Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Clive Barker's Jericho (Xbox 360) Demo Impressions


What can I say except the demo simply didn't do it for me. I've been hearing a good bit of hype for this game, and while it certainly looks nice and Church has some great bouncy boobs, I couldn't get into the gameplay or even the concept of Jericho squad; random paranormal people with special powers who have formed an elite government squad always come of as hokey to me.

In the demo, you take control of 3 members of Jericho squad roughly mid-way through the game as you need to fight your way through the lower levels of an ancient castle. Clive Barker's Jericho looks very nice and it actually reminds me of Unreal Engine 3, though it does use another graphics engine. Character animations are crisp and sharp, and the game's presentation values are quite high, however I found the gameplay generally uninspired and not really scary. The game does have some really nice gore, but gore unto itself is not horror unless its presented in a psychologically disturbing way (think BioShock) and the demo generally boiled down to simply killing anything that got in your way, or letting your squad do that kind of work.

One interesting thing to note is that it has some button pressing sequences, similar to those found in Spider-Man 3. Basically as your character is performing a certain action, a button may quickly appear on screen and you need to press the corresponding button quickly to prevent your character from dying. I didn't have a huge problem with this, and it'll be interesting to see how the press reacts as they slammed this feature in Spider-Man 3.

If I get bored and have some free time, I'd give Clive Barker's Jericho a rent, but based on the demo, it's not a title that screams "buy me."

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