Call of Juarez: The Cartel

The story is decent but lacks a spark. Supporting characters and dialogue are flimsy and uninspired. Shooting is solid – especially the slow-mo moments – but that pretty much exhausts the topic of the core gameplay elements. I have to admit though dual wielding is fun. There are a couple of car chases that were supposed to raise your adrenaline level but their execution is poor. And there are bugs and run-of-the-mill graphics that add to the smell of low budget that hangs over The Cartel. I hope Call of Juarez 4 returns to the Wild West, because it seems that's where Techland feels much more confident. [August 2011, p.42]

Sub-Par shooter that has its rare moments when playing the co-op campaign. Otherwise, a bottle of Tequila is more fun.

The new look of the popular Techland francise it isn't enough to reach the shooters standard quality. Just the cooperative represents a good feature to enjoy the story.

It's depressing to think that Techland took a popular franchise, came up with some brilliant ideas for a new entry, and then botched the execution-but that's exactly what happened.

Perhaps with more development time, The Cartel would have been a more compelling experience but, with a game engine that's showing its age, a confused new identity and a fair few technical issues, it falls sadly short of most FPS fans' high expectations.

Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a poor videogame. Gameplay lacks in term of precision and variety; graphics is distant from the top of this gen.

Call of Juarez: The Cartel isn't going on any short lists for 'Game of the Year', but not every game has to be a complete masterpiece.

The game is shot down by bugs, poor design choices and dreary presentation.

Some distinguishing features give this shooter a touch of class, but bugs and execution flaws cast a long shadow over Call of Juarez: The Cartel.

A perfectly decent game (although in no way spectacular), with a three-player drop-in co-op mode and the characters' different secret agendas adding some replay value. But all the way through, the abandonment of the Western theme nags at you.

There's just not enough at stake to make this secrecy worthwhile.

The original Call of Juarez had something that had not really been explored, particularly in modern titles. Moving into modern times without maximising the modern gunslinger character this is just another run of the mill first person shooter.

Call of Juarez: The Cartel doesn't add anything special to the FPS landscape except for the three-characters storyline, with a mediocre and unpolished technical production. A big step backwards compared to Bound in Blood, and departing from the old wild west setting didn't help.

Quotation forthcoming.

As long as you know this game has nothing to do with the Wild West and don't mind playing just another mindless FPS game with a vulgar script it's probably worth a rental, or possibly a budget purchase if you have some really low standards.

On the whole, Call of Juarez: The Cartel had the potential to be a fantastic game. The plot's many twists and turns would have been superb if it wasn't for the game's poor execution and the multiplayer could do with improving. Nevertheless, it's still a solid game. If you're looking for something to fill the time during the summer drought, this is the title for you.

The Cartel has some charm, style and can be fun. Unfortunately it's not a good game - mediocre at best and the developers should work on it for several more months. Maybe then gang fights wouldn't be so frustrating and embarrassing. Techland has produced a low quality game but fortunately it doesn't make your brain permanently damaged. We wait for another delivery and redemption in the form of Dead Island.

Call of Juarez: The Cartel, isn't a very good game when you get to the basics. Its low production values and simple gameplay drag the experience down, while an erratic pace to the storyline makes it worse.

Compared to the previous Call of Juarez titles, The Cartel is a colossal disappointment.

It's almost as if Techland rushed this through testing merely to get back on Dead Island development…which would make sense if they had an idea how bad this game was getting.

The Cartel is a mediocre game. Something disappointing because we know the Call of Juarez saga, with much better games and far superior action.

The convoluted story is almost pretentious in its efforts at complex character development.

It's your basic shooter without any impressive features and that's the problem: It's a game that doesn't stand out from the rest. It feels like the game was developed with an idea, but the idea wasn't executed to its fullest.

It may be time to close the saloon doors for good on this one – we've just witnessed the fall of Juarez.

Far from polished enough. We miss the Old West.

Taking the series out of the Wild West has stripped The Cartel of character. While I understand Techland's desire to move forward, its lost its edge. In a crowded genre, The Cartel is solid, at times fun, but ultimately uninspiring.

The Cartel has some interesting ideas behind it. However, too many of them are dependent on co-op, and even with them, long stretches of the game feel like boring, soulless slogs. More damagingly, the charm and sense of fun from the earlier games is largely gone, replaced with what appears to be a desire to ape the low-fi look and grittiness of Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days.

The Cartel isn't a Call of Juarez title; it's an extremely average paint-by-numbers shooter channelling the Juarez fanbase for a modicum of credibility it simply doesn't deserve.

It's shallower than the shallow end of a kiddie pool during a drought, and dammit, it's such a disappointment, because the series has delivered compelling storylines and settings, if nothing else, up to this point.

One of the most generic, bland and uninspired shooters I've played in a long time, and in turn has potentially sullied the work done on the series in the past.

At the end of the day the Call of Juarez franchise has taken a giant leap back with its latest installment in the series. Problematic controls, lackluster visuals, grating voice work, and unoriginal gameplay are some of the common themes when I sit back and ponder what went wrong with this game.

