Surprisingly, on the whole, I actually agree with his general assessment. It goes with what I said - this is an attempt at a triple-A game by a non-triple-A developer, and it does feel like it sometimes forgets its own potential. However, I don't feel that the problems are major, obviously. A 6.5 seems quite low for how much fun I had despite the minor flaws.
However, not surprisingly, this review is by Kevin VanOrd, who I fucking hate and think is a complete idiot. I've hated this guy for a while, and hopefully the following points show him for the fuckwit that he is.
Then, add to the mix the game's most annoying (and annoyingly common) foes: demons that explode upon death. The things lumber along quickly and take down any nearby character when they fall. And, like most of Jericho's supersturdy enemies, they absorb a good number of bullets before they die. On its own, it's a perfectly legitimate enemy design. But in a game with six squad members and the most claustrophobic levels ever devised, it's the opposite of fun. You'll watch in horror as your entire squad goes down at once and you are powerless to stop the violence. Why would you create an enemy that needs to be taken down from a distance, in a game that doesn't let you distance yourself? Maybe it's meant to be a challenge, but in reality, it's just imbalanced and cheap. We suspect it's all done under the guise of being "tactical," but this is no tactical shooter. Enemies just mindlessly traipse toward you, so the extent of your tactics is switching between characters to use their abilities in tandem.
WRONG, dickwad. The exploding guys (who aren't demons, by the way, but corrupted cultists) can't "absorb a good number of bullets". They are, in fact, invincible. You can't kill them by depleting their health, only by shooting specific weak points on their bodies. No wonder you didn't like them. You were too stupid to figure out how to kill them.
The story itself never really takes advantage of all this thick, fearful ambience. The setup is pretty awesome on its own, though. In the beginning, God didn't create Adam and Eve--He created a sexless being known as the firstborn. Turns out that whole experiment didn't work out too well, and the thing got locked away in an alternate reality, where it occasionally gets too bored and tries to escape. The secretive Jericho squad exists to shove the firstborn back where it belongs. Too bad the script itself is just a thin slice of nonsense, featuring far too many hokey one-liners ("praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!") than good taste allows. And just when you are finally getting into it, the game ends with a lame boss fight without answering any of the main questions it raised. Leaving room for a sequel is one thing; creating a story that literally goes nowhere is something else entirely.
The story setup is actually pretty awful. It's been done before a jillion times in various forms. And the script itself is fine. His single quoted line is obviously supposed to be farse, which he plainly doesn't get, and while this stuff isn't going to win any awards, it's perfectly functional, occasionally amusing, and I never found anything annoying. Also, after the initial boring plot setup, what the game does with the plot is actually pretty fun, and while the ending is indeed terrible (cliffhanger city), it raises several points that actually make the concept of the plot seem far more intriguing than it did at any other point. So I can't agree with him there, either, though we can both agree that it was too abrupt and could have been handled better. I'd love to see a sequel based on where they went with it at the end.
He goes on to complain that certain animations for powers take too long, which is obviously subjective since I don't find that to be the case at all, bitches about the level design which I thought was mostly functional, if not particularly standout in any regard, and he complains that everything is very linear and close quarters, but that's where learning how to play the game properly would come in. I found myself dying from tight areas where my guys got killed, so I learned how to direct them and spread them out a bit. Problem solved. Complaining about that seems to me to be like complaining about having to click on things in an RTS game.
However, he's smart when he says that this is a love it or hate it game, because that's the truth, I just don't agree that you have to "see behind the shit" to get to the good stuff. I find the good stuff to be paramount, and the bad stuff mostly just stays in the background.
Anyway... I've rambled enough. Case in point, I don't agree, but I do agree. His general assessment taken as an overall thing is fairly accurate, he's just far too critical about certain elements and plainly doesn't understand why certain things are the way the are. He's done the same thing with several other reviews, so I don't find this surprising in the least.
EDIT - Oh, and the other point I forgot to add was that the PC version does not have long load times as this guy would have you believe. Mine were literally about 5 seconds long most of the time. If you can't wait that long, you have problems. I've heard the console times aren't so hot, though.
