Jericho is actually the third video game shepherded by Clive Barker, his first being the highly entertaining Undying and the second being Demonik, which I was sad to see cancelled. Jericho is of the quasi-tactical, first-person shooter (FPS) variety with horror/survival elements. It features a story written by (surprise, surprise) Clive Barker, an interesting cast of characters with compelling powers, and a menagerie of disgusting enemies. I loved Undying, so I was interested in Jericho the moment I heard about it. Despite all the poor reviews and bad press it received, I played the demo and was intrigued enough to pick up a copy.
The graphics in Jericho are an exercise in contrast. On the one hand, the engine is obviously capable of fantastic eye candy. The game is full of special effects like motion blur, depth of field, atmospheric distortion, stunningly realistic rain drops, what appears to be volumetric smoke, great streamers/particles, and so forth. And at least some of the modeling is amazingly detailed and beautifully done. Not many games implement so many little details so well.
Yet on the other hand, I can't help but think that the artists or level designers really missed the boat. The game centers around the city of Al-Khali during several time periods. In the modern era it's a desert city in the Middle East, but in the past it was a haven for Nazis, attacked by Crusaders, governed by Rome, and apparently a center of beauty and learning in ancient Sumeria. The problem is that despite the differences in time, the environments differ surprisingly little.
The modern variant is a dully colored desert city with little to distinguish it. The World War II era variant is a mess of gray stone, gloom, and twisted metal. The crusades era variant is a mess of gray stone, gloom, and twisted metal. The Roman era variant is a mess of gray stone... Well, you get the idea. It really feels like the game misses a huge opportunity in its lack of variation in the environments. I know it's something of a cliche that every game has a jungle, a desert, a frozen arctic wasteland, and so forth, but at least those provide variety. Jericho seems lacking by comparison, particularly insofar as rivers of blood and feces are its main decorative motif.
A less substantive complaint is that the characters' expressions don't change much. It's a bit distracting to hear heart-breaking emotion in a character's voice while his face remains a static mask. Few games get facial animation right, but I've been playing Half-Life 2 (episode two) of late and the Source engine remains groundbreaking in this regard despite its age. If your engine can't handle the details, developers, then don't give me frequent facial close ups during moments of high drama.
In summary, the game has an eminently capable engine, and some aspects of the game push it right to the limit. I love many aspects of its look. But after the umpteenth time you wander through narrow stonework, admiring the decorative gore splayed everywhere, it will seem old. Thankfully, the action is enough to hold one's interest, but I'll say more about that elsewhere.
The audio is actually better than the visuals. The sound effects are great. All the weapons have a satisfying report, the magical/psychic powers have appropriately "out there" sounds, and the voice acting is generally pretty good. The selection of lines seems a bit limited after a while, but they are well delivered. Even "father" Rawlings, who seems a thoroughly modern sort of "priest" in light of his drunkenness, adultery, and so forth, managed not to irritate me too much with his exclaiming "Thank you, Jesus!"
Better still, the music really goes a long way toward setting the tone. Horror-survival as a genre just doesn't work without good audio and Jericho does very well in this regard. The music is appropriately stirring during combat, bombastic during big dramatic moments, and plaintive during the occasional touching moment. It's not the sort of thing I would buy on a soundtrack, but it works well as in-game ambience. As with the other aspects of the game, it's not as creepy as I thought it would be, but it is effective nevertheless.
My only complaint with the audio is that I had a hard time understanding some of the bad guys while they were "monologue-ing" (watch The Incredibles if you don't get that). The over-processed, über-deep vocals were just too frequency shifted to be intelligible. It didn't matter for the most part, but there were a couple of times when I would have picked up worthwhile clues, had I been capable of understanding.
The interface really threw me for a loop at first because the primary weapon attack is on the right mouse button for all the characters. Almost every video game I've played uses the left mouse button for the primary attack, so I was constantly triggering attacks I didn't want to use until the interface "clicked" with me. The trick, which is probably obvious to most but wasn't to me, was to recognize that the left mouse button activates whatever is in the character's left hand while the right mouse button activates whatever is in the character's right hand. This isn't true of every character, but it helped me conceptually.
Aside from that quirk, almost everything works nicely. The menu system is well laid out and functional. The default keys for activating powers, giving orders, and so forth were all just fine without modification. The only tweak I had to make was to invert the mouse axis. Everything else worked without any fussing on my part.
The one negative comment I can muster is that the in-game tips became pretty annoying after a while. At first it was helpful to be told when to use Black's telekinetic power to clear some debris. But I was still receiving the popup messages by the end of the game and found it irritating. The character voicings of hints and tips were more effective and less distracting. I wish there were a way to turn off the tips altogether or perhaps just rely on character comments rather than jarring text.
