Call of Juarez: The Cartel

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.