Clive Barker’s Jericho (Demo)

Articles

By Possum Man, May 21st, 2008

Oh dear God. This game really doesn’t deserve it’s own article, but I decided that the review would be large enough to give it one anyway.

There’s really not much more to add to Yahtzee’s thorough raping of this game in his review of Clive Barker’s Jericho.

I’ll give you a quick run down of the basics though, just so I have something to talk about.

You basically control a team of 7 retarded and obnoxious twats who are members of, and I quote: “An elite military team who specialises in the paranormal.” So they’re a bit like the F.E.A.R. team only less under-funded and without a guy who can slow down time and nail enemies to walls.

The story is apparently atrocious but fortunately I couldn’t experience any of it because the demo instantly thrust me into brown castle number one and gave me no explanation as to why I was fighting un-dead gladiators. 0.o

In this particular section of the game I was only controlling three members of the team, thank God. For some reason you have the ability to switch between your team members, which takes more time than I’d like it to and when you’re finally seeing through their eyes all they were looking at was a wall. The first character I started as was a female with a reasonable sized…gun. “Ok”, I thought, “I’ve got some kind of assault rifle here.” Oh how wrong I was. It turned out I was armed with a sniper rifle that had an under-slung grenade launcher.

“Wait a minute, we’re inside a building, a sniper rifle will be totally useless” I thought to myself. It was. I could have got more use out of a soggy ice-cream cone. Anyway, after figuring out the controls to switch characters, I chose the guy with the mini-gun. Memories of Team Fortress 2 flooded my mind as I walked through brown corridors hosing the un-dead with hundreds of round a minute. That is until I was inexplicably killed by a fire-ball that was apparently hurled by a set of stairs.

The first person camera is terrible, it’s constant bobbing means that half your shots go wide and the other half hit your team-mates who seem to always be two feet away from the enemies. Also, when you get hurt your screen gets covered with blood, dust, muck and fire for no apparent reason. It’s just an infuriating distraction that will most likely get you killed faster as you run blindly about looking for cover. The lack of any kind of health indicator doesn’t help this situation at all, it just makes it all the more frustrating.

Overall, this was an atrocious game. I can’t recommend it, I can’t even give it a score (for what little that means anyway). My advice, stay away from it. It has AIDs.

P.M.