Review: Call Of Juarez: The Cartel - Xbox 360, PS3

by Steven Williamson on 28 July 2011, 15:00 2.0

Tags: Ubisoft (LON:UBI), Action/Adventure

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Taking the shoot-out online

Multiplayer mode gives you some reason to keep playing with a team death-match mode and a variety of objective-based challenges to undertake. A perk system provides motivation to keep going and there are tons of weapons on hand that make it infinitely more entertaining than the single player campaign. In multiplayer, you also get to play as either good guy or bad guy as you carry out objectives such as robbing a bank while the other team defends, or escorting a judge to a set location. There’s also an innovative partner-up system that allows players to gain each others perks as long as they stick together. The biggest flaw. however, is the lack of a party-up system, which means you’re more likely to play multiplayer with strangers than friends; and even with some decent game modes it still suffers with the same technical shortcomings as the campaign, which makes pinning down your target a frustrating experience.



Despite a few multiplayer thrills, Call Of Juarez: The Cartel is a below average shooter. Even before this change in direction, the series was never the most technically brilliant, graphically polished or narratively compelling experience, but the Wild West setting and enjoyable scenarios, plus characters that you could identify with, made it fun to play. That fun has sadly been almost totally sucked out in this latest game, with annoying characters, stupid and mundane objectives and technically inept gameplay that feels like we’ve taken a step back 10 years. Give me a whiskey, a hooker, a bit of real attitude, and a saloon brawl any day of the week - motherf**kers.

The Good

Multiplayer objectives are fun
Single player campaign has a few worthy co-op highlights


The Bad

Awful characters, dialogue and story
Technically flawed, with a poor targeting system and useless A.I.

HEXUS Rating


Call Of Juarez: The Cartel


HEXUS Where2Buy

Call Of Juarez: The Cartel is available to purchase from Play.com.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.



HEXUS Forums :: 2 Comments

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I lost interest in the game as soon as I first heard about it being modern-day and when i saw the first screenshots. This just confirms what I thought all along - that the game will end up rubbish and will fail. Thanks for ruining a series!!
can wait for this game looks not so good!