Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (2009) (Computer game)

The second in the Call of Juarez series, and a prequel to the first game. It tells the story of Ray and Thomas McCall, stretching from their time together fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War, their time as fugitives, their quest for hidden Mexican treasure and their subsequent falling out. It effectively explains how Ray ended up as the deranged gun-toting preacher from the first game. The story is really the best bit of the game, with nice callbacks to classic westerns (the introductory civil war bit is clearly inspired by The Good, The Bad and The Ugly for example), and the combination of the story and the settings give it really Western feel.

Unfortunately the gameplay is a bit fiddly. It's often a bit difficult to see where the baddies and shooting from and you can easily be dead before you've managed to stop them. The duels too feel quite chance-based (I suspect it's difficult to come up with a sensible gameplay mechanic for the classic western stand-off, but I think the follow-up Call of Juarez: Gunslinger does better). The idea that you can play through most of it as either of the two brothers adds a bit of re-playability, but the differences between them aren't huge.

In summary, it's a decent—but not fantastic—shooter, improved by a top quality story-line. It also loses a bit of the variety of play from the original (the differences between the two brothers are smaller than the difference between the two characters in the original) but also avoids the slightly frustrating stealth mode of the original. (Whether that's an improvement depends on how you found the stealth sections of the original – I didn't find them too bad).

I played the XBox 360 version.