How loooong? 'Til the loadin's done...
Graphically, Call Of Juarez looks pretty good though it has to be said that to get the best out of it you need a stupidly powerful PC. Sure, we’ve got large draw distances and all the graphical trickery that you’d expect from a modern game, but even the gaming was straining over some sections… have the developers Techland not heard of a z-buffer? Putting that aside, the actual environments are very detailed with pretty much everything being interactive in some way, especially in the towns. Mind you, you’ll be far too busy worrying about getting shot to take too much notice.
Sound and voice acting are ok, with the weapons giving off a good meaty roar, which is nice. The voice acting come over ok too, but it’s nothing amazing and sometimes you do just wish that some characters, even your own, would just shut up… At times it feels like one of the early Japanese cartoons overdubbed in English with the character rushing to get out 5 lines all in a hurry… sure, give me the plot device or direction for the next level but please, just hurry the hell up!
Click for larger imageBut lengthy conversations and pointless monologues aren’t the only issue with Call Of Juarez. Given that the stealth missions are so tricky and given that probably the only way to get through them with a reasonable amount of health is to quick-save, you’d think Techland would’ve done something about the load times, which are immense. Immense to the point I thought my PC had frozen. Immense to the point of you actually be able to go off and do something else while the game reloads. Seriously, I was glad I had two PCs next to each other as I could do my emails whilst waiting for the level to load. If you want to get through the stealth sections, I recommend taking a good book along for the load times.
Click for larger imageOh, and let’s not forget the auto-save system. We’ve seen these a million times before where, when you get to a certain point, the game saves your progress. Normally, a game will wait for a quiet spot to save so if you die without saving further on, you just go back a bit and start again. Call Of Juarez saves your game in the most unlikely places, perhaps just after you’ve passed a point of no return or as you walk into an ambush… so even if you reload you’re still buggered. Couple that with the enormous load times and you’ve got a deal breaker of a problem. Of course, you can get around this by saving your progress yourself but when you find yourself fighting the game mechanics just to play the game, what’s the point?
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