Melee. Forensics. Hobos. A winning combination.



I initially played the original Condemned game after hearing it mentioned in a Zero Punctuation review. I had a blast beating crazies to death with random weapons of opportunity while desperately trying to preserve my own sanity.

Since I read about Condemned 2 coming out a while back, I have seen very little, if any, advertisements for it. The only way for me to find things about the game was to look it up directly myself. I saw no commercials, no ads on webpages, even the store I bought the game from yesterday had not a single piece of material showcasing Condemned 2’s release. Why? Is Sega and Monolith just counting on the old fans of the original to hype the game by word of mouth? I found the whole thing very odd.



Anyways on to the game.

You return to Condemned 2 in the role of ex SCU agent Ethan Thomas, wallowing in squalor after being suspended 11 months prior from his last derelict trip into hobo town assumedly due to your drinking or the fact that you left one too many bodies last time. Apparently your old ‘friend’ Vanhorn has gotten himself into a pickle and the SCU comes to you to help them figure out what is going on. I won’t go too much into plot as to spoil the story for anyone.



The original Condemned faced a lot of criticism for its bland first person combat and boring forensic gameplay and it seems, so far, that the developers took all of the complaints to heart and drastically improved in many areas.

Combat:

The combat in C2 is the same first person. melee dominated, bum fight that is was in the first game with a few new tricks up its sleeve. One thing I always disliked in the first Condemned was the blocking technique, you could lift your weapon for a second to defend an incoming attack, but if you did it to soon your arms would apparently get too heavy to hold up and you would lower your block. I understood the idea behind the mechanic, but it was unrealistic and became a nuisance to me. C2 fixes this problem by offering two options, Block and Parry. Like the original, if you lift your arms to defend yourself in time with an attack you will parry the attack and send the bum recoiling open for a counter attack. The addition of Block allows you to keep your hands up as long as you want but it wont recoil the attacker. I think that Stamina comes into play later in the game which will affect how long you can block though.

Another new addition is the use of combos in your melee combat. Using combos increases the amount of damage you do exponentially depending on the combo you do. There are also chain combos which you can use once you fill up your combo meter. When you unleash a chain combo, the game slows down and throws some quick time events at you that you have to follow in order to complete the devastating combo. Along with combos is the cool addition of environmental finishing moves. Unlike the original, where if you got a crazed bum to his knees you were presented with 4 choices on how to execute him, C2 offers a new twist. If you get a domicile challenged nut job to his knees you are able to put the fucker in a chokehold and once you do this then you are presented with a myriad of options on how to end the poor bastards life. Options include slamming the persons head thru a TV, throwing him over a guardrail over an overpass, or drowning his ass in a toilet.



I have read that guns play a bigger part in C2, and there is also an option to play in an un-lockable “FPS Mode” from the start menu, so I guess I’ll have to see what happens with that. This is the first time I have played a game on Hard difficulty the first play thru, and at some points it takes me many attempts to pass a certain area, but it is always fun.

Forensics:

Vast improvements have been made to the forensics gameplay in C2. Instead of the hand-holding type of work you did in the original, C2 deepens the aspect of crime scene investigation and has it affect gameplay as well, or at least level score. In C2 when you come upon a crime scene that needs investigating you will be given a certain task to complete, Identifying a Body for example. You will then be given a certain number of clues you must locate in order to solve the given task. Depending on which clues you choose to use and how you interpret each clue will affect your forensic score for each crime scene which in turn affects your level score and rating.



One thing I don’t quite understand as of yet is the use of these sonic emitters. They don’t seem to have any basis in the game other than the protagonist telling you to destroy them because they are arbitrarily bad. Perhaps it is an artificial way to lengthen gameplay or add achievement points, I will have to wait and see.

Graphics and Gameplay:

Does it make one a sissy to be scared by a game? Well then call me Sissy Laroue because this game scares the crap outta me. The designers do this thing every once in a while where you will enter an area and see a bum or grease monster from Return of the Living Dead run past you or towards an area you can’t reach yet. This to me is genius, it puts me in the state of always going…. “Shit I know something is here… fuck… where is it… shit shit shit!!” There is a part early in the game where you are chasing Vanhorn down in order to figure out what the hell is going on, you end up in this room that is covered in this black tar, grease shit and you can’t see shit since the game is already dark to begin with. The graphics are definitely a step up from the first game, while some of the object models appear to be straight ports from the first game, I can’t help but feel dirty after only playing the game for a few minutes. The graphics are much grittier and dirtier, and the realism is much better in C2.



Quick time events seem to play a crucial role in C2. Aside from combat there are these times where you have an opportunity to respond verbally to a given situation. There is a time during the second mission where you get separated from the SCU swat guys you are teamed up with and one guy makes a comment over the radio that “He’ll be fine, he lives in this filth”, and if you respond in time, you make the comment “Fucking Dick.” These quick time events may or may not play a crucial role in the outcome of the situations, I don’t know yet since I have yet to miss a response. They do though affect your level score which in turn effects the upgrades you get after each level, whether it be brass knuckles or a flak vest.

The level design can get a little confusing at times and I have found myself backtracking on accident a few times already and this is mainly due to the darkness and shitty flashlight, just be thankful the enemies don’t respawn in areas like this.

So far this game is exactly what I had hoped it to be, a scary.. dirty bum brawl with some CSI thrown in for puzzle fans. It takes all things that were great in the first game and makes them better while also fixing the things that were hindering the original.


I have yet to try out multiplayer so I can’t comment on that as of yet.