As pretty as the environments are in Call of Juarez: The Cartel, I found myself very nearly headbutting my screen in an attempt to distinguish the blurry mass of an enemy from the blurry mass of the cover he was hiding behind, calling me ‘bitch’ more often than anyone can be trusted to tolerate before bursting into tears. Or just generally getting more frustrated than a premiership footballer tied to a lamppost outside a brothel.
In the name of sportsmanship, I’d like to make it clear that I played and finished Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, and thoroughly liked it, shocking brevity and tedious quickdraw sequences aside; so I’m all for more spaghetti western games; and I’ve also played a good number of Rainbow Six games, which I also enjoyed, blaming only myself for dying constantly due to charging out of cover before getting a good look at where everyone was hiding. The point I’m trying to get across, is that I know both Techland and Ubisoft are more than capable of making good games in their own right; but who in their right mind thought of trying to combine the two styles?
Call of Juarez: The Cartel is, in a sentence, a hybrid of two good games with all the frustrations of each and a general impression of being cobbled together over the course of a few months so that hopefully no one would realise that removing the period setting from a cowboy / spaghetti western is a really stupid idea in itself; even if it has a handful of interesting elements.
For starters, it’s nice to know someone was listening when we all whinged in utter bewilderment about Bound in Blood having two playable characters but no co-operative campaign. The Cartel not only has co-op (should you have not noticed the aggressive advertising campaign), but has three-way co-op, presumably by way of an apology. As a result of three playable characters, The Cartel also boasts significant longevity over Bound in Blood, as each character has their own version of the campaign, influenced by secret agendas – giving you a reason to play the campaign at least three times.
In lieu of horseback chases, The Cartel doesn’t jump on the recent bandwagon of bringing back jetpacks and space combat (much to my dismay) but brings in car chases – during single player you’ll constantly get tossed the keys as the designated driver, as you would if you go to the pub with your asshole drinking buddies and you’re the one with a sprained ankle during happy hour. The driving physics and viewpoint are on the right side of the fun/realism border to give some feeling of weight without the typically hopeless handling of the average American SUV, even if the whole ‘car’ part of the ‘car chase’ is suspiciously quiet. The few times you get to play drive-by like a heavily armed spaniel feel frantic and exhilarating without adopting the nasty habit of murdering you before getting a chance to enjoy yourself.
As with most… actually, sod it, as with all first person shooters these days, there’s a strong focus on cover-based combat, and continues the evolution started in Bound in Blood (wherein you’re trusted to get into cover by moving up to it and the controls subtly change to allow you to slowly lean around, rather than popping your head and immediately breathing through the new hole in the back of your skull). In The Cartel, there are fun little sequences wherein your two allies will cover you while you scamper from cover to cover, highlighted by a marker, until you manage to flank the Mexicans getting a bit too high and mighty with their astonishing military budget. Finally, as far as praise goes, the soundtrack’s still good and still adds to the atmosphere and spaghetti western setting.
Naturally, when someone starts praising the soundtrack of a game, it means one of two things: either the soundtrack is of such astounding quality that it deserves honourable mention, or far more likely, that they’re running out of nice things to say about a seriously flawed game.
Getting back to the point I made earlier about The Cartel essentially having three campaigns due to three main characters, therefore at least three playthroughs; the final mission pretty much makes this redundant because all three characters hate each other from the start and reveal this fact and also decide they’re running out of time to pour their hearts out before the credits roll. I ran a little experiment in this; I played through as Ben McCall, the closest to a cowboy this cowboy game has to offer, then revisited a couple of missions as the suspiciously white ethnic support characters. Fair enough, you have different collectables, and different people ringing you at really inappropriate times, but it doesn’t really make any difference: the only person capable of scratching their arse or actually landing a shot on an enemy is going to be doing all the driving, advancing the plot and hiding from the AI before the crap dialogue and mismatched subtitles send you barking mad.
I don’t know why this annoyed me in particular, you can turn off the subtitles, but they’re on by default. Couldn’t they have given an option to stop the NPCs talking unless they were contributing to the plot? I’ve played games with annoying, 2-dimensional support characters before (Haze comes to mind), but I’d have to say that the newcomers in The Cartel have valiantly stormed the leaderboard. Even if you play as a different character, the one you ditched will start sprouting the same crap you were trying to avoid.
So, while the characters in Bound in Blood were genuinely interesting and engaging, partly down to one of them being DS9’s Gul Dukat (one of my favourite villains ever), they seem to be deliberately unlikeable in The Cartel by being generally irritating, terrible at helping you outside scripted advancing-cover flanking manoeuvres and furiously reinforcing their bland and uninteresting personalities via forced swearing.
If you were wondering, I’m pretty certain the developers’ least favourite character is Kim. Aside from the fact that she’s comparatively as resistant to damage as a choux bun, I found a recurring bug when using her ‘concentration mode’ (bullet time that isn’t bullet time), which meant that rather than spouting the bizarre and completely unexplained lines of philosophy like her counterparts, she gets a subtitled error message. Nice one.
In summary: the setting doesn’t make sense, the characters are unlikeable, the shooting’s temperamental, the replay value’s a filthy lie, you can’t see most of the time and if you try appreciating the beautiful level design you’ll be swiftly booted back to your last checkpoint after a stern telling off.
Nevermind, plenty of bad games have been let off the hook because of a strong multiplayer element; and I promised myself that as a centrally co-operative game with a singleplayer option, I’d give The Cartel’s multiplayer a good going over. At least, that was the plan – word seems to have got out pretty sharpish about The Cartel, because I only found about four people playing over the course of two days, at different times. The idea of having the game lobby as an actual 3D environment is a good one, certainly better than staring at a ‘searching’ animation for 10 minutes, but it’s lost on a game that no one cares about. I eventually got into a campaign level with one real person, but he immediately left in a huff because I was once again the designated driver.
Ubisoft and Techland are better than this. If you want a good spaghetti western first person shooter, get Call of Jaurez: Bound in Blood. If you want a good squad-based tactical shooter that’ll severely punish the gung-ho approach, get one of the Rainbow Six games, the only thing you really need to know is that Rainbow Six Vegas 1 is mercilessly challenging and Vegas 2 is the only one with a sprint button.
No comments:
Post a Comment