Gamer Shelf

It's pretty fascinating how the Western, a truly American idea and mythos, can be so handily crafted by non-Americans. Besides hometown creators like John Ford and Cormac McCarthy, you also have great Westerns from foreigners like Italy's Sergio Leone and Ireland's Garth Ennis. So I find myself pleasantly surprised at how decent a job Polish developer Techland did in creating Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. While it doesn't reach the status of a great Western, it's still a marked improvement over its mediocre predecessor (I likely would have given Call of Juarez a C+).

The log line for Bound in Blood would be "a Polish Call of Duty with cowboy hats." Single-player consists of 15 linear-mission stories that focuses on the McCall brothers, Ray and Thomas; two Civil War badasses who desert their unit and get mixed up in shenanigans with Confederate loyalists, bandits, lawmen, Apaches, and Mexicans. Being a prequel, you don't technically need to have played the first COJ to understand what's going on. In fact, those who do remember COJ's plot will encounter a mix of "a-ha!" moments (such as insight into what kind of ornery badass Ray was before he became a Bible-thumping brute), and some baffling "wait, that doesn't mesh" moments (Thomas is much less of an asshole in this game than in the original).