When you think Juarez, two ideas should immediately pop up in your mind. First of all, most of the, now older, gamers have surely seen lots of western movies in their youth and locations like Rio Grande should sound familiar. Second, there once was a guy who did La Reforma in Mexico. His name was Benito Juarez, two times president of Mexico some 150 years ago and a revered politician by many nations. No matter what, they all have one thing in common. Mexico! When you say Mexico you think guns and tequila. Well, there are plenty of guns in Call of Juarez, the latest first person shooter from Techland, but unfortunately no tequila. They’re all drinking whisky. Big mistake! Fortunately, it’s one of the few and not one of the many, so let’s see what this game’s all about.

    Call of Juarez tells the story of Billy, a young man from Hope with no faith and purpose in life, but sincere and honest. Call of Juarez also tells the story of Ray, a mad reverend with a quick hand and a sharp eye. The story, as most of them do, starts with a tragedy. Billy wants to return home, to the city of Hope, after unsuccessfully searching for the gold of Juarez. Once he gets there, his mother and step father are killed but, and there is a big BUT here, it just happens that reverend Ray, the city’s reverend, is the brother of Billy’s step father. On top of that, Ray gets to the murder scene exactly when Billy wants to run away, so his first guess is that Billy is the murderer. A chase of cat and mouse begins throughout the game and takes our characters to inhabited farms, caves, ranches and all the necessary elements of a good western themed game. There’s even a stagecoach chase included, so from this point of view, the storyline is perfectly put together. I won’t give you any details on the ending, but I’d like to mention that some of the episodes of the game could have been exploited in a different manner, with more drama and character development added to them. I’m referring to the Calm Water episode. It should have been longer and included a better dialogue, because its purpose, besides being a bow and arrow tutorial, was to make Billy self confident. It’s a sudden change for Billy, not as subtle as the one from Prey and I think this is the only mistake they’ve done story wise. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a show stopper, but more details on his training and development would have been nice. There are spoken intros when a level loads and you’ll find out lots of things on both characters, but unfortunately, sometimes it automatically loaded a cut-scene before I was able to read everything or hear the text. I know some of you might complain on the long load times, but play it on a computer with some fast hard-disks and 2GB RAM and you’re all set. If you begin playing and you feel the story is thin or that maybe the gameplay sucks, then play a little more. It’s all due to the cheesy Billy game opening. The pace changes rapidly and it gets more and more interesting on the way with the best part coming once you get to the final episodes.