Clive Barker's Jericho Review - PS3

5

Gameplay: 6
Graphics: 4
Audio: 5
Innovation: 7

After the success of games like BioShock and The Darkness, Clive Barker’s Jericho seemed like a worthwhile investment for Codemasters.  Clive Barker is renowned for his horror novels, and how hard is it to whip up a fresh horror FPS if you have a best-selling author lay out the story for you?  The fact of the matter is that movie-to-game conversions rarely work, so the chances of a book-to-game convert being a hit seem relatively slim, yet Jericho provides us with some innovative gameplay options and some interesting squad-based action to boot.

Gameplay

Down to the basics, Jericho is a fairly simple concept for a video game.  There’s no multiplayer, and the campaign is as linear as games get.  The only factor that separates Jericho from other ordinary FPS games is the story, and luckily the author happens to be a great storyteller.  Unluckily though, the controls feel extremely awkward and slow-moving, and there is very little functionality when it comes to interacting with your surroundings.  Zombie creatures emerge out of the ground leaving no remnants of a hole behind them, and you’re often faced with what seems like endless waves of slow-moving bad guys that have a ton of health and then explode when they die.  Albeit this is at the start of the game, but you still have to play through the start to get to the end, right?

What saves Jericho from the depths of failure is the amount of on-screen action in the heat of battle.  There’s fire, souls flying around, your “Jericho team”, and not to mention the enemies.  The horror doesn’t seem to be there though.  It’s almost as if you’re expecting some random enemy to jump out at you, and then when it happens there’s next to no fear factor.  The other great part about Jericho is the ability to change between each squad member to take control of them.  You’ll have to master each character’s special abilities and be able to use them when required, as they’re fairly useless at doing things by themselves.  Changing characters is as easy as a couple of pushes of the d-pad and then the camera shoots off to the character you selected, not unlike Battlefield 2: Modern Combat’s singleplayer.

So there are a couple of reasons to play Jericho, but there are also quite a few reasons not to.  When you die, you fall to the ground and the screen goes all cracked and red as if you’re dying.  Your team mates can bring you back to life, but 70% of the time they’re too busy yakking to each other.  When they fall in combat though, you don’t hear the end of it until you’ve revived them.  This takes away from the gameplay a fair bit as it almost seems unrealistic and quite silly the way your team mate chooses to take point by charging an enemy (continued next page)