s about it. Occasionally there’s a few sections at the end where you get to man a Gatlin Gun. Some levels have some very light platforming challenges, but that’s being generous. I would call this an arcade shooter, because, well it is, but it really reminds me of those old 90s FMV western shootout games. You walk down linear paths to shooting galleries where enemies all sort of run around, ducking behind cover and when you kill them a big score number flashes up above them along with any special kill you made, like “Headshot” or “Long Range”. You use these score points to level up three skill trees you have access to. One dedicated to pistols, one to rifles, and another to shotguns. These have most your standard skill tree perks, faster reloads, better damage, more ammo capacity, etc. Put enough points into one tree and you unlock special versions of the standard guns like engraved pistols or a gold-plated rifle. You also have a bullet time ability, but I didn’t find it super useful outside a few sticky situations.

The graphics of this game are fine. Again, not trying to set the world on fire, but they do their part. The levels are all set in various typical Western locales, mines, trains, mountains, swamps, etc. They all look real pretty and the skyboxes are nice. That’s easy to do when the levels are rather linear, you don’t get to really wander off and explore much. Towards the end of the game it feels like they may be reusing some locations, I remember fighting in the mountains an awful lot. As for the art design, Ubisoft went for an artistic, overblown representation of the West vs a realistic one. The baddies you face have gun belts strapped all over them and big, oversized coats with lots of superfluous details. While I prefer realism, this design does sell the fun, kind of reminds me of Red Dead Revolver. The few cutscenes in this game are of the low budget version, just still frames with VOs. While I usually find those to feel cheap and lazy, they are fine here because every cutscene is just them sitting at a table, nothing really to animate.

The soundtrack is equally a fun, archetypal, Western affair. During the walks between shooting ranges there's a nice subtle guitar. When the firefights pick up you've got the electric guitar twang with a little modern techno bop in there. The music fades out for the duel sequences which require you to listen for the heartbeat to know when to draw.

Now, what I think is the selling point of this game, is the story. Not so much the content, but how it’s told. The game is setup that you are retired bounty hunter, Silas Greaves (great cowboy name, by the way) and you’ve wandered into the local bar and a kid whose read about you in the dime novels asks about your life. The levels are your recollections of your life, but Silas is an unreliable narrator. I love a good unreliable narrator story. As you play through the levels, VOs from Silas and the bar patrons pop in, changing the story. You could be fighting off “100 bandits” as Silas puts it until he gets corrected and now you are only fighting 10 guys. Or he may mention how he was low on ammo and you watch as your in-game ammo counter starts to go down on it’s own. There are parts where you play through a decent chunk of the level, only for Silas to say “I thought about doing that, but what actually happened was…” and you play through it again a different way. This fun sort of back and forth storytelling really sets this game above other generic Westerns for me.

The stories Silas tells are all about how he’s tangled with most every notable outlaw of the Old West during his career. Each level is dedicated to a Western icon. As a young man he ran with Billy the Kid, he beat John Wesley Harding in a duel, and killed Johnny Ringo, Val Kilmer style. As Silas tells the story, he is involved, directly or indirectly, in a lot of Western legends. Unfortunately, you won’t get to bump shoulders with any notable lawmen like Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson. The final level sees you in a Mexican standoff with Butch Cassidy & Sundance in a cemetery, just like the end of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. It’s schlocky Western goodness.

All in all, if you enjoy a good Western with all the archetypes, and I mean all of them, and just want a fun game that doesn’t ask much from you, or last very long, I beat it in a day, I whole heartedly recommend this one. It’s not too expensive I think $15 on Steam.

If I may nitpick for a moment, as a collector and student of Old West firearms it bugged me how Silas reloads his rifle. He brings it up where you can see the load gate on the side, but he shoves bullets into the bottom of the receiver. I know it’s done to ease the animator’s job, but just take the load gate off the side then.

CoJ: Gunslinger is a simple game. So simple that it often feels like an onrails shooter. Thankfully the weapons feel great - weighty and powerful, while providing sufficient feedback that helps you feel like the titular gunslinger.

