With the new purchase of my Xbox 360 Halo Edition I was able to download and play the Jericho Demo over the weekend. There was an option at the beginning of the game to get more info on the Jericho game. It was a little movie that caught you up to speed and gave a brief overview of all the members on the team. The team is really diverse and it looks like you will be able to put all to good use.

The most difficult thing for me to review the demo was that you jumped into the game already deep into the story. The devs decided to dump you well into the game. The big part of Jericho will be the story and how it will drag you into the darkness kicking and screaming. I did feel compelled to play it but might have been more compelled if I started out the game at the beginning. Either way I went into the ruins with three members of the squad:

Church is a stealthy Katana wielding Blood Seer. She can root the enemies with her spells in the game as well as cut them viciously with her sword.

Delgado is a heavy weapon specialist that just happens to be able to throw fireballs at the enemy to dispatch them quickly. To me, Delgado was my personal favorite.

Black is the sniper of the group. She totes her custom sniper rifle that she can use her telekinesis on the rounds in mid air. This is a rather vicious ability for a sniper to well place shots. Her telekinesis also came in handy for moving rubble around to gain passage to otherwise closed pathways.

Switching from character to character was rather easy and was done through the D-pad. The game tells you when certain characters are more useful if you pay attention to the other characters in game. For example, I came to a place that I wasn’t very sure how to traverse. Shortly after I heard “Church, move your Ass!” Ok….I then knew that I had to jump to Church.

As far as the fright factor of the game, it was well met and might have been a little better if I was able to play from the beginning. The controls were sound as well as the graphics. I got the feeling in some of the sections of the game that the graphics could have been a little better for a next gen machine. I never have been really uptight about graphics in games as long as they had the game play down.

In the end, the demo was well done if not short. It did leave me wanting for more. At this point it is still hard for me to tell you if the game is a buy or a rent. But it is one or the other. If you are a FPS or a horror fan you are not going want to miss Clive Barker’s Jericho.