Then, add to the mix the game's most annoying (and annoyingly common) foes: demons that explode upon death. The things lumber along quickly and take down any nearby character when they fall. And, like most of Jericho's supersturdy enemies, they absorb a good number of bullets before they die. On its own, it's a perfectly legitimate enemy design. But in a game with six squad members and the most claustrophobic levels ever devised, it's the opposite of fun. You'll watch in horror as your entire squad goes down at once and you are powerless to stop the violence. Why would you create an enemy that needs to be taken down from a distance, in a game that doesn't let you distance yourself? Maybe it's meant to be a challenge, but in reality, it's just imbalanced and cheap. We suspect it's all done under the guise of being "tactical," but this is no tactical shooter. Enemies just mindlessly traipse toward you, so the extent of your tactics is switching between characters to use their abilities in tandem.
And that's the way of Jericho: design elements that are fine on their own, and a disaster when combined together. Slow strafing speed doesn't have to be bad. Slow strafing speed in a level when the exploding monsters continually respawn, and you are only playing as Delgado, is murder. Then you have the pretty animations and special effects. They look neat, but some effects, like the 10-second fiasco you have to experience when you revive someone as Rawlings from afar, get in the way. The action leaves you vulnerable for so long that it's better to just run up and use the standard revival skill, letting the AI handle Rawlings (though unsurprisingly, he is almost always the first character to bite the dust). There are a number of effects like this that take their good old time, which would be fine if you could get yourself out of the way to perform your powers and enjoy the corresponding visual display.
When the levels open up, you can see how great Jericho could have been if it had just been given room to breathe. A spectacular Crusades era boss battle and a series of battles in a Roman arena are perfect examples, and had the entire game followed suit, it could have approached greatness. There aren't enough of these moments in Jericho's eight hours of gameplay, but when they arrive, they hint at loads of unrealized potential. In fact, it is your ability to see the potential behind the missteps that will determine how much you like Jericho. This is, without a doubt, a love-it-or-hate-it kind of game: easy to love for the occasionally awesome and intense firefight, easy to hate for its wide array of frustrating design contradictions.
You might want to have that looked at.
You'll get essentially the same experience regardless of which version you play. All of them look great and run smoothly. The textures in the PlayStation 3 version look a bit cleaner than those in the Xbox 360 version, though the lighting in the 360 and PC releases is a bit more foreboding. But they all feature relatively long loading times between levels, which will make you thankful for the story snippets you can read during them. And none of them feature any kind of multiplayer mode, so once you are done, unless you want to relive the experience at a higher level of difficulty, you are done for good.
Jericho is both a triumph and a disaster, and not a lot of games manage to be both of these at once. Frustrating, exciting, inconsistent, linear--these words and many more describe the various elements of Clive Barker's Jericho. If you've got a high tolerance for gameplay annoyances and like the feeling of imposing dread and claustrophobia this corridor crawl provides, by all means, give it a shot. If you like tight shooting mechanics and smart level design, you'll want to steer clear.
Clive Barker's Jericho (PC):
%20PC%20Game%20reviews%20-%20CNET%20Reviews&srcUrl=http://reviews.cnet.com/pc-games/clive-barker-s-jericho/4505-9696_7-31979841-2.html){kind=small}