A budget western shooter that outworks games twice its price, one exaggerated bar-room tall tale at a time.
Official art · via Steam
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger opens with an old man named Silas Greaves walking into a saloon and telling the whole bar he killed Billy the Kid. He keeps talking, and the game keeps rewriting itself around him: buildings appear and disappear mid-sentence, a wagon becomes a stagecoach becomes nothing at all, because Silas is lying about half of what he says and the game shows you the lie happening in real time. It's a cheap trick that costs the developers nothing to render and gives the whole campaign a personality budget titles almost never bother with.
The shooting backs it up. Duels drop you into a Concentration Mode standoff where you track an opponent's tell and fire before he does, and it never stops feeling good even after the fifteenth gunslinger challenges you outside a saloon. The cel-shaded art holds up over a decade later, closer to Borderlands than anything else from 2013, and the arcade mode turns the whole campaign into a score-chasing shooting gallery worth replaying on its own.
The game gets dumb once you're outside the duels. Boss fights usually mean an enemy with a gatling gun and you throwing dynamite at him until he stops moving, over and over. The story you already know from the opening is the story you get by the end, unreliable narrator aside. Enemies mostly stand still and wait to get shot, or pop up on a timer like a shooting gallery target, because that's what they are.
You can see the budget in places too. Dialogue cuts awkwardly between lines, and the hand-drawn cutscenes look like they came from a different, cheaper game. The launch price buried all of that, and the price now buries it twice over. One Steam reviewer summed it up better than I can: "A Ubisoft published game without Uplay. 20/10."
Buy it. Five hours, no filler, and a framing device better than most sixty-dollar shooters bother attempting.