Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

• 1. Introduction

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  Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood opens in August 1864, with two Confederate sergeants choosing family over duty in the final months of the Civil War. Ray and Thomas McCall abandon their post near the Chattahoochee River, defying Colonel Jeremy Barnsby's direct order to reinforce supply lines at Jonesboro. They arrive home to find it partially destroyed and their mother dead. That act of desertion sets everything else in motion: a years-long chase through Mexico and Apache territory, a love triangle that fractures two brothers, and a cursed Aztec treasure that ruins everyone who reaches for it.

  Released in June 2009 by Techland and published by Ubisoft, the game was a prequel to the original Call of Juarez - built from the bones of that first game's failures and its successes. What draws you forward is not the gold, but the question of whether these brothers can outrun what they have already become.

• 2. The Brothers McCall

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  Ray McCall wears a cuirass - a chest plate of body armour - and carries that same weight into every fight. He can dual-wield six-shooters, kick down doors, and operate a dismountable gatling gun. He absorbs more punishment than Thomas can, but he cannot jump as high, cannot aim as far, and does not move as quietly.

  Thomas moves differently. He grips ledges and pulls himself up, sneaks past enemies, and carries a lasso, a bow, and throwing knives that Ray cannot use. When Thomas draws the bow, time slows so the player can aim with precision. His long-range accuracy is sharper than his brother's, even if he is slower at close range.

  The game gives most levels over to a genuine choice: play as Ray or play as Thomas. Whichever brother the player does not pick is then controlled by the AI. At key moments the two must cooperate regardless of who is in command, with Thomas helping Ray reach a high platform and Ray kicking open a door for Thomas. Occasionally a level physically splits them apart, with Ray going through a mine while Thomas goes over it, meaning the level design changes depending on the choice made.

  Co-writer Haris Orkin traced the McCall brothers directly back to history. Many real outlaws of the post-war period, including Jesse James and the Younger brothers, were former Confederate soldiers who lost everything they had and suffered the psychological aftermath of war. The McCalls were modelled on those men.

• 3. A Western Made From Westerns

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  Paweł Kopiński, the lead product manager, described what the team wanted plainly: "we wanted to capture the best of all the western movies we love, so it can't be simply categorized as either a Spaghetti Western or a realistic Western. It's a blend of the best elements from both."

  Orkin placed it closer to the Spaghetti side, comparing it to Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, while also crediting the HBO series Deadwood as an inspiration. More specific debts ran to Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy and his Once Upon a Time in the West, released in 1968; James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma from 2007; and Ed Harris's Appaloosa from 2008.

  Where the tone tips toward extravagance - in the over-the-top violence and the legend of the Gold of Juarez - the script underneath it deals in period realities. Orkin spoke directly about the choice to include the white suppression of Native Americans, the oppression of Mexicans in south Texas, racism, and slavery. His reasoning was that to skirt those truths once you have entered those worlds does them a disservice.

  The team did not originally plan to set the story during the Civil War at all. It was only when they counted backward from Billy's story in the first game that they realised a prequel would coincide with that period. Once the arithmetic landed them in 1864, they built the entire framework around it.

• 4. Chrome Engine and the Technology Underneath

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  Bound in Blood was the first game to run on the fourth iteration of Techland's proprietary Chrome Engine. Kopiński described the technical leap in plain terms: increased performance allowed for more polygons on screen and more advanced special effects, along with wider open environments and natural wildlife that the previous engine could not support.

  The main architectural change from Chrome Engine 3 to Chrome Engine 4 was the shift to deferred rendering. Deferred rendering processes lighting and post-processing effects separately from geometry, which allowed the game to handle more complex lighting scenarios without the performance cost that earlier methods carried. The new engine also offered what Techland called "true multi-platform support" for the first time.

  For physics, Techland used their own engine built on ODE - Open Dynamics Engine - which required no hardware acceleration. That mattered practically for a game releasing across Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 simultaneously, since hardware capabilities varied across those platforms.

  There was one area where the team deliberately let history lose. Kopiński acknowledged that the guns in the game should not technically exist in the period: revolvers of the 1860s were still unreliable, and double-barreled shotguns were the dominant weapon of the real Wild West. The team chose the Spaghetti Western's version of the armory over the historically accurate one, while still recreating the weapons accurately from their real counterparts.

• 5. Shootouts, Duels, and Multiplayer

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  Three distinct types of slow-motion attack run through the game, each called a Concentration Mode. Ray's version lets him rotate a full 360 degrees from a fixed position and tag up to twelve enemies, then automatically fires at all of them with near-perfect accuracy once the window closes. Thomas's version moves the crosshairs automatically from enemy to enemy while the player holds the fire button, then fires by pulling back on the analog stick - mimicking the motion of fanning a real revolver hammer. The third type triggers automatically at certain doorways: both brothers burst into the room simultaneously, two targeting reticles close toward the centre of the screen, and the player must shoot as each reticle passes over a target.

  Duels strip away the first-person perspective entirely, switching to third-person as the two opponents slowly circle each other. The player must keep their character's hand near his gun without touching it - touching it moves the hand away automatically - while keeping the opponent centred on screen. When the bell rings, the player has a brief window to draw, aim, and fire.

  The multiplayer offered five game types, including Shootout (standard deathmatch), Posse (team deathmatch), and a mode called Wild West Legends, in which one team plays Lawmen and the other plays Outlaws through scenarios drawn from real events: the Battle of Antietam, the Dalton gang's last raid, the Frisco Shootout, the Skeleton Canyon shootout, and the O.K. Corral. Thirteen character classes were available, with five available immediately and eight more unlockable through the game's bounty system. Money earned in multiplayer could upgrade a class across two levels: the first cancelling out a class's weakness, the second amplifying its strength.

• 6. Reception and Sales

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  The PC and PlayStation 3 versions held aggregate scores of 78 out of 100 on Metacritic, drawn from thirty-nine and forty-seven reviews respectively. The Xbox 360 version scored 77 out of 100 from seventy-seven reviews. Most critics found it a clear improvement on the original Call of Juarez.

  GameSpot's Randolph Ramsay scored all three versions 8 out of 10, calling the experience "tense, riveting, and superb-looking" and praising the voice acting as "close to pitch perfect." His conclusion was that the game's narrative and production values made it "an almost cinematic experience." Computer and Video Games' Richard Cobbett gave the PC version 8.4 out of 10, calling it "an outstanding FPS with excellent shooting and terrific production values." PALGN's Michael Kontoudis went further, citing it as "the best videogame Western ever made."

  Common criticisms ran to poor enemy AI, repetitive level design, short single-player length, and - most insistently - the complete absence of a co-op mode. Official Xbox Magazine's Taylor Cocke called that absence "completely inexcusable." Eurogamer's Oli Walsh scored the Xbox 360 version 7 out of 10, noting it was "far too unvaried a shooting gallery to earn an unhesitating recommendation."

  Commercially, the game exceeded the original by a significant margin. In its first four days of North American release alone it moved 24,000 units on Xbox 360 and 20,000 on PlayStation 3. By the end of September 2009 it had sold 900,000 units across all systems, making it one of Ubisoft's best-selling titles for the first half of the fiscal year. Total sales crossed one million units worldwide. Ubisoft named it alongside Anno 1404 as a high point in a year when their overall sales had dropped 52 percent from the previous period.