Having a big name writer associated with a gaming title, someone who's known the world over for his capacity to plumb the depths of depravity with each novel, you'd assume the chances of a successful merger between the two mediums would engender success. Not quite. Clive Barker's Jericho scores a solid flesh wound on some aspects but completely misses on others. Let's not forget one important factor: the gaming landscape's been rife with quality shooters recently so it's unfortunate that when squared up against the competition, Jericho lacks guts. For a title mired in its own copious amounts of blood, vomit and intestinal tracts, that's a telling sign.

Jericho plays like the kind of squad-based corridor shooter you've likely played many times over. Following the game design principle of long stretches of confined, formulaic level design mingled with the occasional open space, it's a slog through mostly recycled environments facing an enemy expressing dreadful artificial intelligence behaviours made even worse by your own moronic team members. Taking charge as Captain Ross, you're the leader of a clandestine seven-man military outfit versed in the arcane arts and trained to protect country and planet from paranormal threats called Jericho. It's your duty to take the team through mankind's more tumultuous periods in history in an effort to stop the Firstborn, an evil proto-deity creature from escaping God's own prison. Multiple attempts in past times have failed to forever stop this nefarious ancient from escaping so that's where your team of specialists come in to save the planet from eternal damnation.

The seven team members each have their individual weapons and skill sets. With magical abilities slowly unlocked with chapter progression, you'll find yourself controlling each of the characters, in turn categorising the seven team members from useful to mostly useless. Sgt. Frank Delgardo and Lieutenant Black were the only two I found using throughout the majority of the campaign, having between them long and close range capacity in the form of pyromancy abilities, the close-up ferocity of the Gatling gun, time slowing and the clearing power of grenades. Until a major point in the story occurs, the game plods along with a painful mundaness that would make an emo's life seem bright and chirpy in comparison. It's only after this important event occurs that Jericho allows you to progressively take control over each of the characters, allowing you the chance to play the game from multiple positions and class types. Separated into two squads, Alpha and Omega, squad are limited on holding position (which they seem to hate doing), moving forward (which they always do regardless) or moving them into specific places on the map. You'll soon be shocked in the knowledge that these commands are completely and utterly useless. Being a squad based shooter, that's a startling deficiency. Thanks to the game's simplistic level design, you'll inevitably take the lead, pouring around corners and meeting enemy's solo while the other squad members play catch up.

With the squad's compass fixed in the direction of the Firstborn, on the way you'll meet some inspired and beautifully constructed evil types no doubt catapulted fresh from the cess-pit of pain and misery that is Mr. Barker's dark imaginings. But that's where the admiration ends. AI is quite simply pitiful, on both camps. The enemy's tactical abilities are just about non-existent, preferring a headlong rush into overwhelming amounts over anything else. For the squad members, I'm being nice by just calling them a pack of imbeciles. It's not just the inaccuracy of their bullets that grates harshly on the nerves, or the moments of "Oh look, river of fire, let's all run in, then run around on fire...", nor the many friendly-fire incidences. It's the general lack of compulsion to use the special abilities in a fire-fight and the lack of foresight to back away rather than run right to an enemy you know will explode when in close proximity (to make matters worse, both teams can usually be found bunched up) that really starts to wear down the walls of patience. Then add the thin, veneer like characterisations placed on each of the team-members and you can't help but question the wisdom of having six cookie-cutter characters rather than two or three useful types that you'd actually give a damn about.

In a manner that just about comes as an apology from the developers for the lack of AI, you have the ability to resurrect downed team members. Being a shooter, there's no denying that dying is to be expected but Jericho takes death and its frequency to an all new high. Factoring in the appalling lack of AI, you'll be more often than not find yourself running about the boxed-in battlefield healing like crazy until you find yourself the last man standing, leading a Congo-line of baddies to the closest downed team member, only to be ripped a new hole from behind at the last moment. If one dies, it's no drama; simply walk up to the prone body, hit the A button and they are back to their ineffectual selves. If you all manage to die (which happens often as each squad member will somehow find themselves dead again seconds after being resurrected), you'll be then transported way back to the last infrequent, auto save checkpoint, making you repeat the whole experience again. That's not fun, but it sure is a fine display of a simplistic, dated and generic game design.

Having to repeatedly face just one of these immersion breakers alone wouldn't be that much of a problem but you keep piling on the annoyances and it all turns into a right bloody mess. A good example of that are the survival events. At any given moment, the game turns into a scripted button-bashing affair where failing to hit the correct sequence of buttons in a timely fashion will see you quickly dead. Thankfully, you can repeat these sequences ad nauseum until you happen to memorise which button comes up next.

In terms of the scare factor, I wanted to be scared. Truly, it was like I was forcing myself to jump out of my seat, ready to wipe away the sweat of trepidation and continue. Yes, I played it in absolute darkness. On the off chance that somehow, anything covered in blood and viewed past midnight would give it compulsory levels of scariness, I did just that. Nothing. No whimper, not even a moan disguised at the last moment by a solid cough. I blame that to a total and absolute lack of anything resembling an atmosphere. While the few ambient soundtracks added a semblance of body to the moodiness, the bland vocal acting and sound effects did nothing for the immersion factor.

Jericho seems guided by the principle that the more gore you pack into a scene, the scarier it becomes. Instead, you'll quickly become desensitized by it all, numbed if you will to the levels of pulsating meat and clouds of flies everywhere. For a game that should be seeping in gut-twisting vileness and given the participation of one of the world's more popular horror writers, this comes as the low blow to this horror fan. That's not to say that the visuals were not good. Some of the environments were given more attention than others, particularly evident when visiting the Roman time slice. With its towering columns and sweeping arches decorated beautifully in green foliage up high, while swimming in guts and blood below, it felt like one of the designers decided to have a wander down through the partially complete corridors and add a batch of blood here, and some more over there, then go, "Ah stuff it, let's just splash tons of the red stuff everywhere. That should make do." But there's a lack of context to the levels of gore which by the end of the game makes you feel like you've ridden on one of those long theme park ghost rides, being spat out the other end while shaking your head while mumbling to yourself, "...was that it?"

With the glut of quality titles recently hitting the local shelves, Clive Barker's Jericho is in the unfortunate position to sink and drown without a ripple. And that's without taking into consideration the few quality titles coming to our local shelves in the next eight or so weeks. The sad fact is, no amount of "could have beens" or "would have beens" explain what the hell happened to this title (which is a surprising disappointment, considering Clive Barker's previously solid foray into the gaming world titled Undying). It was a disjointed, inconsistent journey through a version of hell that should have been, well, scary as all hell.