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Call of Juarez preview |
...that I'll kill you if you try anything stupid |
First-person shooters are a dime-a-dozen these days on the PC but there have not been any good western themed shooters. Many developers tried but just fell short of expectations and proper immersion in the theme. A Polish developer Techland will try to give it a shot at making everything right by bringing us Call of Juarez, a new shooter set in the Old West. Techland previously worked on Chrome, a sci-fi shooter, and for Call of Juarez, the company took the latest generation of its graphics engine and adapted it to create an action game set in America's fabled past.
Techland has recently sent us a new build of Call of Juarez to take a glimpse at what the game has to offer. From what we’ve seen so far, the game strives to be more than just a run-and-gun style shooter. Call of Juarez will be heavily driven by a story that takes you through gunfights in dangerous towns to Native American quests through the wilderness. The build we played lets us take a look at two levels from the upcoming game.
Two down, two to go! |
The first level takes place in a small western town. You play the role of an old preacher. You’ll be armed with twin handguns and a Bible which you can put in one of your weapon slots. The Bible itself is useless but it’s pretty neat to utter menacing fire-and-brimstone passages while blasting away your enemies. The second level we got to try is situated in a wilderness where a mysterious Native American has saved you from the river. Here you play as a young fellow who will perform some tasks for the Native American. You’ll be armed with a bow-and-arrow to hunt some rabbits, use a whip Indiana-Jones style while climbing a mountain to recover an eagle feather, and so on. You’ll also get to ride a horse to travel the great distances with the aid of compass to point you in the right direction.
The Native American who
saved your life |
As we noted previously, Techland uses its own proprietary graphics engine for Call of Juarez, and the company has some sharp looking technology at work in the game. We got a good sense of it in the western town during gunfights as we had to maneuver through the impressively detailed town. There is also some pretty lighting effects at work, normal mapping, and a neat slow-motion effect during gunfights in case you get overwhelmed by enemies. We also had a chance to toy around with the physics. Just like in Half Life 2, you can pick up objects and throw them. At some points we had to use objects to continue on with the story, like the part where we had to put a box under a broken flight of stairs to jump up on it and continue on top, or the water tower with a spigot that drops down when you shoot its counter-weight allowing you to hop onto the spigot and to another building.
The game features large open-area levels |
Most of the action so far only involved shooting bad guys and bringing order to the corruption. There's also a neat gun-slinging feature, where you move the mouse in a certain way to simulate a quick-draw. This feature only occurs where you have to duel the main boss of a given area. But you have to be quick and reflexive. It took us several tries to get a hang of it.
Multiplayer wasn’t available with this build but the single-player portion so far is looking promising. Call of Juarez is turning up to be a fun Western game with great-looking visuals behind the game’s engine and we’re looking forward to playing the completed game when it is released this Spring.
