Clive Barker’s Jericho – Review
A game as painful to play as it is to look at
The story is original (minus the cliche “hard-core marines killing demons to save the world” angle). The theme of going back through hellish-twists on time-periods within the city is pretty awesome in itself, and I like to monster designs, but the whole thing would honestly have been better executed with better voice-actors. Really, the voice acting made the whole game seem almost like a ‘B-movie’. The characters are a real pain in the ass to listen to, to be honest. They seriously got their ‘lines’ from bad action movies. The things they say would make Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ears bleed:
Minigun Carrying Mexican Dude possessed by Fire-Dragon spirit: “Hey Abby, what do you get when you cross a telekinetic lesbian with a brick wall?”
*this is your cue to take control of the telekinetic lesbian sniper chick (no joke) and use your powers to knock down a wall in order to progress*
*you then knock down fore-said wall*
*you wait for Fire-Dragon Mexican Dude to deliver a punch line*
*no punch line*(Do you sense how odd the Jericho team members are yet???)
Jericho SUFFERS in the Artificial Intelligence of all the other characters you are not playing as. You will often find yourself healing all of your party members as they get picked off by enemies because they don’t take cover for shit. It’s like they think they’re in a Rambo movie and they stand out in the open, guns blazing, daring the enemies to kill them. Shit, it might as well be a bad action movie when you pair their ‘invincibility complex’ and the bad one-liners. So, for the majority of the game, you’re spent resurrecting all your dead allies with the only other character who auto-heals: The pistol-slinging priest, whose name I don’t remember, nor care about.
GAME TIP: NEVER EVER PLAY AS THE PRIEST. HE CAN HEAL, AND YOU CAN HEAL. IF YOU PLAY AS HIM, ONLY 1 MEMBER (YOU) CAN HEAL CHARACTERS. IN 10 SECONDS, YOU… WILL… ALL… DIE!
As far as graphics and sound: Graphics were nothing as fantastic say Ratchet and Clank Future:ToD or Bioshock, but they are not ‘last-gen’, either. My experience is that the graphics are around ‘Half-Life 2′ quality, and this is more noticeable on an HDTV. One thing that makes Jericho actually stand out is the enemy designs. Not only are they absolutely horrible to look at, they are equally as facinating.
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