The basic story of Jericho is that the player controls a group of magically powered super soldiers called the Jericho, who essentially serve the role of protecting all of us innocent humans against nasty demons, John Howard’s eyebrows and all matter of creatures from a 1930’s Universal film marathon. Of course, in true video game fashion, the soldiers in the Jericho group essentially mirror the personalities of the colonial marines in Aliens – and since that film was released over twenty-two years ago, we have a hard time being amused or impressed. Anyway, the Jericho are summoned by their American military superiors (oh, did we mention that the Jericho ‘don’t exist’ as far as official military records are concerned? Blah, blah, snore) to visit this lost city that has appeared out of nowhere, and basically blast the stuffing out of any evil things that inhabit the place. And of course, there are plenty of those. Not really up to Barker’s usual standard now, is it – though this reviewer failed to think of anything decent the author has written in the last ten years.
That's not really appropriate demon fighting attire, young lady
Players initially take control of Reed for the game’s rather insufferable first level, which is just by-the-number first person shooter action, albeit with severely limited interactivity with the game’s environments, unsatisfying weapons, and really unimpressive creature designs. Fortunately, Reed is quickly disposed of by Jericho’s main antagonist, but through the magic of screwy plot device, is kept alive after his spirit is sucked into one of the other Jericho. Basically, this means you can hop between the other soldiers in the Jericho squad willy-nilly; quite fortunate when one realizes that the game’s weapons are fixed to each character.
The Jericho squad is composed of two teams – Alpha and Omega, with three soldiers in each. Delgado is the heavy weapons guy, who just happens to have pyrokinetic powers – his mini-gun is by far the most powerful and most useful weapon in the game, making him a favourite for use on the battlefield. Cole is a ‘reality hacker’, meaning that she’s essentially like Neo within The Matrix – slowing down time, dodging bullets and such. She’s pretty useless when it comes to fighting, though her grenades do come in handy. Church is your modern Japanese samurai wannabe, with a big sword and sub-machine gun – and in totally emo style, she cuts her wrists to use her blood magic. Black is your typical tough female character – a total ripoff of Vasquez from Aliens – and her explosive rounds pack a real punch. Pity one doesn’t get too many opportunities to use that sniper rifle, though. Rawlings is a man of the cloth who likes two wield two weapons at the same time, as though doing so still makes one ‘bad’ – unfortunately not realising that we’ve seen this sort of behaviour in spades for – funnily enough – ten years. The final character, Jones, is basically a carbon copy of Reed from the first level.
I've always wanted a set of abdominal horns
Squad mechanics are quite basic – switch between characters with the X button and assign orders with the D-Pad. Not that you ever really need to use any sort of tactics in the game – it’s a total no brain shooter. Early levels are almost tunnel like – complete linearity, and totally non-interactive environments just don’t cut the mustard these days. Sure, there are plenty of enemies to kill, but usually the game flow goes tunnel, gunfight with set number of bad guys, tunnel, conversation, gunfight and rinse and repeat. Combat as a whole feels totally unsatisfying and lacks the weight of stronger first person shooter engines on the market. Arguably the only really poor thing about Jericho’s gameplay is the squad AI – they’re not very effective in fighting against the game’s bestiary, and they seldom revive each other when one falls, leaving the player to pick up the pieces. It’s really quite annoying.
Jericho really suffers in the long term value stakes, with its main adventure only offering up about 10 hours worth of play at best. Players have absolutely no incentive to replay the game, unless doing so on a higher difficulty. There’s no multiplayer, no bonuses to unlock and no downloadable content on the way. It’s pretty tough to expect one to fork over the money for what’s essentially a onetime only experience.
Missing: Beloved pet "Voldo". Reward negotiable - contact Bandai-Namco
Developer Mercury Steam opted to develop its own engine for Jericho and their relative lack of experience with (and one would presume the difficulty of programming for) the PlayStation 3 hardware really shows. The character models are of a reasonably good quality, but the animation is below par and there is a distinct loss of visual fidelity on their finer details. Character design on the other hand is utterly generic – one would think that having Clive Barker on board would help things in this department, but it would appear he isn’t with it. Many monsters are very similar to enemies from Silent Hill or the flood from the Halo series. The environments are also mind numbingly dull – one would think the whole ancient civilisation thing would yield much more interesting locations, but the designers instead choose to send players back to various World Wars and such – The Darkness, anyone? Finally, the whole experience runs haphazardly, with Jericho’s frame rate constantly dipping below 30 frames per second. The game’s sound is also decidedly average – the soundtrack is insignificant and the gunplay is underwhelming at best. Fortunately, there are some good exchanges of banter between the squad, but not enough to make it a memorable experience.
To be perfectly frank, there’s nothing really technically wrong with the way Jericho plays – it’s not a bad game, it’s just totally underwhelming and almost outright boring to play. The plot feels rather cliché and fails to captivate its audience, the characters are generic and the gameplay behind it does little to inspire one to endure the entire experience. Perhaps with a more solid engine and some alterations to the plot and design of the game’s creatures, characters and levels, Jericho might have been a game worth playing. But with BioShock, Halo 3 and Half-Life 2: Orange Box on shelves, not even the most rabid first person shooter fan should have a reason to pick Jericho over one of those.
Are you performing at the local stand-up comedy club 
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