As to game mechanics, Jericho doesn't really break new ground, but it does bring some interesting bits to the table. At the outset it's a straight-up shooter. You play the part of Ross, leading the team into the modern city of Al Khali. Your job is essentially to blast the heck out of anything that moves and heal fallen comrades, said healing being the special power Ross brings to the table. It's a good introduction to the game's most basic mechanics, and it introduces you to a few of the game's enemies.
But it's not until after Ross dies, in what is arguably the best cut-scene in the game, that Jericho really comes into its own. When Ross is about to die, his spirit possesses the body of one of his team, a stereotypically "fiery latino" named Delgado. Over the next few levels the player learns to jump from character to character, using their powers as appropriate for the situation at hand. The whole possession mechanic is neat, making it possible for the player to pop around the action in a way that few other games allow. The team's special powers are like a layer of icing on what would otherwise be a bland FPS cake, and the possession mechanic ties the two together. It makes for an interesting soldier/sorcerer feel, at one moment blasting away with a minigun and releasing blood magic at the next.
In addition to the basic FPS stuff and the powers, Jericho occasionally incorporates a mechanic reminiscent of the old Dragon's Lair arcade game. I'm old enough to remember it, and what I most remember was pumping a never-ending series of quarters into that thing, trying desperately to get the moves just right. For those who never played it, the basic mechanic was that you responded to things happening on screen by pressing a joystick in one of four directions and sometimes tapping a sword button. The point was that you had to pick just the right series of moves, which guided the protagonist through full-motion video sequences streamed from laserdisc.
Jericho has a similar mechanic which is mandatory at certain points in the story but which may also be triggered by certain events in combat. The sequences are a little jarring, insofar as control is wrested from the player rather abruptly, after which visual cues are given with flashing arrows at the left, top, right, and bottom edges of the screen. The player must push the left, up, right, and backward motion keys correspondingly or the sequence will be failed. Failing one of the mandatory sequences means you have to repeat it, whereas failure in combat means the character involved goes down and requires healing. From reading the forums, it's clear that many people find the sequences irritating and pointless. I found them challenging and interesting more often than not, but then I liked Dragon's Lair. Your mileage may vary.
As to health, I should point out that Jericho has taken the same route as so many other games of late; i.e., there are no health packs or anything like that. As a character takes damage, his vision becomes red at the periphery and starts panting and so forth. If he can remove himself from the situation, then he can recover after a short while, but if he keeps taking damage he'll drop and require healing. Fortunately, the healing abilities of Rawlings and Ross both restore a character to full health. This mechanic can lead to nasty situations wherein all but two of the team members have gone down and you can't keep the one up and alive long enough to heal a third, but when this happens it's usually easy enough to restart the level.
I should also admit that while I normally complain about games not having the ability to save at any point, Jericho is pretty good about providing frequent enough checkpoints. There is one exception in the game, involving a section where you have to fight through two or three really tough areas before coming to an area I found harder than any of the boss fights, but the checkpoint system generally works. And because the team is resupplied completely at every checkpoint—another one of the benefits of having a "reality hacker" around—the player is liberated from worrying about ammunition or power-ups. This, along with the healing mechanic, makes it possible for the player to focus all his attention on combat, which is welcome indeed.
Suffice it to say that while Jericho doesn't redefine the FPS genre, it does bring solid mechanics to the table. The mechanics allow reasonably intelligent and fun squad-based tactics for much of the game. Oh, and one more thing: in response to the reviewer at PC Gamer, who actually dinged the game for not allowing the player to jump over things, I would like to point out that most pieces of cover may be vaulted by walking up to them and using them. When I read stupid things like that, I wonder exactly how much time the reviewer spent with the game.
A disclaimer from the outset: I have never read Clive Barker's books, nor have I watched any of the movies with which he has been involved. I also don't know how much input he had into the story of Jericho, though one might reasonably expect that to be his prime contribution in light of his credentials.
Having said that, the story for Jericho is maddeningly schizophrenic. On the one hand it has some interesting, if blasphemous, ideas. The notions of God's "firstborn" and their banishment, as well as the seemingly inevitable cycle of soldiers fighting to prevent their escape, have some depth. Yet we learn far too little about the characters' pasts to care much, and the over-the-top-stupid narration to the opening movies is just terrible.
Ok, we've got this firstborn, and we've got to seal a breach opened by Arnold the horribly transformed fool so that said firstborn can't get out and make things nasty for God's preferred children. But how many different times can you drive home the whole things-are-icky bit before it loses its luster? Undying genuinely scared the crap out of me because the supernatural was so otherworldly and used so well for effect. But when every single thing you run into in the world is coated in vomit, blood, excrement, and everything but skin, well, the horror turns into silly.
Seriously, if Clive Barker really wrote Jericho, then in my view he's an overrated hack. The game has some great bits, but the story fails to make the player care. Its only redeeming feature is that doesn't get in the way of the action too much.
