Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood Hands-On - Early Levels, Shootouts, Dynamite, and Cannons

There aren't too many video games inspired by classic Western films these days, so you can Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood a rarity. This first-person shooter tells the story of two Southern boys who emerge from the American Civil War as hardened desperadoes and are led astray from their original quest to restore their devastated Georgia plantation home by women, gold, and a neat new bullet-time mechanic that we'll go into shortly. We got our hands on the game and had a chance to play through the early part of the single-player story mode. Note: This story may contain minor spoilers.

Bound in Blood tells the story of two brothers, Ray and Thomas McCall, both hotheaded gunslingers who begin the game as soldiers in the Confederate Army fighting in the American Civil War, but who quickly become deserters when they find that their home in Georgia has come under siege by forces from the Union army. In the later parts of the game, you'll actually be able to choose to play each level as either one of the brothers, though you'll start the very first level as the roughneck Ray, who prefers close-quarters combat, blowing things up with dynamite, and kicking down doors. Then you'll play the second level as the softer-spoken Thomas, who's a bit more inclined toward finesse and fast shooting.

The game's first mission is a hectic trench battle in which Confederate soldier Ray must fight his way through the trenches to stop a Union advance. This level is a good demonstration of several of the game's mechanics: cover, two-weapon fighting, stationary weapon emplacements, and concentration mode. In this mission, Ray must patrol the trenches, gunning down with his trusty pistol (or dual pistols) any Union soldiers who manage to breach the lines. You automatically acquire cover by pressing up against walls and leaning over or around the sides to aim at your enemies.

The game helpfully colors your gunsight red when you have an enemy targeted, and considering that you're primarily using pistols, rifles, and shotguns (there were no laser guns in the American Civil War) and fighting against enemy soldiers and desperadoes, your enemies can take a few bullets before they go down, though headshots are instantly lethal. Killing enough enemies fills up a concentration meter that will let you, some time within the next 60 seconds, go into concentration mode, which, for Ray, slows time and lets him drag his gunsight over any nearby enemies, "painting" them as targets. This works out best if you can acquire as many targets as possible while concentrating with Ray, because once concentration mode ends, Ray will automatically fire off a wild flurry of bullets that will bring down any enemies that he sighted.

Throughout this and other levels, you must run through a series of objectives that get checked off as you complete them, such as securing a far-off corner of the trenches by using a mounted cannon to blast Yankee rafts out of the water as they try to cross the river. Finally, at the end of the mission, Ray blows up the bridge over the river by planting charges in clearly marked places on the bridge's supports, and finds that his brother Thomas has miraculously survived the battle. However, the brothers are then ordered to choose between following the order to fall back and defend Atlanta or deserting and defending their home. They make the choice to leave the army and head back to the plantation, at which point your control switches to Thomas, the stealthier of the two.

In the second mission, you play as Thomas, sprinting home with Ray at your side and gunning down Union soldiers guarding the homestead. Unlike Ray, Thomas doesn't use weapons in both hands (so you can't carry dynamite and a pistol at the same time like Ray does). However, Thomas is more of a quick draw whose concentration mode lets you automatically acquire targets, but it limits how many you hit based on how quickly you can repeatedly pull back the hammer of your weapon to fire. He's also the duo's stealth and climbing expert, and can equip a lasso to climb up to hard-to-reach areas; you do this by aiming at a lasso-able fixture to lock on to it, and then you swing by wiggling your control stick or computer mouse. Thomas can also kill enemies silently from cover by using his throwing knives. He does both of these impressive feats in this varied mission, first crouching in tall grass to pick off a handful of enemy soldiers, and then climbing a tree to pick off a Howitzer gunner at range with his rifle.

The later levels in the game include more of the game's Wild West gameplay features, including gun duels, which are zoomed-in battles that focus the camera on your character's hip and let you inch your hand closer to your gun in anticipation of the town bell. Once the bell rings, you must quickly move your character's hand to his gun, at which point he automatically draws it, and then you must aim for your opponent and fire before you get taken out yourself. (The game provides some aiming assistance, but it's not a guaranteed win.) Later, you'll also ride horses (which can be used to trample enemies on foot) and ride a stagecoach along a scripted path to smash up a town, high-tailing it out of there afterward and shooting at bounty hunters who pull up on horses alongside the coach. Clearly, Bound in Blood will offer a lot of variety, and much of it was inspired by classic Western movies. The same can be said of the game's dialogue and cinematic sequences, which have a lot of salty language but seem to do a pretty decent job of connecting the dots between the varied gameplay. Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is scheduled to ship later this year for the PC, the Xbox 360, and the PlayStation 3.