None of that is why I loved this game. It is very evocative, capturing the wild west as seen in popular fiction, while also acknowledging the reality of how it actually was. It is this balance of man and myth that makes it such a delight to play. The constant Bastion-like voiceover conjures an image of a dusty old cowboy spinning tall tales in a saloon somewhere. He inserts himself into famous scenarios, taking credit for incredible feats of daring and bravery. He has dueled with every outlaw you've ever heard of (though admittedly lost those duels many times due to the wonderfully complicated dueling system), and (eventually) bested them all.

He misremembers details, causing the game to rewind so he can tell his story right, and once suspends the player in a slow-motion loop to allow himself a lengthy realtime bathroom break. The voiceover is brimming with so much warmth and personality that it is clear the developers had a deep love of the material.

Within these old, bullshit, cowboy tales, are collectables that can be found throughout the levels. These collectables provide factual information regarding the historical events the game is inspired by. Reading one of these that refers to an event you will later playthrough a bastardised version of only helps to emphasise how we have romanticised and mythologised this era of American history. As someone who usually forgoes the collectathon treasure hunt, I found myself scouring the environment for that good, good booklearnin'.

All of this adds up to a very fun, very entertaining and surprisingly educational videogame experience. Not bad at all for a franchise that was lucky to exist after its despised 3rd entry.

I’m not sure I’m alone on this as I haven’t seen much of it written anywhere, but I had a tough time making my way through the mechanical hurdles of Gunslinger. I can easily overlook the fact that the game feels clunky and shooting isn’t the best since we’re talking about a 9 year old title, and especially since the game does give you enough tools to deal with its technical limitations. But there was quite a bit about this game that frustrated me in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Maybe I am in fact alone here, but the amount of instadeath moments I experienced whilst playing this game was not cool. This on its own was already enough to be annoying, but an extra problem here is that the checkpoint system is a bit all over the place, and it would often load me back right in the thick of it, just as I was about to die, thus becoming much harder to get past that particular part. In this narrow sense it reminded me of Deadlight, another game that frustrated me to no end for the same reasons. This, coupled with the fact that textures can look quite blurry and often suffer from over-saturation (though I loved the comic book feel and Borderlands-type art style), made it even harder to discern what was happening at times, even with the onscreen indicators the game gives you in order to mitigate this. I eventually got used to it, but it took some time. It also didn’t help that the Normal difficulty setting seemed steeper than in most other games, though this might well be my own ineptitude talking. Finally, I also had a really hard time in duels, where you have to simultaneously manage your focus and your hand position in relation to the revolver. Focus was almost always fine, but the hand thing was hard to come to grips with.

All that said, I’m glad I pushed through. Gunslinger is a really satisfying piece of game storytelling, making use of attractive stylised visuals and more than competent voice acting to deliver an ultimately great narrative experience. Your character doubles as an accomplished narrator, and the game excels at making you feel like you really are in that saloon with him, attentively listening to his larger-than-life tale, all the while trying to make out fact from embellished fiction through a steady flow of whiskey shots. There is also a deep historical underpinning to the characters you meet along your journey, which you can read more about in the surprisingly satisfying character guide Gunslinger offers in the form of ‘secret stories’ (particularly rewarding if you’re into the Wild West period). And it all culminates in what I thought was an awesome conclusion to such a great narrative style - that you also get a say in how the story ends was icing on the cake. Even 9 years later, it is hard to come up with a game that has done narration as effectively and satisfyingly as this one.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is a classical Western revenge tale told right, even if not done right in certain aspects. I can’t fully look past the frustrating issues I had with this game, but I can certainly weigh them against what it excels in. If you’re looking for a fluid FPS with an awesome feel to movement and gunplay, you almost certainly won’t find it here. If, on the other hand, what you seek is a charismatically narrated tale of blood, fame and fortune under a Western backdrop of soul-sucking vengeance, you’ve probably come to the right place. Grab a whiskey and join us at the table, partner, Silas Greaves is about to take you on one hell of a ride. 7/10