Content is where Jericho really shines. The environments aren't all that numerous or that diverse, and the bestiary of opponents is similarly limited. But where the game really shines is in the plethora of options for dealing with the situations one encounters. The first time I played through the game, I spent almost the entire time possessing Black, the team's sniper. Her "ghost bullet" power never gets old, insofar as she can use her telekinesis to guide a single sniper round through up to three targets. I never got tired of it. Given that her sniper rifle also includes a powerful grenade launcher, she's an engine of destruction. By the end of the game, I could understand the forum posts I read (and some reviews) that harped on the game having only a single useful character.
So the second time I played it, I deliberately branched out and used the other characters and found the game even more fun and interesting. I got in the habit of using Church to lay down a blood ward, then switching to Delgado to use his flame demon or mow them down with his minigun. By the time I had finished the game for a second time, I was all the more intrigued about what else I might do. My third play-through found me using Jones and Cole a surprising amount of the time. Jones can use his power to possess bad guys and trigger special abilities, while Cole is a "reality hacker" who can slow time around her or radically boost the team's firepower. I found using Jones to pin opponents down with a blood ward and then using Cole to run up, drop grenades at their feet, and run back to cover, was a lot of fun.
Even Rawlings has more going for him than meets the eye. His powers are a ranged heal and the ability to drain health from enemies and give it to his teammates, but far more useful in my view are his dual pistols. Each pistol he carries may be configured independently, so you can have one set for explosive rounds while the other is set to fragmentation rounds. The former work really well on the exploding cultists, typically blowing those otherwise tough cookies up in a couple of shots, while the latter work well on any unarmored target. The down side of possessing Rawlings is that he won't automatically heal teammates, as he does when you're not possessing him, but the punch his pistols bring to the table can still make it worthwhile.
So you see, the game's content isn't outstanding because of the level design, enemies, or even the weapons—though I must say I absolutely love the shotgun/assault rifle combination and really hope that idea gets stolen by other games. The game's content is compelling because of the different ways the player can approach any given situation. I've played through the game from start to finish five times already, and I still have some ideas to try. That makes Jericho pretty compelling in terms of its content in my book.
However, I can think of three negative things to say. First, there is some kind of bug with the team-command AI. On rare occasion (it happened to me twice in all the times I played the game), when I commanded my team to hold their ground, one of the members would become bugged. If it happens you'll know it, because said team member will refuse to proceed through the rest of the level. The first time it happened to me, I was nearing the end of the introductory levels and Rawlings got stuck in place. It seems the cut-scene that ends the level depends upon all the team members getting to a certain geographic area, so I was screwed and had to restart the whole level. The second time it happened, I was in a different spot in the game and everything was alright once the level ended.
Second, some of the level design seems unnecessarily sadistic. One particular sequence involves a very narrow corridor with exploding cultists spawning at both ends. The problem is that exploding cultists are not easy to handle with the subset of the team that's in that particular situation, and said cultists explode when they finally die as their names suggest. That corridor can devolve into an incredibly frustrating exercise in trying to keep the team alive, given that a single cultist can take down everyone if he goes boom just a wee bit too close. I wish that were the only situation like that, but it's not. On more than one occasion, you'll be fighting the environment more than the bad guys. A little less unnecessary sadism in level design would have been welcome.
Third and finally, the game has some kind of issue on shutdown. I played it on my new gaming rig running the 64-bit edition of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, so I don't know if it's specific to Vista 64 or not. What I do know is that some kind of scripting error dialog box pops up and cannot be dismissed. The only way I can shut down the game when that happens is to bring up task manager and kill it. It's not clear to me under what circumstances the bug is triggered, but it happens reliably when I quit after playing for a while.
Since Jericho has no multi-player component, there really isn't much to say here. I think it would have been a lot of fun to play deathmatch using the different abilities of the various team members, so it's a pity the developers didn't include a multi-player mode. Why is it that the only multi-player FPS games we seem to get these days are pretty straightforward shoot-em-ups? The special powers in Jericho would have been a blast to play around with against other humans, but I suppose we'll never get that chance.
Not surprisingly, my conclusion has to be mixed. Jericho is clearly not a game for everyone. It's definitely not for children. The game features extremely grisly graphics, sadomasochistic imagery, more than mere hints at lesbian involvement between two of the members of the team, and so forth. The content is unquestionably mature, no matter how you slice it, and isn't a game I'd suggest for anyone who isn't an adult.
Nor is the game something that every adult gamer would appreciate. It definitely has its flaws. I went into it hoping for a horrifying experience on par with Undying or DOOM 3, and I was disappointed to find its ambience more disgusting than creepy or horrifying. There were a few spooky moments, but revulsion was more the rule. Despite the lack of horror, though, I found the game rather entertaining.
Those gamers looking for an interesting FPS with some novel mechanics should at least check out the demo. I suspect that many FPS gamers will appreciate its graphics, audio, and mechanics enough to offset its warts. The demo is pretty representative of the experience, though it is limiting in the number of characters you get to possess. In short, keep an open mind and ignore what most of the gaming press has to say about Jericho. It's better than they give it credit for being.
03/05/2008