Supernatural Chills, Sub-Par Thrills
Clive Barker's Jericho is long on action, short on actual fun.
Published: November 4, 2007
It's frustrating, because so much of the game's copy/paste enemy spawning and few actual enemy types could have been avoided with just a little more variety and opening things up a little more. Instead, being funneled through different looking locales, fighting the same monsters (or, perhaps more accurately, retreating to a safe corner and picking them off from a distance while your buddy AI stands out in the open and gets slaughtered, just so you can run back and heal them between waves, die and try it all over again) cheapens what could have been a very different kind of first-person shooter. The fact that the game is actually quite difficult (a move likely meant to be offset by having the ability to heal your squadmates) just means you'll have to fight through the same repetitious sections even more.
From the little gates that can only be opened by Delgado (the heavy gunner) to the piles of rocks that can only be blasted with telekinesis using Black (the sniper) to very specific remote viewing sections using Jones, the game simply holds your hand all the way through until it's obvious that X bridge needs to be knocked down with X character. It's not until the final act of the game where things are mixed up at least a little, and even then it's more frustrating than anything else.
Jericho clearly wants to be a next-gen game. Shaders are used liberally, adding texture and bumps to the ground, walls and corpses strewn about, but rather than looking gory, everything comes off as looking overly slimy, like the world was covered in... well, let's just call it goo. The framerate tends to swing around wildly, too, at times hitting a buttery near-60, but more often descending into choppier parts -- usually during intense firefights when smoothness helps with aiming. A locked 30 frames would have been nice, but sacrificing a few goo-covered stretches of ground to get it up to 60 would have been even nicer.
Luckily, the audio is far more consistent. With the exception of the laughably melodramatic intro narration and a few clichéd lines, the dialogue and characters in the game are voiced quite well. I caught more than a few common growls and screeches from enemies, but the game's sound work does a good job of throwing effects at you from all angles if you have a surround system. Given the sheer clamor of most of the game, it's rare that you'll even be able to appreciate the music, but during the rare moments where things slow down and you're allowed to take in the oft times claustrophobic surroundings, the music can actually create some slightly spooky moments. Sadly, those moments are fleeting at best, because it's only a few seconds before another big firefight breaks out.
Jericho had a lot of potential, and in some ways, like jumping back and forth between squad members it actually does something different. Sadly, all of the game's set-up and backstory are essentially squandered on an over-reliance on the same constantly spawning enemies and too-obvious puzzles. Had the game slowed down just a little and really used the whole "keep you in first-person at all times" to induce a few more scares, it would have been a bit more befitting of the Clive Barker name. Instead, it just feels like a series of weak boos and familiar targets.
