Clive Barker’s “Jericho”
I am usually very fussy about the FPS (First-Person Shooter) games I play. Doom kicked started it for me, I loved Duke Nukem (and the original platform-game versions), Goldeneye…etc… but often with a FPS it can be over complicated, the developer can try to do too much, without a decent plot or can have a great plot but no gameplay. Clive Barker’s Jericho (CBJ) (for legal reasons I’m pretty certain you have to keep including the “Clive Barker’s” part) seems on the outset to be a complicated game. I loved the premise, you are a team of 7 people with special abilities. One can control fire, another can heal from great distances, one has a ghostly sniper rifle, and can move objects without touching them and what is even better is that the character you play dead…and can possess the other team members at will. Oddly, the other characters don’t seem to mind, but of course this means you get to choose between the team members and thus be all of them during the game. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses.
You can see why this may seem complicated. Added to the fact of changing characters is that you have a primary and secondary weapon button, a melee attack, and you have to balance your special powers as well using different controls. On the xbox this may be a lot easier than it is on a keyboard. I give it a hearty thumbs up, however. The graphics are suitably creepy and dingy so you can only see what is going on at the last moment, the bad guys are hideous, smart and vicious and you thoroughly enjoy dispatching them, and there is no jump button..which is always a plus for me. Jumping only ever seems to make me spend an extra 2 hours a game seeing which terrain I can climb over and which is just scenery and distracts me from taking down evil-half-dead zombie things. To try this out yourself, check out the website and the 1gb demo download. AC
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