Clive Barker's Jericho

Remember Clive Barker's Undying? That game was great. Dripping with atmosphere, sufficiently twisted story, and a truly interesting take on the FPS genre.

I love that game.

That brings us to Clive Barker's Jericho. Like most people, I just assumed that a horror FPS with heavy involvement from Barker (even more than Undying) would blow me away again. I couldn't have been more wrong.

The game follows the exploits of the "Jericho Squad", a group of top secret super-soldiers, each with their own unique psychic ability, as they try to stop the coming apocalypse in, of all places, the middle east. Not exactly what I expected from Barker, but interesting none-the-less. You start by playing the team leader in what amounts to an overly-long training level.

The game starts in an open area outside of a temple as you and the Jericho team are slowly herded towards the temple entrance. The setting is interesting and appropriately chaotic. Then you enter the temple...

The first thing I noticed after heading inside was how incredibly dark this game is. So dark, in fact, that I spent a good 10 minutes running into walls and getting turned around, even with my flashlight on.

Like any well-versed gamer, I immediately went to my options menu to adjust the brightness scale. Which brings me to my first major complaint, there should never be a game that is set in primarily dark environments that does not have a brightness adjustment. That is just laziness on the part of the developer. I expect to have some complaints about most games I play, though, so I set my annoyances on the back burner and kept playing.

At the end of the "training" level, the main character dies. This leaves the player with the rest of the squad to control. You can do this by jumping in between the bodies of all the different team members. This, in itself, is a cool idea, but requires solid mechanics and execution. Jericho, unfortunately, has neither.

Each member of the Jericho squad is equipped with a different weapon and psychic power. So when you are switching characters what you are really doing is switching weapons. The major problem with this is that the menu you access to see who you are switching to only has the character's last name.

No weapon list, no psychic ability list, no current health, nothing.

This causes endless problems. I often switch to the wrong character because I can't remember which character has which ability or weapon. The problem is compounded by the fact that some objectives REQUIRE you to use certain characters. On top of all this bouncing around nonsense, there has been several times I jumped into a character only to find I am standing at the wrong end of a Gatling gun or flamethrower, dying less than a second later.

Which segues nicely into character lives. Essentially, every team member has unlimited lives as long as one team member remains alive. All team members can revive other team members, which is nice. What is NOT nice is that the button you use to revive a team member is also the button you use to jump to another character. This results in the player jamming on the button revive the character, most often in the heat of battle, then jumping into that character as soon as he is revived. If you take a moment to consider the fact that the previously-downed character became that way because of his poor position in relation to his enemies you can see where this would be a problem. You essentially revive a character and jump into him with just enough time to see that character killed immediately, often losing the character doing the reviving in the process. That is just incredibly poor design.

Jericho isn't all bad though. The story is actually quite interesting, if you can wade through the gameplay, and the enemies are pretty cool, even though it is near impossible to see their mostly black bodies in the ever-present darkness.

I'm going to finish this game, mostly because I am a huge Clive Barker fan and I want to see how the story plays out. For the rest of you, I suggest skipping Jericho and picking up Undying. You will pay 1/3 as much for it and get 3x the gaming experience.

THINGS TO LEARN FROM CLIVE BARKER'S JERICHO
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1. If you are going to make a game that is oppressively dark, make sure to add a brightness setting in the game's options.

2. Giving enough info to the player so he can make educated decisions is key. Failure to do so can turn a decent game into a forgettable one.

3. Making a button multi-functional is fine, but not when it causes the player to do actions OTHER than what he is trying to do.