Clive Barker’s Jericho was one of those under the radar gems at the E3 Expo this past summer. The game garnered a fair amount of surprise attention and for good reason—the concept, which is basically what E3 is all about as far as previews are concerned, was fantastic. You control a secret government team of paranormal gunmen, each with a unique set of powers, through a wild adventure concocted from the mind of horror master Clive Barker.
Thing is, while E3 is great at showing you the crust, it does a terrible job of showing you the meat underneath and that’s where Jericho tends to fall apart. The idea is just as tantalizing despite the mediocre voice acting and less than top shelf graphics. The problem is when you actually sit down to play it.
First off, this is a true console port in the sense that it uses save checkpoints inside each mission meaning you simply can’t save the game when are where you want to; this is Design Law 101 for PC games – we like to save our games as we see fit and not when the developer says it’s time because a specific goal was attained. There are some cases when checkpoints are fine, but in Jericho there are a few exceedingly tough fights that take place several minutes into a mission so you are going to repeat parts of a level multiple times, which simply isn’t any fun.
The fights are tough because your bullets are apparently made of Play-Doh. The enemies in the game take an enormous amount of damage before falling; technically this makes sense as there aren’t a hoard of bad guys in each fight (Painkiller this is not) but some weapons are basically useless which is just bad game design.
Another example of the weak design is the fact that each level places you on a rail and leads you by the nose to the next encounter. Every mission revolves around wandering down a path to the next fight. There’s never an alternative way to reach a battle and rarely a way to outthink or out flank the enemy. It’s basically wander down the path, crouch behind some cover, and shoot like mad for a few minutes, and move onto the next fight.
The game even makes use of the now cliché God of War button press moments where you have to press a button on your gamepad or a directional arrow on your keyboard the second a prompt flashes on screen. How anyone could get any level of fun out of this part of the game remains a mystery and in Jericho you have, literally, half a second to make the right choice or you die. Thankfully you can repeat these sequences over and over without any load times, but it would have been better had they not been in the game at all.
The enemies, like the level design, are painfully monotonous. There simply isn’t very much variety in the creatures that you fight and after a while you feel like you are simply repeating the same encounter over and over again. The only break from the monotony is when you switch from solider to soldier. You have the ability to “teleport” into the body of one of your team members, which is a nifty idea that works pretty well. There’s the big mini-gun guy who also can shoot fire at enemies through a demonic snake, there’s the katana wielding lesbian (seriously), the sniper, the priest/gunman, etc. The power each possesses are pretty cool and is truly the lifeblood of this game, and if there was a better game designed around them it could have been a much, much better experience.
