Clive Barkers Jericho

[Family Fry]

Wellllll I will start a first play on the retail game then shall I...

Finished it in 2 big sessions, about 7-8 hours of game, pace is a bit of an odd one feels like you are playing checkpoints at times, its like they have given you 50 levels but that realistically could have been 25 levels with checkpoints in middle.
Scare factor WELLLL I played in dark and with earphones...didn't **** myself once, not that I’m brave just Mr. Barker should be ashamed of the lack of scare factor, enemy designs are really cool as well. Wanted to jump out my skin from the looks, you feel SOOOOOO beefed up with power and with you are a squad who are like a mini army of death, you just don't feel threatened at all, seems like a missed opportunity on that front. Should have split teams up more and made more use of 3-2 man squads rather than 2-3 man squads.
Basically though if you enjoy Quake 4/Unreal/Doom style of frag everything, linear corridor based game you will love it. Graphics aren’t as shiny as they could be bit rough around edges but frame rate is very silky slick and polished, story is a pretty cool idea too, got me involved so much so I had to play through to the very disappointing end, shame all it actually need was an end....
Seems like a lot is told via textural links on loading screen and unlockables/achievements dossiers, fill in the story gaps.
7/10 for me and would agree with some reviews i've seen already.

[DANGEROUS]

Yeah, I've heard this game is pretty lame in terms of offering no challenge, EDGE lambasted it.

That being said- I do love horror themed FPS' and the visuals appeal so if I can find it cheap I will likely indulge.

[Plisken]

i thought this game was absolutely horendous and i'm a fan of clive barker, everything else about it just stinks.

it's tedious beyond belief, the squad AI is crap and gets knocked out every 20 seconds, the loading times are frequent and incredibly long. The squad look like something from a dodgy Quake mod and carry every cliche under the sun, the only decent thing about this game is the enemy designs yet sadly all they do is run at you really fast trying to chop you up.

Worst game i've played all year and one of the first 360 games i've taken back due to it being pure turd.

FEAR is ancient and that was so much better than this, save your money for either FEAR Files or Alone in the Dark/Condemned 2/Alan Wake next year for scares!

[davek22]

I got mine delivered last night for PS3, only paid £25 for it from Gamestation to get PES 08 for £20. After all the negative reviews and comments I was pleasantly surprised by this game. The story is cool, graphics very nice and it plays well enough. Ok its not earth shattering or progressing the genre at all but for a bit of mindless coridoor shooting its cool. Sometimes its nice to play an uncomplicated game with a couple of beers. I had come from a weekend of GRAW2 play though for the second time and it was nice not having to worry about so many variables of the squad movement, position etc. I too would give it a 7, maybe 6....but wouldnt pay full rrp for it

[grant666uk]

I rented this and have to say its not at all bad. I thought some of the character models were very nice. Very slick and gory. Well worth a rental.

[cavalcade]

There aren't many games that begin with a festering flesh wound, and the sound of buzzing flies.

Jericho doesn't either. A moist and insecty bit of flesh certainly does sit behind the usual New Game/Load Game/Configure Controls screen but the impact is lost somewhat from the ridiculous voice over that plays over the opening credits before it.

The man tasked with reading out the intro to Jericho is pretty much doomed from the start because:

1) What he is forced to say is complete tripe
2) He clearly isn't a professional voice over actor, or if he is he should consider a change of career.
3) He sounds like he needs a poo

Through this strained and amateurish babbling our poo straining guide tells the intelligent and progressive *muffled laugh* story that will be backpinning the game Clive "I like videogames, honest" Barker is expecting you to put 8 hours of your precious life into.

This tale is, as you would expect, pitched somewhere between a GCSE English open essay written by a goth, and a bad episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Thankfully, in the first 10 minutes of play during a cinematic sequence, one of the characters summarises the eponymous Jericho group as "basically witches with guns". Though said tongue in cheek, those four words manage to set the scene more effectively than the terrible opening voiceover, and tortuous faux type written backstory exposition forced upon the player during the massive loads.

There are many things wrong with Jericho. Graphically, while passable, it has the same high sheen gore effects of Prey or Doom 3, which look about as realistic as a Cheese String. At times the art direction seems to aspire to something greater, and then an identikit enemy jumps out at you with all the finesse of Castle Wolfenstein. The characters are all taken from the stock school of videogame leads. The women are all barely clad in a few leather strips, and the men have shoulders the width of the M6 near Birmingham. Bad voice acting abounds, bad animation abounds, bad level design abounds and to top it all off it's about as scary as a chicken nugget.

However, the game isn't all bad. Far from it. Riding a wave of ridiculous schlock, somehow it pulls through. It's hideously crippled, and yet it's there, running a marathon dressed in an over-sized bear costume being cheered on by the crowd. Who could fail to love a game that tells you to "aim for the glowing yellow pustules to make the cultists explode"? This is low art gaming. This is B-movie gaming. This is the modern equivalent of finding a hilariously bad shareware game on a PC magazine cover disk, but playing it for hours.

So? Should you buy Jericho? No. Considering the competition, you'd have to be mad. But after playing this at a friends house for about 4 hours I dutifully went out and bought it, before playing for another couple of hours alone. Every one of those 6 hours has left me feeling unsatisfied and vaguely annoyed, and yet I still have a strange urge to play it some more...

I would also like to give a special shout out for the "Special Edition" version which strains the Sales Description act to breaking point with a "collection" of extras so thin you could paper a wall with them. The tin is very nice though. I like tins.