Anything with the name Clive Barker is guaranteed to scare the junk out of you right? I mean he is the master of horror, his name instantly means “do not play at night alone in your basement”. Anyone familiar with Mr. Barker’s type of horror should know not to expect a Resident Evil type game; this is not The Ring on the Xbox 360. The newest game to include Clive Barkers name in the title is Codemaster’s shooter, Jericho and it is defiantly a scary game, just not in the way many gamers may expect. The type of fright throughout Clive Barker’s Jericho is more reminiscent of an old school Wes Craven picture. The blood and freakiness is there but those jump out of your seat scares are not. While playing the game I was on edge, waiting for that major scary moment but it never came, then after it was over I figured out that I had been scared the whole time. The environments, storyline, and characters of Jericho are scary, freaky to be more precise. Every setting in the game is designed to make gamers be on edge, looking in each nook and cranny to see what ungodly tidbits the developers have hidden in the game. Just looking at the cover of Jericho will undoubtedly freak some small children out; it should because this game was never designed for them. For all the horror fans out there though Jericho is a quality title that is very deserving of it’s M rating.
The basic storyline of Jericho is not that revolutionary, although there are some features that very much are. A crack team of soldiers, each of who possess some sort of supernatural ability, is placed together to rid the world of evil forces. One such evil force is out to steal the ultimate power, let’s call it “the firstborn”. If by some chance he is able to attain this firstborn he will be unstoppable and world destruction will certainly ensue. Thankfully the Jericho team is up to the challenge and in the first act they set out to take care of business. Once the first level ends gamers will see that Clive did not want anyone to feel safe, this game is full of surprises. Because it is up to the Jericho squad to destroy the firstborn before the bad guy gets his grubby little hands on it they must go to whatever lengths needed to do so. Completing this feat will take the soldiers through multiple different time periods and locations, each one featuring all new enemies and difficulties.
Everyone from the entire Nazi army to Roman soldiers will attempt to get in the way, why they care about the future outcome of the world is unknown but whatever. The story in Jericho is very involved; there are a bunch of in-game movies to help explain it to the player. Each of these movies looks great but there are many times where it totally pulls you out of the experience and breaks up the action. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing really depends on the preference of the player. Still there is more than enough shooting in Jericho to fill up any videogame from this genre available today. The game controls much like any other first-person shooter, except for one small (see huge) difference. Because Clive Barker decided that the main character gets whacked in the first few levels the developers had to come up with a way to continue the story, less the single-player campaign be one hour long. Thanks to the magic of the Jericho team the main character can now instantly switch between team-members with the touch of a button.
I was a tad worried about this when I first heard about it because of the control complications but the developers made it very simple to do. Each character has their own unique strengths and weaknesses. For example one character is a sniper, which gives the player the ability to take out bad guys from far away with one single shot; the downside is that the character is weak and can die very easily. Other examples of characters are double pistols, a mini-gun, and one who wields a sword in one hand and a gun in the other. Some of the team members also have the ability to perform supernatural attacks/defenses (slowing down time, blood tentacles, summoning monsters, opening doors, etc.) that even adds more variability to the gameplay. Because it is meant to be an action game as long as one member of your team is alive you can continue playing, just run up and tap one of the face buttons and your fallen comrade will come back to life ready to fight some more. This unique feature of instantaneous character switching and their different abilities/weapons is what really draws Jericho out from the crowd and gives gamers a reason to pick it up in the over crowded FPS market.
There are different spots throughout the game where the teams will separate and only certain soldiers will be available, at other points you must use specific soldiers to defeat bosses or solve a puzzle. This nice variability brings Jericho above your average shooter and into the RPG/Action/FPS genre. If it were not for these awesome gameplay features I would be stressed to recommend Jericho based on the gameplay alone. No matter what your preference there is a character combination available to you; this is something I have never seen from a shooter before. The game’s settings take place in all different time periods and they all include enough blood to fill an Olympic size swimming pool. There are also skulls, crosses, pentagrams, and other props from every horror movie imaginable throughout Jericho; obviously to show the influence of Clive Barker. While the story may not be Oscar worthy it is definitely up there with the better shooters out there and it is nice to see such effort put into a genre that is usually pretty plain story wise.
