Clive Barker Games: Jericho vs. Undying
Video Statistics and Information
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Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais
Views: 165,891
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Clive Barker, Undying, Jericho, Critique, Review, Retrospective
Id: FZpRXmfIdiA
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 44min 41sec (2681 seconds)
Published: Sat Oct 29 2016
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I love Undying. Played it a ton as a kid, alongside Half-Life 1 and Doom. To me it was just as fun as those other games, even though if looking back on it now it's not in the same tier.
If it was on Steam, I would buy and play Undying again in a heartbeat, even with its absurdly thick darkness and abundance of loading screens.
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I really just wish Jericho had better characters for combat. Outside of forced character levels, 50% of the time I played I used Abbey, and the other 50% was spent on Frank, who had both an insane damage gatling gun and an insane damage desert eagle. The ability to control sniper shots, and the fact that the gatling gun/deagle are very capable of headshotting, make them far more useful than the others.
The other characters were very niche and not terribly fun. Billie's damage wasn't amazing, Rawling's pistols just sucked, Jones' rifle/shotgun was adequate, and Cole was okay sometimes. Jones was just a puzzle character and Rawlings was just a healer.
I really did love the game though. Shame about never getting a second one.
Even after watching this video I'm still baffled as to why people give Jericho so much shit. It's a very liner shooter, I get it; characters are a cliche, okay; but it's a liner shooter with some stunning visuals and fun — for me at least — gameplay mechanics that hooked me from the beginning until the end.
It was enjoyable experience through and through until the very end, when it turned into shit with the final boss fight and the cliffhanger. People don't give CoD as much shit as they gave and keep giving to Jericho, but Barker's game at least showcases imaginary world likes of which we see pretty rare in gaming medium.
It probably wasn't what publisher hoped for, but at least it was fun and worth remembering. For me that is. I'd honestly pay $60 for a sequel and I don't even play story based shooters that much.
I think Clive Barker deserves to have one of his less action-oriented works adapted by a competent team. Imagine a book like Imajica being adapted by someone like Remedy or Naughty Dog. A sprawling adventure where the "the twist" could be something that simply floored players.
Based on this video it looks like Jericho has some really stunning visuals. It's a real pity that the apparently gameplay and the character writing is so terrible. Makes you wish somebody could just redo the game with better level design, because these locations look impressive even today.
Really makes me wish Noah would do I Have No Mouth/games doing literature adaptions. Or I think Eternal Darkness versus Call of Cthulhu would make an interesting versus. ETA or the gamesof American McGee.
Funny how this is one of my fav games ever, I loved that squad based gameplay, I remember constantly switching during battles and using their abilities non-stop, but I have to agree that the characters are absolutely bland and generic, although I liked it because it cut the dark and sinister ambient of that place, the imagery, story and enemy design scared the crap out of me at the time, never saw something like it again.
I know it's my opinion, but I can hardly see this game as an absolute piece of crap like most people make it out to be, hell, I recently learned that it's regarded as one of the worst games ever made (really? Can't games be just "regular" or "b-tier"), the ambient alone would justify a playthrough or at least a watch on YouTube.
I liked Jericho a lot, the shooting mechanics were fun, and the story was somewhat engaging without getting into CoD cliches. The package as a whole may have been underwhelming for most FPS players, but I just liked it. The linearity complaints boils down to the game being just a set of enclosed arenas, the way Serious Sam or Painkiller did.
Weirdly, I didn't mind Jericho all that much when I played it just three years ago, although I'll be damned if it's still not a slog of a game.