Just as the predecessor, this is one of the best, if not the best, first person shooters ever. Gameplay is excellent, the story is phenomenal and compeling, the characters you play are very interesting in their own abilities. Oh yes, you play different people throughout the game. You can actually chosse in between them, in most missions.

The very authentic "western" feel gives it an extra charm.

Bound in Blood is a fun first person shooter, which unfortunately is a tad held back by it's engine.

It is a very pretty engine, but doesnt feel very fluid. It does allow a intuitive and creative cover-system based on the first person perspective which works very well, and is quite needed to survive on higher difficulties.

The story is pretty cool to follow, but i won't get into that to avoid spoiling anything.

The graphics are good, but i dislike the depth of field blur that is so apparent in most games these days. It means you always have to move the mouse around to look at things, instead of just quickly looking at the corner of your screen in real life. If you try to do that, it'll be a blurry mess untill you shift your focus on it. It feels like i'm not wearing my glasses.

The sounds are good, gunfights sound quite right. Voice acting is pretty good too. All in all, the game hits some western cliché's but is very fun and i played through it without stopping to play something else. But some of the engine's quirky behaviours sometimes stops the game to truely shine.

Rating: 4/5.

It looks gorgeous, plays well and with more variety than most shooters, thanks to being able to chose as which brother you play though thanks to the length of the game, even that may grow slightly repetitive. Have I mentioned it looks gorgeous? Ray and Thomas could have more banter as well, as lines tend to repeat too often, but aside from that, it's an all around decent shooter. If you like the subject matter, jump right in. No knowledge of the prequel required.

It is a sad feeling, not simply as a consumer, but as a lover of the gaming hobby, when a game disappoints to the extent that you simply turn it off in midstream, and have zero interest in going back to it. CoJ has so much texture, so much grit, so much sophistication in physics and appearance. Yet from my standpoint, it was not a game; it was a linear interactive movie. There is effectively one path and that is the path you as player will follow if you choose to finish the game. As much as the gritty flavor, the immersive graphics and good physics captured my attention at the outset, the linearity, and indeed extreme 'orchestration' required to progress in the game eventually just felt unfun. IIRC, I finished through about 5 or 6 chapters. What really did it for me in the end was a climactic "chase scene" portion at the end of a chapter. In playing this, I realized that the game depended on "trick playing;" in order to pass that particular sequence you the player had to perform a series of somewhat unintuitive mouse-click/point-n-shoot your gun actions while riding on a speeding stage coach escaping the bad guys. Scripted I believe might be a simpler word. If CoJ were just an overall bad game, this would not feel so poignant, but it is not an overall bad game. It is a beautiful, rich, immersive game. The characters are 2-dimensional but believable and compelling. The story is similarly engrossing. The physics are elegant and believable. The tactical skills that a player must develop to win combats are just sufficiently difficult that the learning curve is challenging enough, even for an old turn-based strategy gamer like me. Even the 'strategic' dimensions of how to equip your two characters and which ones to play in each chapter have a fascinating element to them. Undeniably, the game is one of the most beautiful I've seen. But for me, as someone who wants to be able to push the boundaries and try things a different way sand-box style, the linearity within some of the chapters, and the scriptedness between and within chapters was eventually intolerable. I feel I got my money's worth; at $15 even playing for only 10 or 15 hours as I did was a good deal. But with all the potential that this game had, I wished so much that it had not been designed with such fencing around the edges and scripting down the middle.

From drewmcgee, "Placed near the end of the American Civil War, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is the story of Ray McCall, the preacher from the original Call of Juarez, and his two brothers. From the original game, I knew that Ray was once a gunslinger and an outlaw before becoming a man of the cloth, but this game gives you the how and why. Which brings me to the perils of prequels: in order for a prequel to work, the events should be as big if not bigger than the original story. In my opinion, Bound in Blood was not as epic or as entertaining of a tale. Already knowing what the culmination of events was leading to left me with a lack of suspense throughout this title. That is not to say Bound in Blood is not worth playing. You are actually given a lot more freedom to move around in this game..."