First Person Shooters are my favorite type of game. So many amazing titles have been released, from the Doom and Wolfenstein franchises of 1990’s, to the Halo and Half-Life franchises still going strong today. FPS games offer the player the chance to immerse themselves in the lives of the characters they inhabit, while playing through some of the best story arcs ever conceived in video gaming. Clive Barker, most famous for his work on the Hellraiser series, wrote a story to add to the thriller FPS subgenre, which recently has had the market cornered by Vivendi’s F.E.A.R and 2K Games’ BioShock. Unfortunately, this entry into the genre is marred by sub-par gameplay and poor game design choices.
Jericho starts you off as Captain Ross (voiced by Cowboy Bebop’s Steven Jay Blum), leader of a secret underground band of magical, heavy-weapon clad soldiers that takes care of the government’s dirty work, known as “Jericho”. You are called to the middle of the desert to respond to a disturbance, a rip in time that seems to go back to the beginning of creation. You lead your team into an ancient city, where you discover that something horrible is about to happen, something that has been in the making since the beginning of existence.
Controls for this game are pretty straightforward for an FPS, the added element of squad commands should be a nice feature, if it did any sort of good at all. Your squad is separated into two units, Alpha and Omega. The extent of your squad leader abilities is to have one or both teams fall back, or come forward. While this could do some good as far as squad protection, your squad has two characters who can resurrect fallen team members. Add to this some of the worst team AI I’ve ever seen, and you end up spending most of your time running around trying to bring people back to life. Your NPC teammates will simply go charging into an enemy, which many times will explode upon killing, which wipes out half your team. So it’s up to you to go over and get them back up, hoping that you don’t bite it in the process. But even if you do, there’s another person who’s just fine who can bring you back to life. It kind of takes the “Safety First” element of the game, and you start jumping into the fray just for fun. It’s got sort of a Day the Earth Stood Still feel to it.
Eventually, you will get the chance to control the other members of the team, each with an insanely unfair magically ability. These abilities range from the having a fire dragon spirit inhabiting your right arm, to the ability to slow down time for everyone but your team. Using the right combination of skills makes it almost too easy to take anything down, even bosses. While the ability to play through levels with different classes of characters is fun, it does tend to get boring, as you end up using the same character’s abilities in the same order to do anything. Even if you screw up, you can just resurrect yourself and try it again.
The game tries to be scary, by placing “shocker” units that pop up when you least expect them in the darkest corners of corridors. But I don’t think I jumped once at the game. I could tell where they were trying to be clever about it, but after the initial shot at the shock, it just got boring and repetitive. It was easy to guess where things might try to scare you, and usually the guesses were right.
The thing I liked the least was the Dragon Quest style button mashing you had to do in the middle of a cut-scene. I get to the first cut-scene where you get inside the temple, and the team starts talking about what’s going on. I thought this might be a good time to set my controller down and grab a drink from the table. No sooner did I take a sip when the team starts running, and the X and A buttons flash up on the screen. Before I had time to think my character falls down a crevice. No warning, no “Hey, maybe you should be ready to hit buttons here” Just a fall down a bottomless pit. The game resumed with my character holding onto a ledge for dear life, and more button mashing was required to climb out of this place. Peeved about the lack of warning, I sit there ready to take over my guy and start moving, but they decide to throw another four minutes of dialogue in just because.
Aside from the lack of difficulty, the non functional squad commands, the unnecessary Dragon Quest action, and the painfully slow text on the load screens, the game wasn’t that bad. It had a decent storyline, and having Spike from Bebop voice the protagonist really made me like the character. The game had potential to be very good and very scary; however, it failed to achieve either one. It was all right, and a little scary, but I just felt like it was too easy.
