Clive Barker's Jericho Demo - hands on.

This game is garbage.

Plain and simple.

It's a generic shooter, with a primary and secondary fire, ability to heal team mates and what not, but you only have set weapons, you must switch team members to use other weapons, which is just annoyingly stupid because some of the characters are terrible but have good weapons, you also have to switch party members at certain points to climb or do other things, the demo only had climb, but I waa left controlling the worst character in the game, probably, who have a handgun and a sword. The "secondary" sword kills everything with one hit, making the handgun useless. Seriously. One of the characters has a sniper rifle, but this is useless since you're in very tight caves and it fires so slowly you might as well stick to her secondary weapon... a handgun... how the handgun is both a primary and secondary weapon is beyond me, but there you go.

There was also a section that made use of context sensitive actions... basically, pressing a button when prompted too on screen as quickly as possible or your character dies. This has been used before, but never in a FPS and it just fails, because the point is that it's supposed to be for an epic, cinematic segment, no crawling down a hole in first person view where you can't see anything anyway.

Anyway, each character also has a primary and secondary magic ability, however, these are basically just trade offs for grenades and add very little.

The game drifts between being too dark and too red. There's parts of the game where you can't see anything and the flashlight just barely allows you to see about 1 foot ahead and places where the game is just red. Think the dark sections of Doom 3 mixed with the Oblivion gate sections of The Elder Scrolls IV. The game should be scary, but it's just bland and annoying so, because it looks nice.

The characters, caves, and even guns are well detailed, it is a nice looking game, it just suffers from poor animation. If you're looking for a next-gen Doom, this isn't it. It you're looking for a good horror FPS, this isn't it. The game just reeks of "done it before", but it's also been done better and with more care than this. Maybe calling it garbage is harsh, but that's what it feels like, the leftovers from other games... when I first saw the title screen, I instantly recalled another God awful and very recent FPS - The Darkness... in fact, this game reminded me a lot of that and I hate that game as well.

I don't think Clive Barker has enough draw to save this game in terms of sales and reviewers will tear it apart. Sorry, Clive, Codemasters and Mercurysteam Entertainment - better luck next time.