It Came From the Bargain Bin #2: Clive Barker's Jericho

Welcome to the second installment of what I hope will be a semi-regular series of reviews. It Came From the Bargain Bin is pretty self-explanatory, but just in case there's someone out there who doesn't get it, here's the gist: In any It Came From the Bargain Bin reviews I'll be taking a look at some older games that people might have missed out on that are now available for a price much cheaper than their original retail release. Some of the games covered would have been worth paying full price for, others will only be worth checking out now that they're at a discount, and some won't even be worth it at the reduced price point. The goal is to help people find titles they might have missed and save them a few bucks in the process. Now that we've got that out of the way, on with the review...

There are no shortage of reasons as to why games eventually wind up in the bargain bin. In the best case, a title may have been out for a year or longer and sold really well at full retail, but the passing of time has seen those numbers drop and in order to get a few last bucks out of the game, the price comes down in hopes of enticing the few people who haven't plunked down their cash. Other times, it's because a sequel is looming on the horizon. No one's gonna pay full price for a game when the new version is about to come out, so the price point drops. In the worst case, the game winds up in the bargain bin because it's not very good or because it's perceived as being not very good (an example of the former would be the original Xbox's Brute Force, the latter would be what happened to Prince of Persia or Beyond Good and Evil). Clive Barker's Jericho falls into this last group. What was $60 less than a year ago can now be had for around $10. But, which game is Jericho? Is it an out-and-out stinker like Brute Force or a misunderstood gem like Beyond Good and Evil? I'm disappointed to say it's primarily found a home in the bargain bin because the game is tragically flawed.

Jericho is a squad-based first-person shooter from the mind of horror icon Clive Barker (the father of Hellraiser, Candyman, Nightbreed and countless other horror franchises). About the best way to describe the game is imagine if someone broke a copy of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon and Silent Hill in half and then glued a piece of each disc together-creating a totally new game called Tom Clancy's Silent Ghost Hill Recon...or something. Basically, it attempts to take the squad-based gameplay of Clancy's series and get rid of the geopolitical intrigue by replacing it with the jump scares and gore of Silent Hill. Unfortunately, the game is only half successful at achieving its goal.

The success comes in mimicking the Silent Hill formula for scary visuals and intriguing stories. Barker's a first-class novelist and storyteller, and it shows throughout Jericho (except for the ending, but I won't spoil that here). Players will take control of the Jericho squad, a special military branch of warrior magicians who take on occult threats to mankind's continued existence. As the game opens, the Jericho team is called to Middle East, where they travel to a city that may have been the original Eden. Unluckily for them, Adam and Eve weren't God's first experiments-a creature called The Firstborn was. Unhappy with how that turned out, but being a merciful deity, God didn't kill The Firstborn outright-instead he had some Sumerian priests seal him away. Naturally, someone wants to free The Firstborn-and only the Jericho squad can stop the threat and neutralize God's misbegotten son once and for all. This will come at a price, though, as the team will have to travel through a series of wormholes that will place them in different hellish time periods of the past.

Quite the story for a first-person shooter, isn't it? In typical Barker fashion the story is philosophically heavy yet never shies away from extreme violence and gore. This the man who gave us Pinhead and the rest of the Cenobites, so expectations are high when it comes to weird and hideous monsters in this game. Barker delivers, offering us a gluttonous Roman Senator (who shoots spew out of his gut), a flayed alive female Nazi officer, demonic Templar Knights, and more atrocities than you can shake a stick at.

Where this all falters is in the Jericho squad itself. The seven members of the team are all essentially walking clichés. You've got the big Latin guy who swears a lot and carries a giant gun (sort of a male version of Vasquez in Aliens), a woman who's along more for her brains than her weapons proficiency, a member with a hidden agenda, and so on. These aren't your typical Barker-styled characters and feel almost forced into the narrative in order to give gamers characters they could recognize. Some of the dialogue is equally forced, leading me to imagine that Barker probably came up with the main idea of the storyline and then let someone else flesh it all out for the final game.

These problems are all very minor in comparison to the gameplay, which is Jericho's greatest shortcoming by far.

When you cut right to the chase, the game is a corridor shooter. Players spend a lot of time in hallways with the monotony occasionally broken up by an open room. I don't have a huge problem with this type of game-sure, it's linear and there's nothing to actually explore, but blasting demons in the face is always a good time. If Jericho had been content to just accept this and run with it, it probably would have been a pretty decent (if ultimately forgettable) game. The problems arise when you add in the squad-based mechanics and the ability to switch at will between any of the characters.

