Plot and Gameplay

The Bound in Blood story starts very unexpectedly. Instead of some sort of introduction to the events the player gets to see both McCall brothers, Ray and Thomas, pointing their guns at each other. Almost immediately the plot switches to the Civil War site and the player who has chosen Ray McCall fighting in the Confederate army will have to repel the attack of the North forces on the trenches of the South army. Once he manages to save Thomas, they receive an order to move back towards Atlanta, but brothers ignore it because they can’t leave their home and family unprotected.

They become deserters, but once they reach their home they discover that their mother has been killed and only their younger brother William is still alive. Knowing that they will be punished for deserting the army, Ray and Thomas hit the road and take William with them.

The next scene describes events that take place a year later. They player learns that over the past year McCall brothers have been banished from numerous towns for illegal activities, that Thomas has managed to seduce sheriff’s daughter and that sheriff himself has been shot in a duel by one of the brothers. As a result, the entire town was hunting McCalls down and they decided to take off on a quest for the legendary Cortez treasure that they were hoping to use to rebuild their property and family…

This is when the real adventures start. The player will participate in gun duels, horseback chases, bank robberies, armed conflicts with local tribes, -everything that makes a good Western.

Except the very first mission, you can control any of the two brothers. Your choice of a brother determines the gameplay style, because Ray and Thomas each have their own skills. For instance, Ray boasts close-quarters combat skills, is very good with a pair of guns and explosives and even knows to use a heavy Gatling gun. Thomas is way better at long-distance duels and is a master of rifles, bows and knives throwing. Moreover, Thomas is very good at lasso, which helps him get into very hard to reach places easily. This choice will make it much more fun to play the game, which is, however, not very long – it will take a player no more than 6-8 hours of non-stop game time to finish the entire game.  Luckily, the day is saved by Free World system that makes Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood somewhat similar to Fallout 3. The idea behind this system is that it keeps the player occupied between the primary missions and he gets to interact with a big world with its towns, prairies, ranchos, ruins and bandits supplying bonus tasks.

Gun duels that are an inalienable part of any Western have been implemented in Bound in Blood in a very extraordinary manner. They become an ultimate delight for some players, while for others turn into a real nightmare.

It all has to do with unusual controls: you have to keep the enemy within your visual field and at the same time hold your hand as close to the holster as possible, so that on a signal you could use the mouse to pull out the gun with one sharp move. It is pretty hard to master this technique, which makes some players very unhappy.

From the technical prospective, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is based on Chrome Engine 4. The previous version of this engine was used for the first Call of Juarez. Despite the absence of DirectX 10 support, almost all features of contemporary GPUs are there including HDR, per-pixel lighting, subsurface scattering, emulation of wet surfaces, cloth, soft shadows, etc. It doesn’t support classical multisampling because of implemented deferred rendering. However, the engine uses ALU computational capacity for edge-detect antialiasing that produces a similar effect. Gamers remember that the first part of Call of Juarez couldn’t boast too modest system requirements. Does the massive use of advanced special effects in Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood give us the reason to think the same way about the second part too? Let’s try to answer this question during our practical test session.