Call of Juarez: The Cartel

Call of Juarez: The Cartel is the third installment in the Call of Juarez franchise. The first Call of Juarez was Techland's big break through game and it's prequel, Bound for Blood, was well received critically. The Cartel, however; is a well-known clusterfuck that flatout killed the franchise. It both tried a lot of new ideas and failed on all fronts

Gameplay:
The Cartel is a first-person shooter that does not control well. It feels incredibly jarring to not only move your camera and aim but the controls themselves feel very unresponsive. None of the guns feel good at all. They lack impact and there is not much response from the enemies themselves, not even a hitmarker that every other game this generation was doing. This leaves you wondering if enemies actually died. There are also driving segments that control very badly, thankfully you are in all reality only driving down linear alleyways. There is not much variety in the gameplay, it is a linear first-person shooter with many segments were you walk around with your guns holstered, listening to dialogue, waiting for things to go wrong. Over the course of the main story you will unlock other weapons by finding collectibles that are unique for each character, but you must do so without being caught. While this is a cool idea for collectibles, casual players that do not have a collectibles guide next to them will not be able to experience a large chunk of weapons. This game does allow you to play it in its entirety with two other plays in co-op. Can you convince two other people to play this game with you? Probably not.

Story:
If there is one thing that you can almost give The Cartel credit for it is the story. The three protagonists of the game each come from different departments of the U.S. Government; the CIA, DEA and FBI who are all coming together to attempt to stop the increase in illegal activity originating from Juarez. There are many twists and turns in the story and each protagonist has their own personal motives that they attempt to accomplish without the other protagonists noticing. Does it warrant three seperate playthroughs though? No, there's only about five minutes of unique gameplay for each story, the rest of the story is the same exact levels and gameplay.

Level Design:
Many of the levels are very large but that doesn't mean any of it is very interesting. Single levels can last up to an hour if you are REALLY taking your time but it's all generic linear first-person shooter level design. The same shoot, get shot at, take cover level design that seventh generation Call of Duty games pioneered. Some levels allow you to take two different routes but they collude back together in less than a minute so what is really even the point?

Graphics / Performance:
With the Cartel leaving behind the old west setting and moving to a modern Los Angeles / Mexico of course the developers would go all in on the modern grungy brown and green style of this generation. This game's style, not including the fidelity of the graphics is just ugly. Which, yea Los Angeles can be ugly but it doesn't look this bad. The game is drenched in post processing effects including bloom, chromatic abberation, depth of field and motion blur in a vein attempt to cover up the low resolution textures and general ugly look the game has. This of course makes it incredibly annoying to even play the game with all of these effects in your face on top of the "red jelly splatter" to indicate that you are taking damage.

Sound Design:
Many of the sound effects in The Cartel sound like they come straight out of a stock library. None of the guns feel like they have impact, the reload sounds do not sound good and oh my god you will lose your mind with how many voice lines are spammed. Characters will often chime in with a remark when you kill an enemy, are getting shot at or even when you are missing your shots. They will get on your last nerve which does not make playing this game any easier.

Replayability / Value:
I did not want to replay this game once but if you are an achievement hunter you must play through the game a grand total of three times, once with each character. So unnecessary and such a boring experience. For those not into achievement hunting, you could play it once out of sheer curiosity but I would not blame you if you don't finish it. There is also a multiplayer component that has a cheap version of "Legends of the West" from Bound in Blood. That mode is very fun in Bound in Blood but with the gameplay of this game I wouldn't touch it with a long stick. This game is not available for purchase digitally anymore, making it abandonware. You can satiate your curiosity for free, Techland has completely disowned this game and it will most likely never return to storefronts.

Dead Island

Dead Island is a first-person hack and slash game developed by Techland and published by Deep Silver in 2011 for seventh gen consoles. In the current day, Dead Island is mostly forgotten due to the release of Dying Light completely eclipsing Dead Island in the mainstream consciousness. While they do share a lot in common, Dead Island lacks a lot of polish that Dying Light had and it also does not have a unique gimmick besides well... being on an island.

Gameplay:
Dead Island features many mechanics from other video games that you have most likely played. It has a randomized loot system like Borderlands. It has skill trees like every seventh gen game with lite-RPG mechanics. It has weapon durability that constantly makes you swap weapons like Fallout 3. It has a large open world with minimal reward for exploration like most seventh gen open worlds. It has mind-numbing fetch quests and escort quests, again like most seventh gen games. It has a total of three unique zombie types that feel very reminiscent of Left 4 Dead's special zombie types. Besides being on an island with a resort, Dead Island has little to zero original elements. Even the weapon modding system feels similar to the Fallout: New Vegas modding system with the only addition being that you have to scrounge random items from containers around the map to actually craft things.

