When I clocked that it would be released on XBLA after watching the trailer my immediate feeling was that this would be like that extra feature in the first Call of Juarez. You did a series of duels that had there own story and were separate from the main story.

Your thought's gringo's.

I am totally bumming right now. i thought this was going to be a full fledged prequel/sequel to the first COJ but i just saw that it was going to be $15. So psyched for another western story/adventure and now its nothing more than mini games? Sucks.

Nice.

Just for the record, this does have a full campaign/story mode. I believe there are 14 levels. It's not an overly long campaign, but based on my play time I'm going to guess it's about 4 or 5 hours long on normal (which is the lowest difficulty level) plus there is a hard difficulty level and an initially locked very hard mode. Every kill in the campaign gets you xp based on how you killed an enemy. For example headshots are worth more then just a normal kill, killing from a range will get you a longshot xpbonus, shooting through an object will get you a penetrating xp bonus and etc. You level up in the game and basically choose from three different skill trees to put in one skill point per level. The skill trees are based on gunslinging (dual wielding pistols), short range focusing on shotguns, and long range focusing on rifles. I believe you can just keep replaying campaign missions and leveling up till you have everything unlocked should you like. The story doesn't seem like anything special, but it seems well acted so far and definitely has it's moments.

There is also an Arcade mode which is similar to the Echoes in Bulletstorm. Basically you wrack up points with more points being awarded for headshots and other fancy kills. The goal is to get through the levels as quickly as possible while comboing up kills. Based on score and time you can get up to 3 stars per arcade level, and arcade has it's own method of picking your weapon style and skills before each mission.

The mini-games that the original post mentions are the duels in the game. Most of the campaign missions end with a dual where you try to keep the enemy in focus to better your aim and your hand positioned to draw quicker while waiting for the opponent to draw first (you can draw first but it's not considered honorable and you'll get less xp/score for it.) There is a Duel game mode where you go through a series of duels up to 15. You have 5 lives total and are scored after each round. It starts out easy but gets pretty tough. I think I got to round 9 my first time through and then got wasted by him all 5 times (thought the last round we actually killed each other).

It actually seems like a pretty good bargain for $15. If you are a fan of more arcade like FPS's then definitely check it out. No multiplayer, but the single player offering can definitely keep you entertained for long enough to justify it's price.

Rock Paper Shotgun's "Wot I Think" was pretty glowing, so it seems worth checking out.