Played: Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
Mechanically, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is very rote - you follow a pre-determined path (to the point where deviating from it resets your progress), and shoot everything in sight. There’s next to no strategy involved, and while there are a few gimmicks (skill trees, a riff on bullet time), the gameplay alone is nothing to write home about.
More interesting is the way that this game plays with story. It’s framed by a drunk, elderly bounty hunter recounting his past exploits in a saloon, complete with interjections by his compatriots and confused revisions by the storyteller. This leads to several laugh-out-loud moments - entire blocks of scenery drop away, enemies disappear and reappear, and at one point he’s literally haunted by the ghosts of every member of the rogue’s gallery he’s taken down.
In this sense, it keeps to the fun you’d expect out of a western, and pulls you along for the ride - each level contains its own setpieces that continually distract, without fail, from what would otherwise be a fairly rote first-person shooter. It’s not going to win any awards for innovation, but the environments are gorgeous, and the narration is fantastic. It’s bizarre to think that this is the same company that made Dead Island.