This means that for the first few hours of gameplay you will most likely be smashing zombies heads in for thirty seconds and then looking at the ground looting suitcases or trash cans for three minutes so that you can mod your weapons to be better so that this process can be shortened to five seconds of zombie head smashing and then three minutes of looting. Besides this game feeling like every seventh gen game had an orgy and birthed it, there is gunplay that is horrible and there is driving that is horrible. Both the shooting and driving are borrowed nearly identically from Call of Juarez: The Cartel which was released by Techland a few months prior. I don't know why this isn't more widely mentioned as The Cartel is typically mentioned as one of the worst first-person shooters of all time. This makes the shooting gallery segments (that are quite common in the second and third areas) extremely sluggish and unfun. Another thing to note, the world design of the game is genuinely good in the first area with the resort. When you make it to the city it nose dives. The city is a maze of alleys and roads with tons of clutter and little to differentiate any of your surroundings. The jungle is also extremely barren whilst feeling like the largest area so far, there is seriously only six or so landmarks in the entire jungle.

Story:
The story of Dead Island is present but is more or less just an excuse for you to travel to parts of the map that aren't the resort. The four main characters are found to be immune to the virus that is infecting the inhabitants of the island and are thus designated as the people that actually go around doing things while everyone else sits on their asses. The group that first finds you and helps you recover is in contact with a mysterious voice on the radio that is broadcasting from the remote prison on the island. This voice promises that they can help you escape if you complete a favor for them. None of the side storylines presented through the side quests are even worth mentioning here as they are all over in about ten minutes if they even exist beyond "do this because I need you to".

Level Design:
I mentioned briefly in the gameplay section that the levels beyond the resort are very uninspired and to be honest, that's all I can really say about them. The resort is; however, well designed. I like that this area has both a mixture of beach-side and inland resort attraction instead of just having a giant hotel in the middle. It makes it feel like this part of the island was developed with the purpose of being a resort destination instead of just a setpiece for a game. There are also elements sprinkled in that remind you that normal citizens do also live here such as gas stations and warehouses that locals used to visit. The city is an undistinguishable mess that has a couple of landmarks that help you triangulate your position. The jungle is similarly undistinguishable but has few landmarks. Most of the missions just allow you to drive straight to your destination anyways. This area feels egregiously bad and that it was just to pad out the length of the game. The prison is fairly competent but eventually ends up feeling like a series of hallways and your stay in this area is relatively brief.

Graphics / Performance:
Dead Island has some decent lighting but often suffers from LOD fade-in issues much like Borderlands does. If you a driving too fast in one area or fast travel, the games geometry will be extremely simple until it loads in. This is most likely only an issue on console versions (which I played on) due to the game not requiring an install. The fade-in does not bother me and I must give props to any developer that makes an open world game playable off of disc streaming alone. The game was stable for the most part except for the Jason easter egg in the jungle segment. I read online that on the PlayStation 3 version, the latest patch makes you always crash while fighting Jason. This is unfortunate as I have the GOTY version and cannot uninstall the patch.

Sound Design:
The sound design in Dead Island is not very good. There were times were infected (runner zombies) would be locked onto me and spriting at me but I would not hear them until they were within swinging range of me. Funnily enough, the few sound design decisions that have stuck with me the most are the sounds the zombies make when you stun them with an elemental weapon. The noises they make when you electrocute them or paralyze them with venom are very funny but also contribute to the narrative dissonance the game has.

Replayability / Value:
I really do not feel like playing Dead Island again or at least not fully. I can concede and say that it is fun to log on for a couple of minutes and smash and stomp some zombie heads in but I really think that this is just a universally fun thing to do. Why would I do it here when I could do it on Dead Rising or Dying Light? I also think the devs thought that people would replay this story multiple times with their friends due to the persistent character system like Borderlands where your level and skills carry over into a sort of new game plus mode. They also added level scaling in an update where if you joined someone's story and were higher level than them your enemies would be levelled to you personally. I honestly can't see myself going back to the story. It already took me around fourty hours to do a playthrough with all side quests and it just burns you out. The Arena DLC is fun for a little bit but going for high rounds is tedious and barely seems to get more challenging as time goes on. There is quite a lot of content here, only for those that like doing repetitive and menial tasks. The definitive edition is currently on Steam for $14.99 which is not a bad price to content ratio but you must weigh in the fact that this is content that will bore you by the five hour mark. In the end, this game is really only memorable for the trailer and Who Do You Voodoo, which I must say I enjoy a lot more than playing this game.