Thumbs Down
Visuals are bland and unappealing. Heavy copy paste on character models. For example in a mission where you must rescue some girls from the cartel you'll save two girls and their 18 clones. Textures are muddy and frequently pop in and the draw distance, particularly on the first level is criminally short.
Controls feel awkward as they have chosen a layout that will not be familiar to any FPS fan, Y reloads, RB cycles weapon (yes cycles) and left on the D-pad is your "bullet time". It's as if the developer purposely used an unconventional setup simply to be different. Aiming is frustrating, the sticks don't seem tuned correctly, you will constantly be overshooting your target as you wrestle with the sticks to point the gun in the direction of an enemy.
Sound design is about as impressive as the visuals. Dialog is often cut short by a syllable at the end of each characters line. Sub titles don't always correspond to what is being said. Enemies only utter a handful of phrases, in fact the written dialog is so lazy that they have different voice actors saying the exact same lines during encounters, and to add one more level of repetitiveness even your team mates will mimic each others words during gun fights. The game also suffers from Kane and Lynch syndrome, I do not believe there is a single sentence in the whole game without the F word in it.
Story. There's a cartel smuggling arms into Mexico and it is up to 3 racially stereotypical cops from different agencies to stop them. I got the feeling that the game is ashamed to show you it's cut scenes and would rather you forget there was even a story to this mess as the reminder that you can press B to skip them never goes away.
Gameplay is formulated into, drive to an area, get out the car. Shoot all the bad guys, move to next area shoot all the bad guys, repeat until door breach segment, maybe shoot some more guys and throw in a covering fire segment where you must move under friendly cover fire to flank the enemy. It is mixed up very slight with a highway fire fight, but beyond that every mission is the same but in a new setting.
The most fun I had playing this game was watching an enemy vehicle drive over a moving 18 wheeler to continue the chase on the highway shoot out level, possibly the funniest glitch I have ever seen.
With todays over saturated FPS market there is no room for a title as visually, audibly and fundamentally flawed as Call of Juarez The Cartel. Point for point it fails on just about every level and is simply not worth your attention.