Call of Juarez: The Cartel

Game Info

Techland should’ve scrapped this game.  Ubisoft should’ve canned it.  Call of Juarez: The Cartel is so criminally unfinished it makes me know what it must be like to playtest a derivative shooter with no redeeming value whatsoever.  It’s completely obvious that this was a throwaway title that they needed to push out before Dead Island was released.  Why is this game so bad, and what did we do to deserve it?

Cartel places you in the shoes of either a gruff, old, white LAPD detective (who is also a cowboy for some reason – ever been to Los Angeles?  No horses), a black – but not too black – FBI agent girl, or a Mexican-American cartoon character.  There’s a drugs/arms/women/invasion deal going on, and you three must stop it, using oftentimes invisible weapons and the same 3 lines of dialogue throughout the entire game.  There’s shooting, occasional dialogue and cutscenes, and everything to make this a generic co-op FPS.  But it seems like as soon as the trailer for Dead Island was released and created all that buzz, Techland decided to divert resources from The Cartel to Dead Island.  At least, that’s my take on this awful, awful shooter.

There’s a lot here, so let’s start with the unintentional bugs first.  Your weapons will vanish.  They’ll still be in your hand and you can fire your invisible gun, but you’ll be holding nothing.  Enemies will vanish, too.  Just, POOF!  Gone – but don’t worry, they’ll respawn in rocks, or behind fences that cannot be shot through.  The game will lock up, forcing a hard restart.  Audio (headset, otherwise) will stop.  Or continue on forever, really anything goes; sometimes you’ll empty a clip and the gun will continue to make the firing noise until you turn off the game.  Hit detection is terrible.  The cover/move gimmick is broken, pistols are worthless, and the graphics look like vomit.

How about the awful stuff that the developers intentionally put in to the game?  Driving sequences with tiny, tiny waypoints.  If you miss the waypoint (because it’s the same color as the road), restart.  A stage where you only shoot black people, and can get a trophy for killing a certain number of them.  Mexican gangsters are kidnapping American women for some kind of sex trade thing (it’s all very convoluted).  Any Mexican in a suit is a bad guy, which is okay because they’re all the same anyway.  The sassy FBI agent turning down the lecherous Mexican DEA guy, who (spoiler alert!) wears a suit so he is also a bad guy.  I think this game told me everything it needed to get across to me when I first started it up.  On the menu screen, there’s an extremely low-rez gun spinning in the background.  I sat at that screen for 2 minutes, expecting the textures on this gun to load.  We’re talking extremely low resolution here, too – PSOne stuff.  I can’t believe this game got published.  There’s a slow-mo bullet time (what a novel concept!), but using it makes your character quip a one-liner so bad that it’s not worth the added ammo and damage bonuses.

Cartel does have a few interesting concepts, but even these are broken.  Since the three characters are all in this mess for their own reasons, sometimes they’ll get a text message or phone call from an NPC, forming a small sideplot.  They’ll ask your character to retrieve a package, or blow up a car – interesting little diversions.  But your character will ALWAYS answer his or her phone, no matter the danger around.  There are areas where everyone splits up, but the difficulty spikes are so goofy that you may wind up replaying the same section 10 times.  The online co-op functions well enough, and voice chat is pretty clear – but there’s no drop-in.  You load a stage, then wait in the loadout area.  The three characters have multiple endings, but I can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to play this game more than once – or even halfway through.

This is execution in its worst form.  This is absolutely the worst game of 2011, and can safely be ignored in every circumstance.