Hey kids, like blood? Wanna bathe in it? Tough, that's what's happening!
After this year's E3, we had some pretty high hopes for Jericho, but we now we realize that we may have set our expectations for this one a bit too high. There's no question that the game's premise promised the kind of horror-packed experience Clive Barker has been known for... we just didn't realize that it would end up being shackled with both slipshod game design and the sort of rambling gore-for-gore's-sake plot that Clive Barker's become known for. With so many triple-A titles looking to devour your dollars this holiday, there's no need to waste time or money anything this blatantly mediocre.
Ammo From the Future
The best aspects of Jericho are the characters, but even those aren't as fleshed-out as we'd have liked. The character models are magnificent, assuming their techno-goth look doesn't turn you off. With leather straps, superfluous buckles and titanium cylinders, the detail in the models is truly inspired. While there aren't that many different kinds of enemies, they are uniformly well-rendered. The unfortunate qualifier with the enemies, however, is that they are consumed by swarms of black flies after you've killed them so you can never get a really good look at them.
Each of Team Jericho's seven members has a personality all their own; the problem is that you only learn the intricacies of a couple of them. For example, Church (the team's blood magician) was raped by her father; Cole (the reality hacker that can stop time) is afraid of the dark and being touched; and Black (the telekinetic sniper) is a lesbian. Unfortunately, that's the most you'll really learn about the team, leaving the other four members in an ambiguous haze of cliched one-liners that don't seem to have any relevance to pasts you know nothing about.
Of the team, Cole was our favorite not just because she could stop time (risking her tenuous grip on reality in order to do so), but also because she can re-supply the entire team with delicious ammunition from the future. Plus, she's a big fan of the divine proportion (or golden ratio) which is a mathematical proportion used in art and architecture, so she provides at least one non-Lovecraft-related reason to check out Wikipedia. This is in contrast to the game's plot, which, like much of Barker's work, cribs from Lovecraft wholesale.
Don't be Frightened
Playing through Jericho, you become desensitized to all of the things that are supposed to scare the crap out of you. There are only so many enemies you can run into with gaping, bloody holes where their naughty bits should be before you begin to bore of them. Oh look, here's another monster wearing some poor sod's entrails as a pull-over hoody...
Unfortunately, the environments do little to increase the terror as they remain predominantly the same from level to level. Because the team is trapped in Al-Khali (an ancient site of atrocity located somewhere in the Middle-East), the events of the game take place in unchanging sandy ruins. The only difference is that you can occasionally enjoy the poorly rendered Clive Barker touches like rivers of blood and feces and skeletal remains draping the walls. It's all so terribly contrived that it's difficult to get into the mood that Jericho is constantly attempting to foist upon you.
This could have been remedied if the enemies had been a bit smarter or inventive, but most of them simply run at you crazily. Consequently, Jericho's gameplay comes off as a decidedly "lather, rinse, repeat" affair where you enter a new area, kill the monsters that spawn and run at you and then move onto the next area and perform the monotonous experience all over again. It's not a terribly surprising formula for games of this type, but we had hoped for something a little more substantial.
Still, for fans of Clive Barker, Jericho could provide some degree of entertainment, and as we stated at the beginning of this review, it's not totally devoid of rewards. At the same time, it's difficult to recommend a game with so many lackluster elements in a world full of Gears of Wars and BioShocks (both of which managed to be scarier than Jericho).
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