Reviews// Call of Juarez: Gunslinger

Remember how you felt that first time you held a gun in your hand? The weight of it in your palm, the tingle of anticipation as you squeezed the trigger... the spattering of pixels as the piece of blue plastic you held in your hand fired a beam of light at the screen and changed a virtual world irrevocably (until you died)?

Ubisoft and developer Techland do. And so, I suspect, does the protagonist of Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Silas Greaves, in his own roundabout sort of way.

Gunslinger is a Western about tall tales, revenge and killing hundreds of men for the flimsiest of reasons because really, why not?

Techland has taken a gleefully pulpy approach to the latest instalment of the Call of Juarez series. The shooting's fast and the women are... well, there aren't a lot of women in it. But the game certainly favours fast, furious bloodletting delivered with panache and a knowing grin over any attempt at grim and/or gritty.

It's probably just as well, since the last Juarez game, The Cartel, attracted flak for poor portrayal of Mexican drug wars and plodding gameplay.

In Gunslinger you play as Silas Greaves. From the vantage point of the year 1910 he tells the story of his life as a gunfighter and you play through each chapter as him. It's a story that takes in many infamous moments in the history of America's Old West – moments that you may recognise from many of your favourite westerns. Silas has a different take on many of these events to your favourite directors and/or historians, though. Versions in which many of the 'heroes' are nowhere to be seen and he had to do most of the killing all on his lonesome.

In fact, Silas, sometimes changes his take midway through his story, so that events will rewind then proceed on a different tack or objects will literally spawn in the game as he recalls them. It's a pure genre-as-aesthetic approach. I'd like to say that this approach is a wry postmodern nod to revisionist takes on the Old West in popular culture, but I suspect it's actually designed to enable them to throw out lots of fast, loose and violent gameplay.

Happily, it works.

Gunslinger is about being fast and vaguely accurate. There's little strategy to it beyond deciding whether you want to hang back and shoot from a distance or get up close and personal. Breaks in the action are few and far between and, barring a couple of minor diversions you can take that will affect whether you get the element of surprise, it's very linear.

The upshot is an arcade-y experience that, at certain points, leaves you feeling that the enemies popping up to fire from behind cover could almost be crims from Virtua Cop. The game's stages often feel like shooting galleries and come about as close to that light gun feel as I've come across in a game without a peripheral.

Gunslinger's version of bullet time is 'concentration'. In a conceit of pure psycopathy, concentration is something Silas can only muster when he's killed a few men. When he does, the exact things that you'd expect happen – time slows down and your enemies are highlighted. Although this isn't particularly novel, Techland is very keen for you to use it and reminders will pop up on screen if you've filled your gauge for it up but not put it to work.

Similar to this is Silas's Sense of Death. This is what happens when you get bitten by radioactive death. It means that, once it's built up (which happens automatically) you'll be able to see a bullet that could prove fatal coming towards you and possibly dodge it.

The fact you're playing through different key moments in Silas's life means you get to dodge any prolonged instances of filler. Exposition is delivered as voiceovers and very occasional motion comic-style cutscenes. You also get to skip across a range of great-looking environments, offering up different sorts of shootouts – particularly across boss battles.

This frenzied style of gameplay is pushed even more in arcade mode, which trims off all the fat to basically present you with a shooting gallery. You're given scores based on how you make your kills, and a combo multiplier is applied if you can keep mowing enemies down and destroying things at four second intervals. If you make it to the end of a stage alive in arcade mode, your score goes on a scoreboard. It's a lot of fun, and probably the purest expression of the game's ethos.

So far, however, we've got a cocktail of game elements that could easily be found elsewhere. If Gunslinger has one aspect that separates it from its peers, it's the Duel. Unfortunately, this little gameplay nugget isn't very good. When you get into a duel, the game switches to a third-person view in which you're looking out passed your gun to your opponent. You have to 'focus' on your enemy by using RS to keep a circle hovering over him while simultaneously keeping your gun hand close to your weapon using LS. The focus is fine, but quite where you need to position your hand to keep it 'close' to your pistol, thus decreasing your draw time, is a mystery. When your opponent draws, you do the same with RT, then you have to aim, then hit RT again to actually shoot. It just doesn't work. At least, not in any way that's intuitive or feels like it makes any sense at all. It can be frustrating within the story mode, and the separate 'Duel Mode' is a write-off.

Still, this is a small element of the game. Overall it's fast, frivolous fun. Gunslinger won't make you re-evaluate what you want from a shooter, but it will give you a damn good, easy-going time.

Pros:
+ Fun, arcade-style action
+ Whimsical approach to the subject matter
+ Furious arcade mode accentuates the game's style

Cons:
- Clunky duel mode
- A little too linear

SPOnG Score: 8/10