Call of Juarez: Gunslinger Review — A Great Story Wrapped Around a Good Shooter

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger opens in a saloon in Abilene, Kansas, in 1910, and it never quite leaves. An aging bounty hunter named Silas Greaves sits down with a drink and starts talking, and the game you play is the story he tells. That framing is the whole trick, and it is a good one. Techland built a first-person shooter where the level can change because the man narrating it got caught in a lie. The result is the fourth Call of Juarez game and the only one worth remembering.

Trailer, via Ubisoft.

A Saloon in Abilene, 1910

The audience matters as much as the teller. Jack is sarcastic. Steve is an old-timer. Molly tends bar, Dwight is a teenager, and Ben runs the place. They listen, they push back, and when Silas exaggerates, they say so. The game treats that skepticism as a mechanic rather than a cutscene.

Silas is an unreliable narrator, and Gunslinger establishes it fast. When his listeners challenge an inconsistency, he revises. The world revises with him. A shootout he admits never happened gets literally rewound so he can tell it differently. An Apache war party appears and vanishes. A whole section of a level turns out to be something that did not occur. A character shows up with no explanation, so Silas backfills the context and the scene reshapes around the fix.

That is the best idea in the game, and it is not decoration. Most shooters ask you to accept the world as given. Gunslinger asks you to accept that the world is being made up in front of you, badly, by a man with a reason to lie.

Silas Greaves and the Men He Claims to Have Killed

The campaign starts in the New Mexico Territory in December 1880, during the Lincoln County War. Silas rides with the Regulators, led by Billy the Kid, and he is hunting Roscoe “Rustling Bob” Bryant, who rides with the John Kinney Gang. Pat Garrett’s posse attacks their hideout. Billy and Silas are arrested, jailed in Lincoln, and sentenced to hang. Four months later Billy engineers a jailbreak and both men escape.

From there the game becomes a tour of the Old West’s most famous names, filtered through a man who may or may not have met any of them:

• Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett in the Lincoln County War
• Newman Haynes Clanton, killed in Guadalupe Canyon
• Curly Bill Brocius, killed at Iron Springs
• Johnny Ringo, tracked down months later
• Henry Plummer, former sheriff of Bannack, Montana
• John Wesley Hardin, arrested in Abilene
• Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Jesse James and Frank James

The list is long on purpose. Silas crosses paths with a Chiricahua war party, the Dalton Gang, George Curry and Kid Curry. He takes a job from the Rurales in Mexico to hunt the Cochise County Cowboys. He kills Clanton, then Brocius, then Ringo, and after he is well paid for those deaths he works out how much money is in bounty hunting.

Underneath all of it runs a personal quest for vengeance that has driven him across the West for decades. Where that quest ends is the heart of the story, and the game is smart enough to keep it there.

Six-Shooters, Sawed-Offs, and a Cave That Builds Itself

Gunslinger is a first-person shooter, and unlike earlier Call of Juarez games it gives you one player character: Silas. Each level runs a series of primary objectives you complete in order as you move through the map.

The arsenal is period-correct and broad. Six-shooters, quickshooters, rangers, shotguns, sawed-off shotguns, rifles, sawed-off rifles, and dynamite. More powerful weapons unlock as you go.

The unreliable-narrator hook does real work in the levels themselves. Silas gets trapped in a cave until he mentions a way out, and the way out forms in front of you. The weather changes several times in one level as he revises what time of year it was. One stretch is played three times with major differences, because a different character is telling that part. A group of Pinkertons appears and immediately disappears. One level opens with Silas on a train and no explanation of how he got there.

Not every one of those gags lands. Some read as the designers showing off a trick they liked too much. But the cave and the triple-playthrough section are the kind of thing almost no shooter of this era attempted.

The Release Timeline

The original release came in May 2013, and the Switch port followed in December 2019. Here is the running order:

Thirteen years on from that launch, the story holds up. It was never the part that aged.

Why the Western Came Back

Gunslinger exists because the series needed rescuing. Call of Juarez: The Cartel had moved the franchise from the Wild West to the modern day, and it was critically reviled and commercially unsuccessful. Techland’s designers were openly trying to redeem the Call of Juarez brand.

So they went back. Gunslinger returns to the western setting of the first two games, and it is narratively unrelated to the three titles before it — Call of Juarez, Bound in Blood, and The Cartel. You do not need to have played any of them.

That decision is the reason this game works. The Cartel’s problem was not that it was modern. It was that it had no reason to exist inside this series. Gunslinger has one: a man in a bar in 1910, telling stories that keep growing, to listeners who keep catching him.

The Verdict on Call of Juarez: Gunslinger

Here is what matters and what does not. The gunplay is solid and unremarkable. Six-shooters and sawed-offs handle the way you expect, the objectives are linear, and the campaign is single-player only. If you came for a shooter, you will get a competent one and no more.

What you will remember is the frame. The saloon, the listeners, the rewinding, the cave that builds itself because Silas finally thought of a way out. Gunslinger understands something most western games miss: the West people actually know is a story someone told, and the telling is more interesting than the facts.

The exaggeration is the point, not a flaw. Every legend Silas name-drops — Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, the Daltons — arrives already half-myth, and the game lets him muddy the water further. That is a sharper idea than the shooting deserves.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is not a great shooter. It is a great piece of storytelling wrapped around a good one, and the storytelling is what you will still be thinking about after the credits. Techland set out to repair a damaged brand and instead made the best game in the series.

Call of Juarez Gunslinger · first-person shooter · game review · Techland · unreliable narrator · western games