Original gameplay ideas, great story and stunning effects mix up with imperfection, straightforwardness and stupidity

User Rating: 6.5 | Clive Barker's Jericho PC
It's a sad case when a game like Jericho has so many nice things to display and yet gets self stained by it's imperfect elements. One moment you are amazed by some new trick of effect, and the other you are cursing how stupid this game can be at times - this is how it is, and that is, sadly, true.

Jericho is a tactical, team based first person shooter, that follows the traditional formula. It tells a story about a special operations team, that specializes in dealing with paranormal activities, and is dispatched to investigate the mysterious appearance of some ancient city ruins in the middle of the desert. On arrival to the designated spot, the team looses it's leader - your main character, and gets sucked into another dimension - an earlier time of the same place. By developing the storyline, you find out, that your lost main character reapers as a "soul" that can directly interact with any of the team mates and control them. You also find out, that in order to find out the roots of the mysterious ruins appearance and what they are about, you will have to travel through magical portals to an earlier time of the same place and in each timezone/dimension find the missing answers until you end up in the timezone where the paranormal activity originally started. Not wanting to spoil the story, you will have to find out for yourself, what are those time travels about. Suffice to say, that during your adventure by traveling through time, you will visit timelines of the same ruins in eras like world war 2, medievals, Roman empire, ancient Mesopotamia and the finally the source of events.

So now you know in what settings will the gameplay happen, as for the gameplay itself, you will be able to use the whole team as a single unit and switch direct control from one team member to another - this is the main strong innovation of the game, that allows you to experience what team based tactical first person shooters are about. This feature is greatly developed as each of the team members has it's unique paranormal abilities, not to count his arsenal of weapons, physical feats and character features. Diversity is rich and needed - at the right moments you will want to use a character that has the ability to open the minds of your enemies and explore their weakness, thus allowing to manipulate them for accessing ways or solving problems. At other times you will need to pass through a burning rock field in order to trigger something on the other side and there will be just the right team member to do it. I think i gave enough insight of what team play is about and do not really need to tell the details of every character. All of them are so unique, that you will always find the most useful solution.
Unfortunately, i can not say the same good words about the environments, game objects and foes. While your whole team is balanced and unique, for starters, the monsters in this game are too much unbalanced, repetitive in every level you play, and having a typical design detail, that will at times annoy you enough to delete this game. Most of the monsters you will be facing, being of demonic kind, act with a pattern, that is always the same, overpowered, not appealing and, most important, frustrating, instead of being challenging. Some of them are nice an all of them look good, but that obviously is not enough for a good gameplay.
Objects found in the game are also pretty much of predetermined in terms of usage, and don't give you the freedom of doing what you want, rather what you need at the given moment.
Level design, nice in detail, and with appealing architecture, is completely broken by the linearity and straightforwardness. In fact, Jericho is one of the most linear shooters i have ever played. This comes from the facts that there are too many invisible walls, generally one way direction, no exploration value and there is not enough space to maneuver around while you are fighting with a whole team - mixing it up with broken monster acting, it gets simply overcrowded and delivers death without the ability to avoid it. This, my dear reader, is the worst part of the game, for which i wanted to trash this game into the toilet, but eventually continued..
Also imperfect are some of the controls and responses in this game - like ridiculously fast button access times in critical situations, or the other way around - too long sequences of cinematic action, that for instance takes a relatively long time to resurrect your fallen partner, and while you are doing this, being exposed your self, someone else get's killed period. Basically this game does not have the balance in places it needs!
If you can bypass these imperfections, you will be able to enjoy the game.

There is nothing specific about sound effects - they work where they need to and do that just fine, although the narration of some of the team members might get you annoyed.

Obviously one of the strong points of this game are the graphics - looks really great, although the engine reminds Doom 3 too much at times, and that is not good for a 2007 game - not because it looks bad, but because it feels repetitive.. It's a game that requires NVIDIA Physx card, and i am never happy about this as any ATI card thrown in will suck.

The game has a nice HUD and a simple customization menu. When run on proper hardware, it does not lag and feels responsive. I have encountered bugs in this game, but non of them was critically bad to spoil the gameplay, although i find it strange that there was no patch released.

For final words this game is a mix of both innovation and imperfection, brilliance and dullness, so you will be both, delighted, and annoyed. What i don't get it are the stupid fan boys of this game, who completely ignore it's faults and pretend that everything is great... It's a sad case that they post reviews in gamespot. I just tried to be fair with my review and that's all.

BTW, this game is not even close as good as Undying was, even though they differ in genre...