Atmosphere can only take a game so far, something Jericho illustrates clearly.
Jericho follows the elite United States military squad, named Jericho Squad, during their investigation of the lost city of Al-Khali. An ancient entity of incredible power, named the Firstborn, is buried in some sort of dimensional rift here and an insane ex-Jericho member turned cult leader, Arnold Leach, is seeking to free the Firstborn from its millennia long imprisonment. Only Jericho squad can stop it through the use of the magical powers that the seven man squad possesses.
Each member of Jericho squad has some sort of special power at their disposal that sets them apart from other soldiers. They are all mystically trained in some talent that allows them to combat the occult wherever it rises.
Captain Devin Ross, the leader, is a psychic healer who can raise the dead and wields an assault rifle with an under-slung shotgun. Abigail Black is the teams' telekinetic sniper who can use her telekinesis to throw enemies and objects and also to guide her bullets in slow motion. She uses a high powered sniper rifle with a grenade launcher. Xavier Jones is a psychic of some power able to sense emotions and project an astral projection of himself to possess people; he uses the same gun that Ross does. Father Rawlings is a priest who knows how to exorcise ghosts, heal your squad and kill his foes with his twin desert eagle pistols.
Frank Delgado is a shaman who has a flame spirit attached to one arm requiring him to keep that arm covered at most times. He uses a chain gun as his prime weapon with a pistol sidearm. Billie Church is a blood mage who can use her life force to damage or bind enemies in place. Acting as the team scout she wields a katana and automatic pistol to great effect. Lastly is Simone Cole, a hyper-intelligent reality hacker who can use her smarts to bend reality through intense mathematical algorithms. Using this she can slow down time or refill your ammo via rewinding time in your ammo belt. She uses a machine gun and grenades to act as support for your squad.
While all of this sounds interesting, and it is at first, it all falls apart once you actually start playing the game. The squad mechanics are ambitious to say the least but the game itself isn't up to handling it. Early in the game Ross will die and continue to live as a ghost that can inhabit his squad mates. This allows you to control any member of Jericho and use their unique abilities in gunfights or to get past environmental obstacles. This part of the game works just fine, it's your squad that flubs it.
Stupid is the name of the AI in this game. The enemies will blindly charge at you for the most part with very little intelligence showing through. This is easy to overlook since the enemies come in hordes and you are desperately scrambling to reload and keep up your fire to kill them off. What ends up making it inexcusable is that your party AI is just as stupid, if not even more so, than the enemies.
Father Rawlings can heal your squad and both he and Devin Ross can bring soldiers back from the dead. You will be doing this quite a bit since your party members fight like absolute dunces. They will rush up on enemies, running into the midst of a horde, or they will stand their ground while the huge enemies charge at them. Trying to save them is a full time job between possessing them and getting them out of the line of fire and reviving them from the dead.
The worst part of all of this is that the enemies you will fight almost seemed designed to exploit your squads' idiocy. Enemies that explode when they near you, or are killed, are numerous and come in waves so you can expect to lose a squad member or two each time you fight them. Yet more annoying is the fact that your squad has a tendency of grouping together, something that gets them slaughtered by the machine gun and flame thrower enemies that prevail in the early stages.
Honestly the combat is essentially broken in this game. Your squads' guns feel almost entirely useless against the enemies for the most part due to how little effect most of them seem to have on the enemies. Fire away an entire clip into the most basic of enemies and, unless it was all aimed at their face, they likely aren't going down. Only the secondary attacks pack much "oomph" behind them but these are fairly limited in usage. Sure that grenade launcher on Billies' sniper rifle does great damage but it's only got one shot before it needs to reload. The only one exempt from this is Delgado, who is a powerhouse. However your squad gets split up at intervals and this leaves you with little control over who you really use much of the time.
One place where this game doesn't disappoint is its graphics which are awesome. Not only does the game look good, even on a standard TV set, but the entire environment just oozes atmosphere. Blood oozing down the walls, desolate environments and a variety of time periods that clash together in an orgy of viscera. The enemies look like something out of the Hellraiser movies, an obvious comparison considering the source materials, but they all evoke a rather "What the hell?!" sort of feeling the first time you see them screaming towards you. The boss monsters are like something out of your nightmares and are quite deadly to boot.
As good as the graphics are the game stumbles on the sound a bit. While the soundtrack and ambient sounds are all rather awesome the voice acting is fairly atrocious. That's not to say that the dialogue isn't passable and that I don't appreciate the banter that goes on between the party. What I don't appreciate is the horrendous voice acting from a number of quality voice actors who have previously done some great work. They really flub it here and none of the voice over is very good... Well there is one exception: the Firstborn. When it speaks it isn't just one voice, there are several male and female voices that speak at once, overlapping each other. This fits the fact that the Firstborn isn't really male or female, it is something else entirely.
Jericho definitely had some potential and a quality story going for it. Codemasters simply seems to have dropped the ball as far as the AI in this game goes, killing the actual gameplay and thus the game itself. The horror storyline will likely draw in a number of people, something I can't really argue against. However the gameplay itself will put many gamers off and I cannot blame them either. Jericho just fails when it comes to creating an engrossing gameplay experience.
Score: 5