	Clive Barker’s Jericho
	Developer: Mercury Steam Publisher: Codemasters Release Date: Out Now Players: 1	Words By:
If you’re a 360 owner, take a quick look at your games collection. If you’re like me over half of them will be first-person shooters. The others will be racing games. With AAA titles such as Halo 3, Bioshock, Orange Box and CoD4 there’s no reason why you shouldn’t load up on quality shooters. With competition like that Jericho is going to have to throw something different at you. And it does. Over and over and over… The title of the game, Jericho, is the name of the seven-man covert Special Forces squad with a difference – as well as packing mean weaponry everyone has a link with the occult in some way. These range from being able to slow down time to chucking out a fire demon from your hand. You’ve been called to the ancient city of Al-Kali to stop religious fanatics from opening the ‘breach’ and unleashing God’s mistake on the world… The atmosphere is quite gothic, and like a toned-down version of Doom 3 everything is done in darkness, with only a small circle in front of you illuminated by your torch. However the style moves quite a bit towards emo (like The Darkness, which this game borrows quite a bit from), when the characters start shouting and freaking out. One of the characters even cuts herself as an attack - I kid you not. I’m surprised they didn’t have Marilyn Manson playing on a loop in the background, and they kitted out all of Jericho in long black trench coats... The developers really haven’t held back and every corner you turn you’ll find tortured corpses, ruined castles and courtyards and literally rivers of blood and pools of vomit, gore and excrement. The graphics are overall very impressive, the character models are very detailed and there’s some nice explosion and environment effects. So this really ‘aint one for the kids, as the enemies are even more macabre than the environments - hellish crusaders who have cut off their own hands and replaced them with swords attack you alongside a nasty array of demons that look like they came straight out of Silent Hill, including those bloody Nazis! Yes, even Jericho is set in WWII for a part of the game, but luckily is nothing like Call of Duty… With seven members in your squad, all with different weapons and abilities you would think you’d get some dynamic firefights. In fact, this is where game starts to show that it can’t live up to its promises. Although there are many characters and abilities, you’ll quickly find out which ones are useless, such as father Rawlings (who carries two pistols). But if you play as the minigun-wielding Delgado his single pistol is twice as powerful. You’ll find the characters that actually are pretty fun to play, like the sniper who has a mounted grenade launcher and can psychically control bullets to headshot up to three enemies consecutively. Unfortunately the game forces you to split up in places and you’ll have to play as one of the characters that isn’t so well balanced and fight a whole level alone, which is a bit of a problem. There are two things that are not done particularly well in this game, and unfortunately they’re interlinked - the combat and level design. Although the environments are quite beautiful you’ll never be able to access 90% of it as you’ll be herded like cattle through the linear corridor levels that only provide brief entertainment when you have to change to a specific character to open a door, or push some rocks out of the way with telekinesis. Most of the game will be spent fighting wave upon wave of mindless enemies, who keep running straight into your fire and only fighting back when they are within five feet of you. There are some variation, like the mortar-firing behemoths and the walking proximity bombs which you have you kill by shooting what looks like giant spots on their demonic teenage faces. Luckily your squad is just as moronic as the enemy so it evens things out a bit. There are some standard problems like when they won’t follow your (very limited) squad commands, fire blindly at the enemy and not use their abilities properly but then there’s the big one, the problem that pretty much killed the game for me. None of your squad can actually die, so when they go down you can revive them, something like in Gears of War. If you die, control shifts to the next available person until they die, until there are no revived team members to control. Your squad will frequently mimic the enemy AI and run blindly into a crowd of enemies oblivious to the fact that so has most of the team and they are right next to one of those explosive teenagers. This happens very frequently and when you combine it with the rather sparse checkpoint system there is a hell of a lot of repetition. Since you need at least one other person revived for you to continue you will spend most of any major firefight running across the battlefield reviving your idiot teammates who ran into a wave of enemies. After a while you wonder whether this is a combat game or Theme Hospital… The main story isn’t amazingly long, only the checkpoints being so far apart in bastard-hard places make it a long slog to the end. What would have saved this game is online (or even offline) co-op. the dodgy teammate AI would be lessened if you could run through it with at least one mate. Unfortunately after you’ve finished the game there’s really nothing else to do. There’s no multiplayer and you wouldn’t want to play through again anytime soon. Clive Barker’s Jericho isn’t a bad game. It’s tried something new with the squad-based combat system with a twist and put it in a really good setting. It’s just a shame the combat, AI and level design ruin any atmosphere the game manages to create, and the innovations don’t work the way they should.

Best Bits
- Nice graphics
- Great atmosphere
- Nice weapons and abilities to play with
- Loads of gore and gratuitous swearing!

Worst Bits
- Linear level design
- Very basic squad AI
- The voice acting gets old quickly
- No co-op


by: Crazypunk