I still don’t know what to make of Techland’s Call of Juarez: The Cartel, and these screenshots don’t exactly help. A lot of these are from the game’s multiplayer, which has Deathmatch and other modes that aren’t revealed yet — although you can see some “challenge” stuff going on.
The main game positions drug cartels as the new outlaws to warrant that Call of Juarez name. You can play as one of three characters, who will each have their own story and ending, across a 15-mission campaign mode. Either do that solo, or as a team of up to three players in co-op. The missions themselves will include things like witness protection, car chases, interrogations, and undercover shenanigans.
The characters are an LAPD cop, a DEA agent and a gang-affiliated street-kid-turned-FBI-agent, so you won’t be playing as cartel members or glorifying cartel violence yourself. Still, it’s such a departure from the previous two Call of Juarez games that brought us most of our Western gaming fix before Red Dead Redemption raised the bar on that.
I’m wondering how this one will turn out. Hopefully it won’t just be a mix of missions with some multiplayer thrown in. We’ll be able to see for ourselves on July 19, 2011, when the game hits PS3, Xbox 360 and PC in North America.
