This is the first article about Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. The next will include a presentation of the characters and a bit about the game in its essence. This article on the other hand will present some technical details of the game and what do you need to play such game. If you are not used to this game, you should know that the first Call of Juarez was an excellent game in terms of story and gameplay. A few Western games manage to attract the attention of the players, but Call of Juarez rises above all. Even so, I cannot think of this title with pleasure, its technical problems occurring as a black patch over the greatness found in other chapters. The first negative aspect that can be seen even by untrained players are the loading times.
Five minutes to load a map which takes about ten minutes to complete is something totally inadmissible in the industry. Even so, after those ten minutes of gameplay, there was loaded another screen to present a new part of the level (although this was noticeably shorter). These loading screens, with low performance even on the best configurations of computers have removed the first Call of Juarez from the group of the best games of that time.
Two years after the release of Call of Juarez, Techland decided to launch a new game and bring this title to a series. Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is a prequel of the first game that develops the story behind the main antagonist in the first game, Reverend Ray McCall (who also was a controllable character) and his brother, Thomas McCall – Billy’s stepfather, main character in the first game.
The story begins in 1865, in the American Civil War front, where Ray and Thomas were soldiers of the South. After a very pleasant first mission in action and “feeling”, the two become deserters, fleeing from the Army to save the family, mother and youngest brother, William, from the hands of troops from the North. After a pretty heated battle at the McCall family estate, they meet William, but their mother was already dead. From this point, the story is moved three years in the future, at which time Ray and Thomas became cowboys and argue with the law, largely because of their adultery when it came to women. After a duel with a sheriff, they are looking for the forces of law, their only option to escape being to cross the border to Mexico, where is the legendary gold and where they start looking for gold near the town of Juarez.
It does not last long and the two fall back into trouble again because of a woman, Marissa, Billy’s mother in the first game. With her help, the two get to know Mendoza known as “Juarez”, an outcast from Mexico, which was as they were, in search of gold in Juarez. They decide to join forces and together with an Apache Indian, Seeing Farther – whose story is detailed through cinematic scenes – they go on a Western adventure of the highest quality.
For introducing the story, the producers use both cinematic scenes and the comments of the youngest brother William – who was a priest and always tried to bring the right way between the two brothers – during loading screens. If in the first game, the comment occupied the entire and ended before the loading bar reached its half, in the second game this is completely backwards, the loading is faster, although it is not interrupted, you get to chance of playing the game faster, because a message appears: “Press Any key to start”.
These new loading screens contain links to artworks which accompany the voice of William, a somewhat low budget alternative to creating full-fledged scenes. The images and the short videos are inspired by Western movies, especially Italian – Westerns and are of an excellent quality. The cinematic frameworks, combined with effects like camera shake and the use of the “depth of field” to focus on certain elements make the user wonder if he looks at a “machinima” very well done or he plays on PC.
But all these effects were equal to zero, if a managed voice acting was not used. Even if none of the actors giving life to the voices in the game is not a celebrity in Hollywood, they do their job successfully, managing to capture the exact spirit of the Wild West and making the characters believable. The player will enjoy watching these scenes and many times he will wish that they take longer to get as much of the story this way.
To show us these scenes so beautifully directed, Techland used Chrome Engine 4.0, a version (much) improved of the graphics engine used in the first game. As I said in this article, the loading screens were reduced to a few seconds from several minutes and Bound in Blood is released also on consoles, not only on PC. The graphics quality of the game is not great when it comes to 3D models of characters. Although they are animated and look realistic as possible, they could have been better reproduced in terms of details. The textures are not exactly the most successful of this date, but they do their job. Fortunately, the game runs absolutely no problem on a decent system and despite the less detailed character models, the outer locations are excellent. Trees, grass, plants and even buildings look great.
As a difference from the previous game, the game structure is the fact that the characters do not to alternate from level to level. At the start of each level you can choose between two playable characters, Ray and Thomas, each having certain advantages over the other. The two are inseparable in most of the moments of the game, except for some levels about which I will say something more in my future article. Whatever the chosen character, the game takes place largely the same, few are the moments when the two split up to take it by different routes.
