A slice of Jericho

Codemaster waded into this season’s computer game battles with this gruesome offering at an unfortunate time to be competing in the FPS arena. Call of Duty IV, Half Life2: The Orange Box, Timeshift, and Blacksite Area 51 are all fighting for the title of best Christmas Shooter and none of them are to be taken lightly.

But Jericho can hold its own against that competition. For one thing its build quality is fantastic: exquisite modelling is brought to life by top quality animation and has a consistently smooth framerate, the visual effects, game script, and sound are done properly but not overdone (except for the intro voiceover sequence), and it’s plain that a lot of perfectionism went into this production. A lot of the levels are just magnificient. Unfortunately, rather than just cash in on this modelling prowess in the conventional and successful way, Jericho’s levels are swamped in gore: mounds of what look like raw flesh and dead people cover the ground in places, and what at first was strikingly gruesome soon becomes ignored. Gore is one of those things which if done properly and infrequently can completely change the entire experience – here it just marrs the scenery. Sadly it just undermines the effect of the horror that they’re trying to create. The same can be said of the enemy models: the mutilated cultists disgust, not horrify. The Jericho team should take a lesson about using gore to horrify from F.E.A.R.

In Jericho you take possession of different members of your squad. Codemasters did an excellent job of balancing these: while you will have favourites, each character feels different and there is no individual one that is clearly superior. In any given fight you can switch to Church (has a sword and a spell that holds enemies powerlessly in place) Black (a sniper with a rocket launcher) Delgado (a huge ass chaingun and a spell that wooshes round the room setting enemy on fire) and Cole (whose can slow time and increase your firepower). If one goes down, you can switch to another, until the character that you’re possessing or another character (Rawlings) heals them.

In terms of level design, XBOX 360 official magazine claims that it is “ridiculously linear”. Jericho was just as linear as Gears of War was, and while that’s not a good thing it doesn’t affect the enjoyment of the game. The levels in terms of looks and the way they play, and the monsters you face, are far more varied than GoW’s were. But they’re all covered in red sticky.

The storyline is also more deep. I haven’t researched how much of this is true and how much came from Clive Barker’s (seemingly twisted) mind, but the premise is that gnostic texts make reference to a creature that God made before he made humans, called the Firstborn. This being was so terrible that it had to be locked away from the earth (God didn’t want to kill it. Given what happened to the dinosaurs this is slightly surprising). The firstborn is now pretty cheesed off by this and every so often someone who wants to become a god tries to free it so that it destroys the earth. Every time it breaks free it takes a little bit of the world back with it. Meeting the cockney WW2 soldiers is pretty cool, but going back into the roman times just revealed a stack load of people getting crucified. Better than the storyline behind the game events is the background of each character: these are released as bonuses for in game progression.

Jericho is a great game for fans of squad based FPSs, provided that you don’t crave horror and don’t mind liberal amounts of indiscriminate gore. For the rest, there’s Blacksite Area 51 and FEAR Files.

- John

Play nice. Play Jericho.