Xbox 360 PS3

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger

ShooterAdventureArcade

Time to beat: about 6.5 hours
Plays offline: Yes

Overview

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is a 2013 Western-themed first-person shooter for PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Switch. Developed by Techland and originally published by Ubisoft, it was released in May 2013 for PlayStation 3, Windows and Xbox 360. The Switch port was released in December 2019. It is the fourth game in the Call of Juarez series, although narratively, it is unrelated to the three previous titles (Call of Juarez, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, and Call of Juarez: The Cartel).

The game tells the story of Silas Greaves, a bounty hunter in the American West during the second half of the 19th century. Telling his story to a group of saloon patrons in 1910, Silas's increasingly grandiose and difficult-to-believe tales find him hunting Roscoe "Rustling Bob" Bryant, as he either teams up with or squares off against Wild West legends such as Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, Newman Haynes Clanton, Johnny Ringo, Curly Bill Brocius, Henry Plummer, John Wesley Hardin, a Chiricahua war party, the Dalton Gang, George Curry, Kid Curry, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Jesse James, and Frank James.

After The Cartel changed the series' setting from the Wild West to the modern-day, Gunslinger returned the series to a western setting. In making the game, the designers were very much trying to redeem the reputation of the Call of Juarez brand after the critically reviled and commercially unsuccessful The Cartel. In returning to the Wild West setting of the first two games in the series, the designers decided to focus on the importance of storytelling in myth-making. Basing the narrative structure on Bastion, they aimed to use the game's unreliable narrator to examine the fine line between fact and fiction in establishing the legends of some of the West's best-known figures.