Clive Barker's Jericho
October 31,2007 -

Right now, the game market makes it incredibly tough for underdog first-person shooters to establish themselves. With so many big hitters currently on the market and so many more on the horizon, a game of this genre needs to hit pretty hard in all the right places – interesting storyline, tight audiovisuals, solid gameplay, and so forth – just to pay the price of entry. Clive Barker’s Jericho is lamentable in that it simultaneously presents fresh ideas and nails some fundamentals, and then nosedives in the most ignorant ways. For every stroke of genius, a boneheaded design element counters and nullifies it. By the time it’s all said and done, the bad stuff stands out most, decisively rendering the good stuff irrelevant.

We should start by getting one crucial misnomer cleared up right away. In spite of its association with famed horror author Clive Barker, Jericho is far from scary. It can be a little taut and more than slightly disturbing on occasion, but the game offers far too many crutches for it to meet true horror game criteria. For one thing, it’s hard to get really anxious about things that go bump in the night when you’ve got six heavily-armed, highly trained, ‘tude-filled soldiers standing shoulder-to-shoulder with you virtually every step of the way. Add to this the fact that one of the Jericho members, named Cole, has the power to “download” more ammo any time supplies run short, as well as the fact that you can revive every member of your squad as often as they need it, and there’s just no way for the gloomy, gothic atmosphere to really sink in. A few scenarios in which you plod around solo let the tension mount a smidge, but those sequences are largely uneventful, and you always reunite with your squad well before solitude gets your heart thumping. If you’re looking for the gut-wrenching thrills of a good gaming-induced scare, you need to look elsewhere.

Jericho lives up to the other half of its description well enough, though, providing handfuls of satisfactory first-person shooting for a solid eight to ten hours. Much of its success here stems from the ability to switch between the different Jericho members on the fly. Each of them packs a unique weapon load-out that makes them either more or less effective against different enemies. In addition, each member commands their own unique magical abilities. One such ability is Black’s “Ghost Bullet,” an offensive power that gives you limited control over the trajectory of a speeding bullet, allowing you to blow holes through as many as three enemy heads with a single shot. Pretty rad, right? The character abilities actually help give the game its identity – without them, Jericho would feel utterly derivative.

Instead of being derivative, it’s monotonous, not to mention unfairly difficult. The uninspired level designs are all to blame. You basically travel from one cramped room to another through a series of narrow, winding corridors that carve out the one and only path leading from the beginning of the game to the end. Enemies usually materialize out of the ground by three or so at a time, then amble towards you as fast as they can. The majority of enemies use long, rusty blades to attack you up close, while others use guns and spears for distanced attacks. Under the command of the game’s AI, the Jericho are total imbeciles, often standing flat-footed and getting beat down by the most basic goons. Other times, the game is just downright cheap, leading you to claustrophobic areas where flame-throwing monsters stand sentinel. With very few cover options available, the Jericho squad has little recourse and gets roasted again and again. Eventually the idea of just temporarily ignoring your downed squad and killing everything yourself will cross your mind. You’ll try it, and then quickly realize that while they don’t do as much killing as they could, the Jericho at least serve as good distractions, so you pretty much have to keep them standing to have a prayer. In most skirmishes, you’ll spend as much time trying to revive the good guys as you spend trying to kill the bad ones.

Then there’s the problem of the individual character powers being shoehorned where they absolutely don’t belong, taking the game from monotonous and cheap to just plain ignorant. One of the most common “puzzles” in the game involves utilizing the character Abigail Black’s telekinesis to move obstacles out of your party’s path. That’s fine by itself, until you get done and realize the impediment was something lame, like a plank of wood that any character could have nudged over with a finger. Later scenarios force you to select Delgado, move to a heavy iron gate and make him lift it out of the way. Worse still, the game literally walks you through these scenarios every time they pop up: “select this character. Move right here. Push this button.” Lame.

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