Clive Barker's Jericho

pretty much nothing is fun about this game. it got taken off steam store, no wonder why. the AI is shit, the main game mechanic is a gimmicky arbitrary annoyance (changing characters)
THE PACING IS TERRIBLE, combat feels weightless and lame, enemies aren't fun to fight, shit level design, SHIT boss battles. everything sucks. dog shit.

3/10

Better than I was expecting, but not by much. Jericho's body-jumping between supernatural super-soldiers makes for an exciting mix of playstyles, but it's all restricted within an absolutely linear set-up with no regard for team play, and the grind of the descent into the Pyxis begins to drag well before the end, an infamous botch all its own. No one can deny the premise had promise, but if only that level of inspiration actually went into the level design. This is your answer to Ebert's claim about games being art?

Its unfortunate that Jericho turned out the way that it did, because there is definitly a lot of good stuff about this game.

Starting off, this is marketed as a horror game, but its only horror as much as doom 3 is. Which is not much. There is a lot of gore, and the depictions of hell can be truely gruesome at times. A shame it doesnt really have a stronger soundtrack to back it up, but the atmosphere in some places can be itense. Now the best part of the game is the gameplay for sure. You are in control of Jericho team, which are 6 highly capable individuals, each one has a different primary and secondary firearm, as well as one or two special abilities. You can change between them on the fly, and each one feels great to play as. i keep changing them because they all felt so good to play as. Though i did find that its more reliable to leave the support classes for the AI to handle. Which is one of the major flaws of the game, and that is that the AI is terrible. Like staring at the walls, back turned to the enemies, sort of terrible. Most of the time they are helpful, but they can be annoying, specially when you switch to them and you find that they are a whole lot behind. There are command options, but these are a bit limited. But on the whole, the basic concept and premise is great. The amount of canrage you can pull of with this team is really satisfying, and on top of that the game is visually pretty (if you can call gore pretty that is).

Now the game is riddled with flaws. One big one is how linear and repetitive the level design is for the majority of the campaign. This combined with the low amount of enemy types (which arent all that great, all they do is rush you) can make the game repetitive, were it not for the challenging difficulty and switch mechanics keeping the player focused. The pacing is also a bit off, since the first chapters are lenghty, while in the latter ones boss fights are much more frequent and often the only thing you will do. The game also has a few QTEs that come out of nowhere, and are annoying. It obviously fails as a horror game, but i dont view it as such tbh. Storywise its forgettable, but nothing cringeworthy or outright bad. I like the foul mouthed banter between the characters.

I wish that someone took the ideas from this game and make a L4D type of game out of it. Im normally of the opinion that coop shooters are a bit dull, but i could see it being a lot of fun with this set of abilities. Purely as an FPS though it can be hard to recommend this to someone.