Oh noes, more of teh zombies!
On the graphics side of things, Clive Barker’s Jericho at times is pretty damn gorgeous veering over to sparse and bland at others. The opening sequence, set in a desert with a whirling sandstorm is a case in point. Ancient, sand blasted stone with 90⁰ corners? And seeing the team move over this ground can be depressing as you watch their feet magically step through a boulder as if it wasn’t there.But then in other levels the amount of detail is seriously ramped up with objects pertinent to the time-zone you’re in littering the area, blood spewing all over the place as enemies explode and flames flickering from nearby fires. After a while you’ll almost know when some action is going to happen by how detailed the area is… as if you’re only traversing a section to get somewhere else and the bit you’re in has been added to pad out the playing time somewhat.
Click for larger imageThere’s absolutely no interactivity with any of the environments either, beyond what you have to do to solve a puzzle. This can be misleading in places as at times you’ll be looking for a way out and nothing but a chandelier above you seems to do anything… but it’s just window dressing, so trying to blast it and make it swing into what you think is a switch is a waste of time and ammo. So although the puzzles part is good, you will have to think along the lines of psychic abilities rather than physical solutions.
But by far the biggest problem with Clive Barker’s Jericho is the repetition you’ll encounter. You see, the basic idea is that you’re traversing time zones sucked into Al-Khali each time the Firstborn attempted to break free. You’d think that this would’ve allowed Clive Barker’s undoubtedly massive imagination run wild… but it hasn’t.
Click for larger imageOther than a few visual clues dotted here and there, you’ll be hard pressed to find much difference between the time zones. The biggest problem is that the enemies, other than the odd one or two zone specific baddies and end of level bosses, are the same throughout the entire game. The first zone you’ll encounter is set in World War 2 and here you’d expect to maybe see some Nazi zombies or weird tank-organo-mech things… but the closest you’ll get to that is a gruesome looking multiheaded thing with a machine gun…
Sure, you run into the World War 2 version of your Jericho squad who are kitted out with gear from that era but you’ll still be fighting the same demons from earlier levels… and they’ll be the same bad guys in later levels too. Which means that the Codies and Clive Barker have a missed a big opportunity to have made something of all these different time zones… Yes, the models and textures do look brilliant on the bad guys but surely there should’ve been more than just these few?
Click for larger imageAnd sadly the repetitive nature of the baddies carries on into the levels themselves. There’s a bit more variety here, even though some areas within a level will be bland by comparison with others, but from a gameplay perspective, the mechanics in each level are roughly the same. You enter an area and have to figure out either how to progress or, in some cases, free trapped team mates whilst fighting off the bad guys. And then you do it all again.
As I said earlier, these puzzles do tax the brain more than your average shooter and they do become more complex as you progress but the problem is that the basics are the same. Given the wide range of powers you can wield and the whole body-hopping thing, you start to wish you could do a bit more within the world you’re in… I don’t even mind the linearity of the levels, I just wish it varied some more.
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