After last E3, we had some pretty high hopes for Jericho, but after playing through the game on its most difficult setting, we realize that we may have set our expectations for this one a bit too high. There's no question that the game's premise promised the kind of horror-packed experience Clive Barker has been known for... we just didn't realize that it would end up being shackled with slipshod game design and the sort of rambling gore-for-gore's-sake plot that Clive Barker's become known for. It's not that Jericho is bad, it's just not very good, and when you have so many triple-A titles looking to devour your dollars you simply don't have time or money to waste on anything this blatantly mediocre.

Ammo From the Future

The best aspects of Jericho are the characters, but even those aren't as fleshed-out as we'd have liked. There's no question that the character models are magnificent, as long as you're into the techno-goth look they all sport. Even if you're not into the look of leather straps, superfluous buckles and titanium cylinders, the detail in the models is truly inspired. While there aren't that many different kinds of enemies, they are uniformly well-rendered. The unfortunate qualifier with the enemies, however, is that they are consumed by swarms of black flies after you've killed them so you can never get a really good look at them.

Each of Team Jericho's seven members has a personality all their own; the problem is that you only learn the intricacies of a couple of them. For example, Church (the team's blood magician) was raped by her father, Cole (the reality hacker that can stop time) is afraid of the dark and being touched and Black (the telekinetic sniper) is a lesbian. Unfortunately, that's the most you'll really learn about the team, leaving the other four members in an ambiguous haze of cliched one-liners that don't seem to have any relevance to pasts you know nothing about.


Honestly, Cole was our favorite of the whole team not just because she could stop time (risking her tenuous grip on reality in order to do so), but also because she can re-supply the entire team with delicious ammunition from the future. Plus, she's a big fan of the divine proportion (or golden ratio) which is a mathematical proportion used in art and architecture, so she provides at least one non-Lovecraft-related reason to check out Wikipedia. This is in contrast to the game's plot, which, like much of Barker's work, cribs from Lovecraft wholesale.