Clive Barker’s Jericho

I was expecting a lot from this game, I’ve always liked Clive Barker’s horror (not so much the odd S&M aspect though) and I was happy to see that Codemasters (publisher of Overlord, another great game) was involved. The first hint I should have taken was if was also for consoles, and FPS’s on a console are almost always watered down. I know thats a little general, and negative and I shouldn’t say things like that but smaller titles ( not something like Bioshock or Half Life 2 ) tend to take less risks, and a big risk is to make a complicated FPS with a decent story.

The plot sounded interesting, but there was VERY little dialogue to help string it along. The only filler you get is when you unlock an extra, but silly things like a character bio should not be an extra, it should be seamlessly integrated into the story itself. And there was a lot of potential too. The bad guys themselves were very cool, and it would have been nice to get more interaction between the characters and the bosses. The main characters you play were all kind of bland Hollywood caricatures. They had really cheesy lines, repeated a lot of the same silly catch phrases and you never really got to know any of them to care what was going on. The dialogue also hinted at other things but never explored them, so that was also frustrating. The ending it self was a huge let down, and I watched was seemed to be the longest credit roll in history hoping there was something cool at the end. There wasn’t, so don’t waste your time.

The “hook” or the game was the fact that you could possess one of the 6 characters at any time, and there would always be a situation where you had to be one of them to progress in the level. The problem was that none of them on their own was useful enough to be the standard soldier type to kill all the baddies, most of the were really bad at that.

But let’s get to why I did have high hopes for this game, and that was because of…

Clive Barker’s Undying

Now this game was really good, and if you dont mind playing something that is a little dated in the graphics department. It had a really well developed story, lots of dialogue and interaction with other characters. The bosses we all nicely fleshed out, creepy in their own Clive Barker way, and just cool. It also had a good enough level design where you had no idea if you were really going in the right direction, but you always managed to be where you needed to. Like, they didn’t just cop out and create a bunch of invisible walls that you couldn’t walk beyond.

The game was just scary, had cool weapons (magic and physical), and its little signature trick ( being able to see ghostly events in the past ) was well done. It’s worth playing, I might try and replay it now that I’ve been disappointed by Jericho.