Before Adam and Eve, there was the Firstborn, abandoned by God and imprisoned in an abyss. Four times throughout history the Firstborn has tried to puncture its way out of its prison, and four times it has been beaten back by a team of seven warriors, taking a chunk of orphaned time with it. Now, once again, a breach has opened in a desert in the Middle East, and it’s up to the seven-member Jericho Team to travel backward through these slices of time — fighting anyone unlucky enough to have been caught in them — and deliver the Firstborn’s last rites.

High-concept and high-action from beginning to end, Jericho is far closer to Gears of War and Painkiller than to Condemned, but it’s darker and gorier than all three combined. Outfitted with traditional weapons ranging from grenade launchers to Japanese swords, each member of the Jericho team also boasts paranormal combat abilities — including astral projection, pyromancy, telekinesis, and even the power of resurrection.

So, while the usual rules apply when facing multiple waves of enemies, the supernatural elements add a fresh, macabre dimension to team tactics: As the incorporeal, body-hopping Captain Devin Ross, you can order Delgado, for example, front and center to thin out a herd with his minigun and then resurrect him from a position of cover every time he dies. That’s the kind of weird tactic you’ll find yourself coming up with constantly throughout the game, and if switching bodies and manipulating five or six weapon and power combos in the space of a few seconds sounds like a lot to manage, it is. But if you can parallel-park a Warthog, you’ll get used to it in no time.

Jericho is too often sandbagged by patronizing design decisions obviously intended to keep you switching characters (an opponent may, for instance, inexplicably refuse to die until you switch to a particular team member), and interminable spawning from the same locations degrades many battles. But the latter may not be such a bad thing after all: it’s endless fun to switch tactics and experiment with different combinations of powers and weapons for crowd control, so despite the somewhat limited 11 to 12 hours of play, you can start again from the beginning – like we did – when you’re finished, and not replay the same battle at any point.

ON XBOX 360

+ Superbly executed controls and clever occult powers.

+ Unprecedented levels of cruelty and gore.

- Tedious respawning…and where the hell is multiplayer? Not here, we say.

? Couldn't the Big Guy Himself have lent a hand?

7.5