Name: Clive Barker's Jericho
Genre: First Person Shooter 
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC (Reviewed on Xbox 360) 

I wanted Clive Barker’s Jericho to rock so much. Clive is a brilliant horror writer and a defender of video games as art. Because of that I wanted his newest attempt at bringing the scare to consoles to be successful, almost as a reward for his defense of games. When the demo dropped I nearly broke down in tears because of how abysmal it was. The controls were garbage, the graphics were dark and mediocre, and the story just flat out reeked.

So when I opened the new game I went in with my tail between my legs and my panties in a bunch. If it was anything like the demo I was prepared to just stop playing it when I started and move on to some of the other great titles to come out this week.

Lucky for me (and unlucky for those games), the full Jericho wasn’t nearly as bad as the demo. It may have been the opposite of the Bioshock effect, where the demo pumped players up to ridiculous heights. The game ended up being much better but still not good enough to warrant a buy (or even a full play through).
The plot of Jericho is cliché horror bullshit. The question that is always posed is “but is it scary?” No, because its too stupid to be scary. Fear is best invoked when the player can place himself or herself in the situation (at least a little). When the player needs to suspend all they know to get into a story is a lot to ask. I am sorry, but I find it hard to be afraid of monsters when I am shooting psychic fire at them. It was different in Bioshock and much more believable.

Players assume the role of the Jericho Team, a supernatural and super secret squad sent by the US Government to take care of anything that falls into the realm of "WHAAAAAA?!" Near the beginning the main character dies and gains the wonderfully invasive ability to jump into the bodies of teammates (which leads to the joke spoken to the "Lesbian Sniper" of the group: "Hey, how does it feel to have a man inside you for the first time?") The group moves on to try and stop a cultist from bringing an ultimate evil, The Firstborn, to the earth.

The game also suffers from something it never should have: horrid storytelling. Due to the frequent and long loading times there are little text blurbs that try to distract the player that the game is loading over and over again. For some reason they thought it would be smart to just spoil plot points when doing this.

One example (and yes, I am going to spoil the plot, get over it) is when being attacked by a miniboss. After it beats on the Jericho team for a while and you beat back some soldiers come out of nowhere and shoot at it to scare it away (because, you know, my pyromancer isn’t scary enough). The characters are befuddled and question who their saviors could possibly be. While the game loads the text explains how there was also a British team sent to the area that was lost. Thanks, Codemasters!

The graphics are dark and mediocre, as stated earlier. They opted for shiny blood all over the place instead of focusing on making the environments look interesting. The character models are fantastic but the grounds textures might as well be a flat brown. With the huge load times I can’t see why the graphics are what they are: crap.

Each member of the Jericho squad has their own special psychic power ranging from slowing time to shooting fire. They are interesting and shake up the game from an extremely average game to an average game that had potential. The game would be volumes better if it included some kind of co-op. It would have been infinitely easy to add story wise, as the plot involves jumping between different characters anyway. What is another floating soul to do the same? In the end the game could be fun for some, but not for me.