Barker plus game equals arse. There, we said it. There’s no reason that this should be the case when you think about it, though – after all, Barker, in our humble opinion, may just be the best horror and dark-fiction writer this country has ever produced, and games… well, games are good aren’t they? Playing Jericho, though, is a refreshing experience; for the first time ever, Barker plus game equals… very nice indeed, actually.

Describing Jericho as nice, though, is a bit like describing Satan’s anus as congenial – the game is chock-full of shiny disgust in just about every category of bodily secretion. All of your staple runny liquids are present and correct: blood, pus, sick, poo and plenty that we couldn’t actually categorise. This, along with extensive use of the fword, strong sexual references and the kind of body-shock gore that will make your toes curl and your nails slowly peel off, means that Jericho is a very adult game. This being the case, will anyone born after 1989 stop reading now! Go on… turn to page 95 and read about Spider-Man: Friend Or Foe instead.

Okay, now we can get on with the gory details. The ‘Firstborn’ was God’s greatest mistake; a being that preceded man; a prototype gone badly wrong. Jealous of the life on Earth that man has acquired through God’s generosity, he means to wreak his revenge. He dwells in an ancient city – Al Khali – that rises from the Middle Eastern desert in every time period in human history in which evildoers seek the Firstborn’s power. The Firstborn uses each appearance of the city to steal a ‘time slice’ from mankind and with each reappearance, the slices he’s nicking are getting bigger. A LOT bigger. The Firstborn’s plan is to bring the entire human world into his. Al Khali contains several of these time slices, each having an eventual goal and a boss. The boss holds the key to the rift leading back in time to the next slice and the man himself. It’s a nice idea and has allowed MercurySteam to implement some interesting scenarios, from World War II to the Crusades to ancient Rome; each with its own set of freaks to massacre.

Jericho is an FPS, but instead of ‘one man versus the world’-style gameplay, you have a squad of seven. Each member of your team or ‘Jericho Squad’, possesses not only different weaponry and markedly differing play styles, but also has a couple of magical, psychic or technological abilities that will give you a much-needed upper hand during battles. When we consider that their powers include astral projection, timeslowing, healing, telekinesis, incineration and rooting your enemies to the spot, we found this element of the gameplay to be surprisingly well balanced.

Your main character is Captain Devon Ross, and we don’t think we’ll be spoiling the plot for you too badly if we tell you that he dies very early on, facilitating the ability to possess other members of your team. It’s a cool mechanic that not only allows for the ability to switch at will between combatants, but also makes for some pretty interesting banter between Ross and his various hosts. There are many times during the game where an individual or mini-group is separated, either intentionally or by chance, from the main pack. By dissecting the team in a variety of different ways, wholly new battle dynamics emerge, cleverly teaching you important battle-strategy lessons that can be carried through and used when you rejoin the rest of your squad. Jericho very rarely forces you to occupy just one particular individual, though. More to the point, you can pretty much spend most of the game occupying the same team member if you have a particular favourite. Our chosen one was Abigail Black, the telekinetic sniper who can control the path of her bullets in slow-mo, after they’ve been fired; satisfaction guaranteed.

Visually, Jericho is a mixed bag. On the one hand, your enemies all look uniformly awesome, if awesome means shiny, disgusting and bleeding black sick from their eyes, that is. On the other hand, though, quite a few of the environments look a bit blocky and thrown together. What’s more, everything in this game is shiny. Of course, one could argue that vomit and faeces are generally shiny, but the omnipresent sheen often leaves you wondering why. Also, while the plot canters along nicely for the most part, we simply couldn’t fathom why the game ends as it does. Obviously, we can’t tell you what is precisely wrong with the ending, so instead we encourage you to buy it and see for yourselves. Flaws aside, Jericho is a polished product – polished till it’s shiny as hell.

Dan Howdle