Topic: Mercury Steam and Clive Barker's Jericho

[Ratty]

Recently I decided to try out a demo for Clive Barker's Jericho, which has been on my steam "wishlist" (really more a "curious about list") for years, and was surprised to see Mercury Steam's name pop up on the opening. Intrigued, I looked up Mercury Steam's history on mobygames and gamefaqs and found that they had apparently made only one game prior to this ("American McGee Presents SCRAPLAND") and followed it up immediately with Lords of Shadow. As such this title could probably be considered the "demo" that impressed Konami enough to give MS the keys to the Castlevania franchise. Which I figured a lot of people here might find interesting. Though those who are big fans of MS no doubt already knew it.

As for my thoughts on the demo well.... In spite of the scathing review from Zero Punctuation from when the game came out seven years ago, I figured now that it's $5 (or $3 if you catch it on a sale) rather than $60 it might be worth a play. All I can say from the few minutes I played the demo is no, no it doesn't seem to be worth $5.
The game looks nice enough, but the characters were grating from the get go "I'd rather be doing anything else right now." being one randomly spit quote. Also worth noting is that the female members of this specialist military team seemed to be wearing "catsuites", which appeared distractingly out of place in a horror game where the guy (the only one in the demo) was in gigantic bulky armor. The squad based gameplay immediately gave me flashbacks to the horrible cover shooting in the Mass Effect games, though I'm sure it's not actually that bad. It seems like something that would be a camp classic if it had co-op, but as it is it might just be very unfun.

Here is the official trailer btw, though it's just a pre-rendered cinematic that doesn't begin to show off how cheesy the game seems to be.
Clive Barker's Jericho Trailer

If there's anyone here who's played the game, what did you think of it? And am I wrong? Does it get better/is the demo unrepresentative? I seem to remember Painkiller had an absolutely awful demo that put me off trying the game for a long time so such things happen. It would be interesting if anyone could spot some artistic things carried over to LoS.

PS- For the record, I liked "The Thief of Always" and "Twilight at the Towers" (a cool Cold War espionage/werewolf short story) but thought Hellraiser 1 was boring. Don't really have any other experience with Clive Barker stuff that I know of.

[beingthehero]

The horrible a.i. is extremely amusing at first but then it will just give you a headache if you try to force yourself to play further into the game. It's also extremely linear as fuck in terms of level design but I guess in lords they were able to excuse themselves with "IT'S LIKE THE OLD GAMES TRUE FANS WILL KNOW THIS".

I guess the exceptional amount of gore is interesting but then again Nanobreaker had that too and both are disasters. Maybe that's not really a plus.

I heard scrapland also blew but i've never bothered to play it myself.

[Kingshango]

Jericho is one of the worst games I've played this gen (or rather last gen, it still feels weird saying that.)  and it shocked me how decent Lords of Shadow turned out in comparison.

I heard mixed reactions about Scrapland but I hear that it's mediocre overall but it's not bad.

Before they were Mercurysteam, they were Rebel Act and developed the game Severance Blade of Darkness back in 2001, which I hear is a very good hack & slash RPG. Some have compared it to Demons/Dark Souls gameplay wise and It even developed it's own cult following as of late.