Call of Juarez: The Cartel

Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a modern-day first-person shooter built around a three-player co-op campaign, where you pick one of three interagency misfits: Ben McCall (LAPD, descended from the series' original cowboy protagonist), Kim Evans (FBI), or Eddie Guerra (DEA). The setup sounds good on paper. Each character has a hidden agenda running parallel to the main mission, so while you and two friends are fighting through the streets of L.A. and later crossing into Mexico, you might be quietly stealing cartel drugs to cover a gambling debt, or lifting evidence files your boss told you to bury. Your partners only hear your side of the phone call when you get new orders. It creates a layer of real-time distrust inside a co-op game, and in 2011 almost nobody was doing that. Credit where it is due. The problem is that the shooting underneath all of that is deeply mediocre. Guns handle fine at a surface level - the AK-47 gets the job done at mid range, revolvers punch correctly, and peering down iron sights long enough kicks in a slight zoom - but enemy AI is passive and cover-addicted, time-to-kill feels inconsistent, and the weapon sandbox never evolves past a generic mix of pistols, shotguns, SMGs, and rifles with nothing interesting separating them. Mission structure is repetitive to the point of comedy: drive somewhere, talk briefly, clear a series of arena rooms, get in a car chase, repeat. The car chases in particular wear out their welcome within the first two hours. Concentration mode (a bullet-time ability inherited from earlier entries) is available with any weapon here, which is a mechanical upgrade on paper, but the implementation is throwaway. The PC version launched months after consoles and arrived in worse shape. Audio cuts out mid-fight, enemies clip through cover, subtitles contradict spoken dialogue, and the competitive multiplayer mode - cops versus cartel across team deathmatch and objective-based Missions - was already a ghost town on day one. The partner system in multiplayer, where sticking close to one assigned teammate gives both of you a damage bonus, is a decent hook that nobody got to enjoy because population was essentially zero at launch. In 2015, Techland's own CEO publicly called the game a mistake, and the title has since been delisted from all major digital storefronts. If you are reading this, you found it somewhere very specific. The competitive challenge system in co-op is worth one sentence of genuine praise: each player occasionally gets a private objective mid-combat (a headshot quota, a melee kill count) and when one of you hits it, the others instantly fail theirs. It is petty, it is fun for about twenty minutes, and then the interface clutter buries it. Giant HUD notifications obscure the screen during firefights. The single-player AI ignores its own secret agenda entirely, removing the only hook that makes the mode interesting. Play it solo and you are left with a corridor shooter with no personality and a habit of crashing. There is a version of this game that works, and it requires exactly three friends, a tolerance for clunky production values, and zero interest in netcode quality or ranked anything. If you want to feel the texture of a genuinely unfinished 2011 FPS with one legitimately original idea trapped inside it, it is a historical curiosity. If you want a shooter that respects your time, look at Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, which came after this and is the apology.

Fred · Scout Team

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