Clive Barker's Jericho

Jericho is definitely a case of inventive design married all-too-unhappily to old school thinking, and the result is a game that is almost fatally broken.

With no replay value of any kind and no cooperative or multiplayer action at all, Jericho is practically begging me to tell my readers that this game is only worth a rental.

Jericho is not a bad game it’s just one that lost its way slightly during development. The ability to jump into other team members bodies and harness their powers is a good idea let down slightly by poor implementation and a claustrophobic level design.

Not nasty enough and not scary at all. [Dec 2007, p.92]

With its unique squad-based focus and the huge combat variety on offer, it breaks plenty of new ground for the genre - and were it not for a few rough edges would have been bordering on essential.

Ultimately, considering the overwhelming strength of recent FPS arrivals, Clive Barker's Jericho is likely to sink into the gaming Abyss with God's diabolical Firstborn... never to be seen again.

Jericho is clever enough for a good time with a FPS, however as anything else Jericho should trade in this blood gushing festival of carnage for jelly donuts.

Poor level design poisons Jericho's awesome but unrealized potential.

The game combines a tired formula of spawning wave after wave of mindless enemies in the same room with you with the clumsily-executed 'squad-based' combat, which is enough to stave off any fan of the genre aside from stout Barker fans in it for the intriguing but sadly unrealised plot.

Clive Barker’s Jericho will likely appeal to a certain group of gamers just from the implied pedigree, but the truth is that the uninspired gameplay, linear levels, horrid AI, and merely average presentation values keep this game from ever gripping you like any of Clive’s movies.

If the developers had given this game another six to eight months in development, the game could have been a solid shooter; unfortunately it ends up just being an average one.

Overall, Clive Barker's Jericho is somewhat of a disappointment. I was hoping for another great horror game just in time for the Halloween season but this was not the case as the storyline and character design is not enough to save this game which is flawed on many different levels.

Jericho is a title with great ideas. The squad-switching mechanic works very well, the various magic abilities are mostly sound and the plot is potentially very interesting. However, great ideas don't make up for shoddy execution, and Jericho just isn't a $60 game. It's far too short and easy, and the complete lack of any post-game content is almost unforgivable.

If broken gameplay mechanics and community college acting didn’t weigh down the game, it might actually be worthwhile.

Jericho works really hard to build up a tense and involving game environment, but then can’t quite deliver the game to match. Confusing at the points where it needs to be clear and, only sporadically showing glimpses of what should have been, Jericho is a perfectly reasonable experience, but hardly essential.

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.

Jericho doesn't really bring anything new to the gaming world.

On one hand it's a near-broken video game, packed full of so many gaming no-nos that it ought never to be spoken about again, but on the other it's original, atmospheric and sickeningly good fun.

Beneath the mangled exterior of clumsy control methods and weak characterisation there is a great idea here and had the game been given a few months longer in development it could have had these annoyances ironed out.

In Jericho there was the potential for an atmospheric game packed with terror, wonder and invention. Unfortunately, all we get is a very standard shooter with a number of annoying failings, sitting atop an undoubtedly original premise.

Jericho is way too ambitious and it hurts on every side. While not broken, it’s poorly designed and dull, from spawning enemies making the tactical play irrelevant, to a horror story that, despite its charm and intricacies, just isn’t scary. Jericho may be art, but not all art is good.

Instead of getting caught up in the struggle against a demonic force that threatens the continued existence of your race, you're left with tacked-on squad elements, poor friendly and enemy AI, repetitive encounters, and unabashedly linear levels. Jericho has a few memorable moments, but they're not worth the cash.

Clive Barker's Jericho is the type of game that would have made an impact a decade ago. Its onslaught of enemies is far more reminiscent of old-school shooters like Quake, and if that's your bag then you should be able to at least marginally enjoy what Jericho brings to the table.

The sheer number of things that had to go wrong to keep Clive Barker’s Jericho from being a raging success is almost unbelievable, because when it comes right down to it, this game had the makings of a real hit. The fact that the credits roll at the exact same moment you finally find yourself on the edge of your seat cements the overall feeling of incompleteness the game gives off from the beginning.

Publisher Codemasters didn't complement Barker's original story with an enjoyable video game.

The game's failure to monopolise on its squad dynamic relegates it to a shooter-by-numbers, and its appeal is then further undercut by the fact that, while Barker clearly has a sense for the grotesque, it is the only note that Jericho plays. [Dec 2007, p.91]

Clive Barker's Jericho is a mish-mash of great concepts and stupid design choices.

A story that took you into twisted, deranged, decrepit worlds that just yearned for some fantastic art direction and varied, interesting level design - you didn’t get any.