Techland with its Call of Juarez series managed to be in the middle peasants. The series was not a hit, but it was captivating with its atmosphere, original plot presentation and setting. A small number of westerns saved the Poles, and after the release of the best-selling game in this genre, namely Red dead redemption, the developers got scared. These are not the people who can compete and outshine such a mastodon as Rockstar.
They decided to move the new part of the game from the wild west to our time, the setting is the city of angels, Los Angeles, where the main characters from various government services fight Mexican drug cartels for control of the city.
So, 2011, drug lord Juan Mendoza, a name similar to the main enemy from previous games, transporting his goods across the border from Mexico to Los Angeles decides to get rid of the annoying drug agents and blows up their office, which alarms the city government. The department decides to create a special squad to find out what exactly happened and catch the culprits. We will play as one of the three fighters of the squad.
You can choose from a policeman, an FBI agent and a drug control representative who miraculously escaped a terrorist attack; each of the characters has their own skeleton in the closet.
With the previous parts of the series, The cartel is united by only one character from our trio, Ben McCall, a distant relative of one of the main characters, as many believe Ray McCall, but in one of the interviews the developers said that after Ray’s death, Billy Candle took his last name, but in appearance Ben is similar to the Reverend. Someone contradicts himself. Some more levels return us to the ghost town of Juarez, and the Aztec gold will again be returned to the plot, and we will find ourselves in the famous fortress from the previous parts of the series.
Each of the heroes has their own goals. Kim has a brother who is in a street gang and for his sake she has to break the law. Eddie has a gambling addiction, which causes him to have a lot of debt. And Ben is trying to help a former prostitute not return to the streets. This all results in separate tasks for each character. The essence of which is finding some objects on the level or talking with some characters. For completing tasks they give experience, with each increase in level a new weapon is unlocked. When lifting an object, your partner may “catch you by the hand” and you will not be given experience. With this, the developers wanted to diversify the characters, who apart from this have no differences, although for each it is written who uses what better, although I didn’t notice the difference.
The gameplay is based on three pillars. Driving a car, the controls are reminiscent of an iron, shootings, boring and monotonous, and searching for objects to increase the level. There are also fist fights, two blows and the enemy lies down, why they were returned from the first part is unclear. Thank God the fights are only at the beginning. So the gameplay can be described as follows: first get to the scene of action, then shoot out and chase some suspect.
The locations are also boring, you can www.skolcasino.uk count them on one hand. Street, club or strip club, forest, desert, abandoned city and roads.
All this is at the very least mixed and presented in disgusting graphics, which, it seemed to me, are much worse than in the first games. The animation is wooden, there is more dust from explosions than fire, on the road during a cut-scene a car can drive right through the heroes more than once, there is a LOT of blur, the eyes hurt from playing for a long time.
The shooting was upsetting. It is impossible to hit anyone from the hip; when aiming, everything becomes blurry and only where you are looking is clear. Adding a larger selection of guns did not help make the game more diverse; quantity of weapons does not mean quality. Pistols and machine guns don’t feel like "real" weapons.
Artificial intelligence adds fuel to the fire. Enemies sit in cover and wait to die, and the number of enemies in one shootout is not as many as we would like. Well, to be honest, in the previous parts the dummies also did not shine with intelligence, but at least they made some dashes. The game has become even more like a shooting gallery, especially when playing with a controller.
The management surprised me. Playing with a gamepad I liked the revolvers. He took aim, shot, hit the head. The machine seemed weak and unnecessary. Later, I switched to the keyboard. How surprised I was when pressing A or D switched weapons. That is, the movement buttons were not WASD, but QWES, this is the strangest layout. To throw a grenade, you need to turn the wheel down. I think few people could play for so long. It’s good that the layout can be changed. With the help of a keyboard and mouse it has become easier to use machine guns and Uzis, but this is my personal opinion.
Slo-mo doesn’t help either. Everything is as always, when killing enemies, the “concentration” scale accumulates, after it is filled, press one button and hang out headshots for a couple of seconds.
Well, since the conversation turned to slowing down, what kind of call of juarez could do without knocking down doors and shooting everyone with a weapon?. There is so much of this here that it gets boring.
The Cartel is designed to be played in co-op, since the game is old, I did not have the opportunity to evaluate the co-op passage. But it’s not scary because the partners who are constantly with you are taken under control by artificial intelligence. I immediately thought that it would be similar to left for dead, in which partners, if there was a lack of people or playing alone, were replaced by computer dummies who helped as best they could, lifted you up or participated in transferring certain things from point A to point B, there was no impression that you were carrying everything on yourself, there is no such thing here. At one level you had to quickly move two bags of money before a fuel tank exploded, this is complicated by the fact that enemies are also shooting at you. In such a situation, there is zero help from your partners, it is VERY annoying.
I think it’s time to sum it up. Call of jurez: the Cartel reminded me of two games – Kane and Lynch, weak graphics and dull shootings. And in its driving and control of the car it is similar to Boomer: Torn Towers. Well, maybe it was just me.
The plot, although it has four endings, is weak and banal, like most action films of the 80s. The shooting doesn’t have enough stars in the sky, it’s better to cut out the jeep chases altogether. Add brains to artificial intelligence. The picture would do well to remove so much blur, although without it all the angularities of the graphics would come out.
I wouldn’t recommend playing this, it’s better to replay all the other parts or any other shooter.
Of course, there are people who liked this project, and they went through it 4-5 times, but I don’t understand them. A person must have at least some taste.