Jericho breaks up the unit into two teams: Alpha and Omega. The whole group can be ordered to move or hold position, or it can be further broken down into the two teams. Sounds good, right? It might have been if not for one glaring problem: the game's A.I. (for both the enemies and your allies) is so stupid that ordering anyone to do anything is a complete waste of time. The developers apparently realized this, too, because there are only two times where you actually have to issue squad commands-two switch puzzles very late in the game.

These squad mechanics might have worked at least a little bit better if the game's enemies didn't just automatically rush you as soon as they spawn. It might also have worked better if your team didn't just continually stand there shooting enemies at point blank range even though they know they explode upon death. There's no real need for any sort of strategy in the game's numerous firefights-enemies spawn, they lumber toward you, you back up and shoot them as they approach. The game only gets difficult because your squadmates refuse to get away from exploding enemies (of which there are many) and you will therefore spend most of your time running to revive them instead of actually killing monsters. Because of this, there are moments where Jericho feels more like a "first-person triage" game than an actual shooter.

The ability to switch between all these different characters sounds pretty good on paper, too, but it's another idea that doesn't really work the way it should. Of the seven characters, three are useless. There is almost no reason to ever use Jones or Cole and if you did use Rawlings, you'd do nothing but run around reviving fallen allies. The other characters have their uses in certain situations-Church is your best melee bet (although melee in this game is a pain), Delgado has the best magic attack, and Black has the sniper rifle and exploding bullets-but it would have been a lot more interesting to ditch the whole squad thing and swapping characters and just have made a standard first person shooter. All of this gets even more frustrating when the game occasionally forces you to use certain characters for specific events.

On top of the firepower, each character has a special magical ability they can use. Delgado's flame power is super useful as is Black's ghost bullet attack. Everyone else, not so much. Jones, the most useless character of all, can astral project into enemies. This sounds cool, until you realize he astral projects into them solely for the purpose of hitting switches. He can't just take them over and take out the guy's partners...that would be too awesome...but if you need a faraway switch hit, this dude is your man.

Another thing the game tries that doesn't work is the incorporation of quick-time button press events. Basically, at different parts of the game, you'll be tasked with hitting buttons quickly and in a specified order to make something happen. This something can be crossing a crumbling chasm (ooh check out that alliteration...) or killing some giant hellspawn. It never ceases to be annoying. The buttons that need to be pressed don't appear in the center of the screen (because, you know, that might make sense) but instead appear on the top, bottom, left, and right sides-and I don't mean just north or south of center, I mean all the way on the edge. The only redeeming thing here is that if you fail, the game lets you try it again-without having to go back to a previous checkpoint or re-fight any enemies.

One last gameplay gripe before we move on. Jericho is a glitchy game. It never out and out crashed on me (that would have been too easy...) but on several boss fights it glitches out and there's no way to actually win the fight. Battling the female Nazi early on, she glitched on a building top, wouldn't come down, and wouldn't take damage. Only after 10 minutes of pummeling this chick with everything I had did I finally learn that she was supposed to come back down to ground level and fight. She was stuck. This meant I had to go back to the last checkpoint and fight my way back to her. Similar events happened in two or three other places. With as many guys as there are who want to work in the game industry (and want to break in through quality testing) you'd think Codemasters could have hired enough guys to make sure the game actually worked before shipping it out to retailers.

Visually, the game is serviceable. Jericho isn't going to blow you away with its graphical prowess, but it's not an ugly game, either. My biggest beef with the graphics are that there simply aren't many different varieties of enemies. Prepare to shoot the same few groups of monsters over and over again. At least those few models animate fluidly and look suitably disgusting. The game's environments are really nice-loaded with blood, gore, and shattered corpses at every turn. There are people who've been crucified all over the place and I often found myself stopping just to look around at all the atrocity on display. Seeing it all can be a bit of a challenge since the game is quite dark in some areas. Adjusting the setting helps, but it makes the colors a little more washed out.

Perhaps the best thing about Jericho is the game's music. This is a title that's more gory than frightening, but the aural accompaniement certainly added to the ambience. The voice acting is decent as well, which helps make the walking clichés that pass as characters a little more tolerable.

It should be clear that I wasn't a really big fan of Jericho. I wanted to love it-I love Clive Barker and I liked the story, but the gameplay just ruins things. I'm embarrassed to admit that I actually paid $60 for this game (and it's been sitting on my shelf since the day it came out...) and if you had the chance to grab it for that price I'd tell you to run screaming from the room. But what about now, at the lowly price of $10-$20 new? Surely it must be worth at least a look at that price? Yes and no. It's a short game (easily beaten in under ten hours) and it does have a fairly interesting story and design aesthetic. Of course, it also has some really botched gameplay and a lot of glitches that pop up pretty regularly. If you really love first person shooters, squad-based shooters, and horror games, you might give this a shot...but only if you can get it for $10 or less. Paying anything more than that is paying more for Jericho than it's really worth.