Call of Juarez: The Cartel moves away from the historical settings of the previous two games in the franchise, and is instead set in modern day Los Angeles and Mexico. After the bombing of DEA offices in LA, a task team is created to take down the Mendoza Cartel responsible, and is comprised of an LAPD detective, an FBI agent and a DEA agent.
Storyline and Characters
The task team is a racially diverse selection of stereotypes comprising of: Ben McCall, a white LAPD detective who served in Vietnam and is emotionally scarred for life (and is also the tenuous link to the previous games’ antagonist); Eddie Guerra, a shady Mexican DEA agent with questionable hobbies; and a black female FBI agent named Kimberly Evans who tries to pull off sassy diva agent so hard you might as well call her Halle Berry.
Each of the characters has their own unique view of the storyline, their own agenda for getting the job done, and their own weapons specialty. This three way mesh of potentially interesting and unique team members should have added a great level of depth to the storyline.
Unfortunately it didn’t.
As for their own agendas, each character has their own “side quests” which they have to complete without the other two members of the task team noticing. Achieving this means furthering their own storyline and unlocking more powerful weapons and items as time goes on. These actions do little to endear the characters to the player, while the rewards for completing them successfully are mostly useless.
Gameplay
The gameplay of The Cartel complements the storyline in that it is equally bad. The AI controlling the other two task team members is slightly denser than that of space invaders, and will constantly shoot at everything that isn’t an enemy.
This complete lack of assistance along with the taunting your task team members dish out when you don’t kill all of the enemies by yourself fast enough leads to a very frustrating experience, and this is before the glitches.
You’ll often find that your allies are stuck in completely different rooms while you try to Rambo in and defeat the enemies. This is made harder still when enemies spawn beyond the game’s invisible boarders, move in and out of seemingly solid objects, and in some cases, refuse to spawn at all. I was forced to reload the last save point more than once because of these various issues, not an endearing feature for any game to have.
Elements of the gameplay are repetitively and poorly thought out. Breach actions are one example of a game mechanic that is good, though it is repeated constantly until the appeal is lost.
Driving in The Cartel is horrendous, with cars handling like stubborn donkeys. During these driving sequences, you rely on your AI controlled team mates who are almost completely useless once again. If they’re driving expect many crashes and poor handling, and if you’re driving and they’re riding shotgun don’t expect them to hit anything smaller than a building.
Graphics and audio
As far as the graphics and audio go, The Cartel isn’t actually too bad. Visuals have their moments and the sound track is pretty solid, apart from where game glitches let things down. I would often encounter areas where the framerate was quite choppy, and the sound would drop out and reappear when I least expected it.
Conclusion
Call of Juarez: The Cartel isn’t a very good game; in fact I’d go so far as to call it mediocre. The characters lack depth, the storyline is bland, the AI is as smart as two rocks, the gameplay is repetitive, and there are enough bugs to make one wonder why this game was ever released in its current state. A rushed game with a clear lack of polish, Call of Juarez: The Cartel isn’t worth half its asking price – steer clear.
Call of Juarez: The Cartel review (PS3) << Comments and views
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