Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

Ubisoft and Techland's outlaw FPS shoots straight, but could have aimed higher.

	Version 360 (PS3, PC)	Developer Ubisoft	Publisher Techland	Genre FPS

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Also worthy of praise are the scripted co-op flashpoints in which both brothers bust into a bandito-stuffed room side by side, blazing away in slow-mo with two pistols apiece. Two aiming reticules arc slowly up from the corners of the screen to the centre, and you fire with left and right trigger when they intersect with anything fleshy.

Missions range from twenty to forty minutes in length, and save for a couple, rather random interludes in which you're allowed to roam a small area taking on non-plot-relevant part-time work, the proceedings are cast-iron linear. Kicking outlaws off this mortal coil nets you cash, and there are gunshops sprinkled around the place where you can buy new and higher quality firearms. While some of these are mighty purty and sound real authentic, the practical ramifications boil down to whether you prefer a high fire rate, less frequent reloads or greater stopping power per bullet. Occasionally (this being the Wild West and all) Bound in Blood lets you ride a horse, but anyone hoping for the challenging level of fidelity boasted by Red Dead Redemption's procedurally animated steeds will be disappointed: to all intents and purposes, the experience is much like donning rollerskates and strapping a bronco's head to your privates.

Techland's Chrome Engine 4 packs a lot of detail into some panoramic settings, spills an exciting array of lighting effects over heavily seamed character models and even tosses in some decorative physics and environmental destruction, but tearing is rife and facial animations have a weird plasticine quality. On balance it's a good-looking game, but rough edges aren't hard to find. The audio, by contrast, is almost flawless, with particular praise going to the tense orchestral build-up during a duel.

While the story can be exhausted in two sittings, Bound in Blood's multiplayer offerings are quite substantial. There are cowboy-flavoured specimens of deathmatch (Shoot Out), team deathmatch (Posse) and VIP protection (Manhunt) to pursue across eight, moderately sized maps, mostly derived from single player levels - plus Wanted, in which players compete to become the point-scorer a la GoldenEye's The Man with the Golden Gun mode, and Wild West Legends, which builds objective-driven matches around famed historical episodes like the O.K. Corral gunfight.

How deeply all this will bed in on release day is still a little up to guesswork, as the game's servers are a dusty wasteland at present, but there's a rather neat mid-match economy system which sets a bounty on each player's head. Killing another player adds their bounty to your own. This cash can be used to upgrade each of the multiplayer's 13 character classes - for the duration of the match only - a total of three times. Classes themselves oscillate predictably between weak but speedy, close-up fun and long distance support, and the weapon selection is limited, but if Bound in Blood online runs short on ambition that's probably the worst of its flaws.

With Red Dead Redemption looking like it could blast the criminally under-utilised Wild Western genre wide open, it's easy to dismiss Bound in Blood - too easy, in fact. An hour or so in you'll be yawning as you train your sights on yet another pack of amateurish hired guns, but then some plot nuance, scripted event or shaft of forest sunlight will reignite your interest. It's a slow but steady crowd-pleaser, in short, much like F.E.A.R. 2. Nevertheless, only the most gluttonous of Spaghetti-westerners need apply.

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