Military Video Games, computer games, games, gaming - Military Times

Go east, young man

There should be something downright, well, shady, about using the Bible for cover.

Yet here we are — pistol in one hand, Good Book in the other — reading Scripture to distract our enemies long enough to arrange a meeting for them with the man upstairs.

In “Call of Juarez,” turning the other cheek will get you shot in the other side of the face.

An interesting take on the first-person shooter genre, “Juarez” rips off just about every cowboy flick ever made, creating a campy spaghetti western that comes off as “Deadwood” meets “Shanghai Noon.” Whether this was the intended result is anyone’s guess, but either way, goofball is what you get.

In single-player mode, you alternate between two characters, both classic stereotypes straight from the pages of a bad novel. As the half-Mexican drifter Billy Candle, you’ll sneak, steal and snipe to get by, all while trying to prove that you didn’t murder your mother and stepfather. As Reverend Ray, a gunslinger-turned-preacher-turned-gunslinging preacher, you’ll live out the crazy notion that God himself has selected you to deliver vengeance to the heathens of the Old West.

Throw in a side story about the “Call of Juarez,” the generally fruitless search for a lost Aztec treasure, and that’s the game.

On the surface, “Juarez” should be pretty good. All of the pieces necessary for a proper western story are in place — horses, Indians, saloon girls, quick-draw battles. Unfortunately, “Juarez” never quite reaches its potential.

Blame it mostly on poor control design. The controls aren’t intuitive and mostly leave the player wondering “Umm, now what?” Billy is supposedly a master bullwhip artist, yet swinging and climbing are unmanageable and usually leave Billy lying dead on the ground. Reverend Ray is supposedly a veteran gunslinger, but his slow-motion “concentration” mode routinely leaves the player exposed and outgunned.

What’s worse, the designers knew this before they released the game. After each death, a gaming tip flashes, offering advice on how to overcome the mechanics. Hey, thanks for nothing.

Even if you could overlook such flaws, the plot bounces around so often that it’s hard to invest in either character. Plus, Billy’s a wuss and Ray’s just creepy. We couldn’t even make full use of the Bible-pistol combo because reading Scripture to a man you’re about to shoot in the face is just unsettling.

To its credit, the game is rendered beautifully. When the angry mob set the jail on fire with us in it, hoping to smoke us out, we experienced a brief sense of panic as we fumbled and bumbled with the shoddy controls while trying to escape the flames.

If this were the real Old West, we would have taken “Juarez” out back and shot it, to put it out of its misery.

Call of Juarez. PC ($49.99), Xbox 360 ($59.99). Rated “M for Mature” for blood, lust and blood lust, plus disturbing misuse of religious artifacts, coarse language, racist remarks and implied rape. Not for the kids.