How Not to Create Story-Driven Gameplay

Q: How do you get someone to play through Jericho? A: Take away their ability to blink

It's a busy fall and winter for PC releases, and the list of upcoming titles contains at least a half-dozen must-haves. But even if it were a dormant release season, one could be forgiven for passing up Jericho. Despite its dark atmosphere and imaginative enemy design, the game fails to be frightening. Confined levels and too many scripted sequences leave the gameplay feeling too restricted, and the irrationally high system requirements on the PC will leave most gamers with a less-than-optimal visual experience.

Moments of interactivity seem to get in the way of the frequent bits of story; the result is a cobbled-together game that offers neither fun gameplay nor an interesting story. More often than not, you'll pound the keyboard in anger at the unnecessarily high difficulty level, made worse by useless AI teammates. Even the ability to play as one of six different characters at any time isn't enough to breathe life into the game. A horror theme often ends up translating to a silly premise in video games, and Clive Baker's Jericho proves that point once more.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

Component	Publisher's Minimum	Publisher's Recommended
Processor	Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or AMD equivalent	Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor
Memory	1GB	1 GB
Graphics Card	NVIDIA Geforce 6600 GT or ATI Radeon X1600	NVIDIA Geforce 8800 GTS or ATI Radeon X1950 XTX
Graphics Card Example	Not specified	Not specified
Free Disk Space	6 GB free space	6 GB free space
Net Link	Not specified	Not specified

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

Component	YouGamers Minimum	YouGamers Recommended
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ / Intel Core 2 Duo E6420	AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ / Intel Core 2 Duo E6750
Memory	1 GB	2 GB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon X1800 XL 256MB / NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT 256MB	ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro 512MB / NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
Free Disk Space	6 GB	6 GB
Net Link	N/A	N/A

Scores

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

Gameplay	60	Plays like a shooter on rails, only with less satisfying results. The ability to control different characters is a plus, but the boneheaded AI kills the squad-based mechanic. You're led down a set path from start to finish, and no amount of creativity in enemy design or story can save broken gameplay.
Graphics	82	With the right hardware, the game is visually appealing. Sure, it's a standard Xbox 360-to-PC port, but the lighting effects and shaders round out the grotesque atmosphere. There's nothing horrible, but “dark and spooky” has been done before, and with much better results.
Audio	73	Obligatory mood music is creepy, and the sound effects are all capable. It's a loud game, with frequent firefights and lots of otherworldly noises coming from enemies. Voice acting is often amateur, and the cheesy dialogue doesn't do much for the ridiculous story.
Technology	75	Again, it's a PC port of a console game. Minimal graphics options to tune performance mean that only those with a well-equipped PC need apply. With no support for hardware-accelerated or positional audio and high system requirements, it's apparent that minimal work was done to move this title to the PC.

OVERALL

There's little in Clive Barker's Jericho to support the namesake author's argument that games are an art form of the same caliber as cinema. Ironically, the story is better-suited to a summer Hollywood horror flick, and it falls flat as a premise for driving action in a video game. With a number of great releases on the horizon, there's no reason to let this aberration anywhere near your hard drive. For those keeping score, it's Roger Ebert: 1; Clive Barker: 0.

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