YMMV / Call of Juarez: The Cartel

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • One of the levels is set during a shootout in a nightclub, and there are zero consequences for killing civilians other than losing out on an achievement. As Noah Caldwell-Gervais noted, this can be harder to take in the aftermath of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shootings.
  • Several cutscenes and quick time events feature the protagonists outright beating up suspects, including sex workers. During the 2010s, police brutality became seen as a serious issue especially in the United States, with large scale civil unrest in 2020 due to the murder of George Floyd by on duty policemen.
• Sequelitis: Easily seen as the low point of the franchise by many, from both fans and critics, due to a combination of the change to modern-day California, being dishonestly marketed as a New Old West game, being very buggy, and the aforementioned Special Effect Failure, just to name a few. It's also the only game in the series no longer available on Steam.
• Special Effect Failure: Driving segments are clunky and vehicle collisions have no weight; hitting a car head-on will cause the other vehicle to bounce like it was filled with helium. Subtitles are often misspelled or don't match the dialogue. AI pathfinding and scripts are so buggy that the player often has to drop what they're doing to make them proceed, up to and including doing most of the other half of a party-split because the AI decided not to go through a door.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Another reason why the game bombed is because it's just hard to get invested in the game's plot. Not only are the characters bland and uninteresting, with character conflicts being an afterthought, but they're also incredibly unlikable and unsympathetic, with very little character development as the game progresses.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Extra Credits did a lengthy discussion about how the game makes a lot of reactionary assumptions about Mexico, the Drug War, and other concepts. Noah Caldwell-Gervais, on the other hand, theorizes that the game has, all along, been based not on actual real world and history, but on the outside perception — Techland is a Polish developer, mind you — of the warped reactionary rhetoric within the United States itself.

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