Clive Barker's Jericho (Xbox 360)

There are button-tapping God of War style action sequences that will result in you losing your head if you time them wrong.

Visually Jericho is appealing and to some (including me) it's not all that horrific, there were no times where I shouted loudly and jumped a foot off the chair (thank you Condemned!) - There were a couple of times I was heard to remark, ick, and: that's disturbing. It has a visual flair that could only come from the mind of Clive Barker in terms of level design, creatures and effects. These are all done without any slowdown and whilst the game isn't a fantastic looking one, it works for me.

The models and animations are all pretty decent; the Jericho squad look unique as well as having a wide range of actions that they can perform when you're not controlling them. They'll roll and dive as well as go into cover and duck behind available barricades. This leads me into the AI, now this is where I get irked with the game since it's a squad-based shooter and you need to keep certain members from going down during combat so you can keep the whole squad from ending up dead.

The AI on the enemy side does what it claims to do, it's vicious and it's not really concerned about its own safety - it charges in and tries to overwhelm you if it happens to be that kind of entity. If you're fighting a sneakier opponent then they'll take cover and attempt to flank the squad.

The team AI is for the most part again fairly decent, until there happens to be a detonating enemy and they all run over even though you've told them to stay put. They need a couple more days in the obedience school I think. I'm serious keep your squad back as much as you can and control Rawlings to make sure he doesn’t run up to one of those suckers.

You can also get taken down by friendly fire at times if you're not careful, especially from Frank Delgado…who seems to be the game's asshole anyway.

The music is suitably dramatic and does a good job of working to heighten tension and provide suspense. It has a suitable horror-esque score combined with a military up-beat.

The sound design is solid enough and the various sounds in the game all come across well. The weapons all sound like they're actually realistic rather than some other FPS' weak 'paf-paf' this is supposed to be a piece of military-hardware and not a pop-gun effects.

The voice acting varies from good to medium, there are no truly awful performances and whilst some of the random chatter from the Jericho's can be repeated a little too much it never really got on my nerves. I'd say one of the highlights of the game is listening to some of the banter between the squad, which is oddly enough similar to listening to the Marine banter in Halo 3 - which I loved, especially when you activated the IWHBYD skull.

I don't think the Jericho banter is quite as good as the Halo 3 Marine banter but it's by no means shabby.

Jericho clocks in about 12 to 15 hours of play depending on your style and there's probably enough replay-ability in terms of squad member switching to make you want to go back and try again using different powers and playing in a different style.

It's not a brilliant shooter, but by no means is it one that you should give a miss to.