Worse than Bound in Blood in every way, and you'll have more fun laughing at its missteps than anything else.

Subpar map design and control issues put the multiplayer game on shaky ground from the start, and these problems coupled with team-based objective play that just wasn't designed well and a completely dysfunctional partner system that forces you to buddy up with a randomly-assigned stranger make the multiplayer game a "one and done" experience for most gamers.

Although Techland brings some nice ideas into the Call of Juarez universe, the game ultimately fails to deliver because of a way too typical story, dated graphics, loads of bugs and a total misunderstanding of the concept 'Wild West'. The Cartel is a major step back for the franchise and we would have been better off without it.

It's sad to see an under-the-radar favorite tank so spectacularly in an attempt to revitalize the brand, but Cartel is one call you can clearly push to voicemail.

It feels like a budget title, not a Call of Juarez game. If you're a fan of the series I suggest forgetting this game ever happened and start hoping this doesn't become the series' swan song. That'd be a shameful way for a franchise like this to go out.

The game is generic at best, broken at worst, and falls short in its attempts to innovate cooperative play.

Taking the story into modern times seems to have robbed it of its passion and charm, replacing it with asinine characters and more cuss words than an Al Pacino flick. It's not the worst shooter I've played, but it's got all the problems of a budget title and few redeeming qualities to make it worth recommending.

Feels like that blatantly annoying contemporary relative -- a sort of unironic Ali G.

A woeful misstep into the pantheon of disposable first-person shooters, and a balsa wood ghost town of a game that no amount of support patching could possibly shore up. [Issue#113, p.96]

A good idea in principle, and one that could have made for a great game, but its execution is so poor that it ends up looking like a complete mess. [Issue#75, p.76]

Sure, there are some minor kicks to be had in three player co-op, but they're very short-lived and fraught with frustration. Call of Juarez should have stuck to its guns and remained an Old Wild Western. Avoid this like you would the real po-lice.

Truly, this game is a disappointment on nearly every level.

The most forgettable, bland, fractured game I've played this year which only gets points for some interesting concepts albeit extremely poorly executed. In a year boasting Duke Nukem Forever, that's really saying something.

Quotation forthcoming.

An outdated game – mentally and physically – that tries to switch from the West nostalgia to a drug dealers filling concrete jungle. Not a good idea. "Among the blind the one-eyed man is king" was the saying. Now, we can call it "The Ugly Duckling". But unfortunately, this is where the story ends – no maturing into a beautiful swan. And now back to the machines, back to the West!

This can't be the same developer that made the last two games. That team must be off doing Dead Island or something. There were germs of good ideas in here, and it is possible to play it through to the end, but the criticisms and frustrations will overwhelm any fun you have doing so.

It's not the game we expected. The Cartel is disappointing because it fails to be a good FPS or to show something different. Its characters have no charisma and the gameplay is tough. Awkward and very cheap budgets, this game will be forgotten.

If the Old West is anything, it's a giant myth, and one that the Call Of Juarez games have always embodied. What The Cartel replaces this with – a mishmash of 
The Shield and conspiracy theories – is a much less substantial vision, played out within a world with no real resonance to it.

Why fix something that isn't broken? The Cartel takes the franchise in a modern setting and fails in every possible way. Please, Techland, bring back the good, old west!

The wobbly plot and hateful characterisation could be forgiven were The Cartel's shooting superlative. It's not. Guns feel flimsy, and enemies stick fastidiously to cover, hopping up and down and waiting to die.

There are number of clever concepts here, but they're left drowning in a sea of mediocre first person shooting and action movie clichés.

Call of Juarez: The Cartel is an incredibly disappointing sequel that manages to remove everything that makes their prequels so appealing.

Call of Juarez: The Cartel surprised us, and not in a good way, as it took everything that was good about the last game and pretty much ruined it. The technical flaws are numerous, and The Cartel just isn't fun in any way, shape or form. This is like that terrible one night stand that happened when you'd had one too many and, frankly people, you can do much better than this.

Call of Juarez has been downgraded and is disappointing in every aspect of gameplay and design.

Techland's move from the Wild West into the modern era didn't pay off. The Cartel is an uninspired, boring and sometimes broken game that should not have been published in this state.

An inept shooter that manages to make Duke Nukem Forever look like Modern Warfare.

A once respectable franchise has been irreversibly tarnished by this steaming turd known as Call of Juarez: The Cartel.

The Cartel is a calamity; an unfinished, unpleasant piece of dreck that even developer Techland got bored of before hoisting it out of the door. The Cartel's list of misdemeanours is lengthy and depressing, but the worst is how either Techland or Ubisoft can have the nerve to put this on the shelves and ask people to pay money --real money-- to play it.

The Cartel heartbreakingly not only fails to build upon Bound in Blood's momentum, it spits in the face of everything that made it worthwhile. It doesn't feel like a misstep for the series, it feels like an epitaph.