Call of juarez is a VERY good western FPS game, but is plagued by some annoying aspects.

You play as either billy, a young native american who set out to find the legendary gold of juarez, who is now on the run from the law, after his mother was murdered and he was found at the crime scene. Or his step-brother, ray. A preacher for a town called hope, except pretty much everyone there is a no-gooder.

The story unvolves through ingame cutscenes, and short texts read by either character before the level begins, and it's about ray chasing down billy and trying to bring him to justice for his mothers murder, while billy's on the run trying to find the man who killed his mother.

Like i said, the game is plagued by some annoying aspects, one which happens to be billy's gameplay focus.. stealth. Now, i'm all for stealth in videogames, as long as it's done well.. but unfortunately, it isn't. The enemies will go from point A, to point B, and sometimes a C. And you'll obviously have to creep past them, but it's a lot easier said than done. They seem to have eyes in the back of their head, can hear you from a near mile off, and seem to turn around almost as soon as you start walking, but, it's okay for the most part.

The OTHER annoying aspect, would be the games other main focus, platforming. Platforming in FPS games has always been at the VERY deep end, mainly cause it's never been easy to judge your jumps (Mirrors edge proved me wrong). And CoJ does nothing to help this, infact. The platforming in CoJ some of the worst i've seen, you have to make jumps, alot. Precision jumps. Only problem is, sometimes when you land on "X" object, you'll.. be thrusted forward, or slip backwards, fall and either die, or be forced to repeat the process. Even if you judge the jump PERFECTLY you can still muck up, i have no idea why this happens, but it's EXTREMELY frustrating.

Now we have the bad aspects out of the way, lets talk about the good. Ray's levels, are all about old fashioned western shooting, which is essentially what the game SHOULD have been. All you do, is go from point A, to point B, shooting every single badguy that dares look at you wrong, now ray doesn't have a health meter, like billy does. He has a prayer book (since he's a preast) and when your low on health, you can call for a prayer, and it heals you up a bit, weird addition.. but it's okay. I can only find one annoying aspect with ray, the game developers for.. whatever reason decided to make ray's weapons rust, ending them up exploding. Which is.. okay for a realistic game, but it's frustrating as anything, when your in a BIG Gunfight, and your revolver just randomly explodes, worrying if your going to pull through.

The game looks GORGEOUS, even for a few year old game, the texture work and lighting is VERY well done. Just, bit of a problem is that it isn't optimized too well, the X360 version runs smooth and looks great, but the PC version.. not so much.

Well, this about sums it up really, CoJ is a VERY good western game, definitely worth a purchase seems it's going cheap by now. But, if the game had a little more polish, and they ironed out the flaws, it could of been so SO much better.