With the release of the titanic XBox-360 Monolith productions brought to the front line condemned, a spine chilling horror game, where you are placed in the streets of the unfriendly city of all, filled with lunatics, psychopaths, serial killers, and the odd bypasser wielding a fire-axe. But the only thing on their mind is the thirst for blood, and you’re the number one dish!
The star of this game is an F.B.I agent named Ethan Thomas, you help him unravel the serial crimes in the slums, he is quite the popular FBI agent, and so far very successful. Well that is until you start the game and you’re told to investigate a serial-murder of a bloody kind involving a lady, and a metal chain wrapped around her. Shortly after examining the body, you are on a chase into the building following the suspect, but after your encounter with a couple of weapon wielding maniac's you are then framed for the death of your fellow police officers. Yes that’s right, the name of the game is, get your name cleared, and find that suspect who stole your gun and messed up your whole day. As the game progresses a lot more things get more complicated, one after another. But it still keeps the game interesting and makes sure your still on the edge of your seat.
Condemned plays well all the way through as a good action-horror, half of the time I found myself whelping and screaming through the game, well most of the scary parts, the frights are very unpredictable, and the whole ambient of the game adds to the effect making it a constant bone chiller. During the game you are constantly kept updated by friends helping you, once you found clues you send them to your headquarters where your trusted friends are helping you to clear your friend. Every so often the puzzles add to the game play, but you might find yourself wanting to skip the puzzle just so you can go to the next blood thirsty encounter. The finishing moves add an extremely gory concept to the overall game play, as you bash and hack at your enemies once they drop to a low health rating, they will wobble around and get on their knee's dazed you are then given different options which you can execute your victims with, and take our word for it. They aren’t pretty. At times in the game I found myself slowly turning evil and demonstrating each and every finishing myself.
Every mentally ill person is included in this action-horror, you name it, this has it and they aren’t dumb. Your enemies will run around in the dark, sneak up on you, attack from behind. This keeps the game play very fresh, they will use their surroundings to their advantage, and wait for you to come around the corner to make you say hello to Mr. Metal pipe. The enemies don’t go easy on you either, and medi packs are very sparse so you really need to learn how to block and fast because it becomes a great advantage in fights against tougher enemies. Once you block an attack it stuns the enemy for a small amount of time which you can then attack.
Added to your inventory of top notch gadgets is a tazer, which can be used to temporarily stun an enemy, or simply blast his weapon out of his hand, this helps a lot during battles, but it does have a recharge time of a few seconds, but most of the game you will be finding yourself just using the hand-to-hand weapons as they seemed the most effective. There are firearms in the game such as pistols and other weapons, but since ammo is so very uncommon around the levels, it makes your handguns seem very pointless once you have had your fun with it. The replay factor on this game didn’t really appeal to me because once you have seen it, you've seen it so it makes the second time very boring and predictable. But the game does leave a lot of achievements to unlock on the X-Box 360 version, but unfortunately is not included in the PC version. But this is definitely worth it to add to your collection of horror games, and can sit respectably besides your copy of F.E.A.R since they are in the same league.
The graphics in this game do that their asked to do, the whole game is a very dark based game, and the lighting plays a treat in setting the mood, at one point I was very tempted to raise the brightness of the game just so I could see all the clues, the levels are very brilliantly made if not very linear, there was never a really big area to explore. Most times you were in the building in the dark, nothing but a tiny torchlight to brighten your way. Objects can be moved, kicked, doors can be hacked down so it creates a wide variety of things you can do to the level. It’s also quite impressive when the enemy AI hides behind any pillar of piece of wood they can find to sneak up on you.
One small mention, this game is definitely not for the faint-hearted, the bizarre props, sinister room additions and blood, and we mean, lots, and lots, and lots of blood. Blood over the walls, the carpets, the roof, heck you even find dismembered pieces of body’s laying around the buildings you have to interrogate. Admittedly the character expressions could have some work done to them, and the textures could use a touch up since nearly every single building uses the same wall texture, but you will hardly ever notice this when running around the building with blood dripping from your axe.
Sound gives a big treat to the players, it is an amazing asset to the whole game, and really can put you off guard. When just wandering around the buildings the sound will keep you on edge constantly, you will feel threatened everywhere you go expecting something will jump out at you so it proves very unpredictable. There is a constant ambient between each level you play, and the sound is so crisp clear you can hear the sounds of psycho's running across the floor boards. As most players have probably heard from F.E.A.R there are a lot of moments where the sound will shoot shivers up your spine. This happens a lot in Condemned to good effect, you really are torn between a choice of if you really want to continue the game, or just to give up and shove on the closest light hearted film you can find to calm your nerves. There is no multiplayer option available in Condemned but their really wouldn’t be any interest in it, it’s not one of those games which you can play with the friend. So sorry guys no Time Crisis style play here.
There is no such difference between the Xbox-360 Version and the PC version, graphics and frame rate hold up very well in both versions. No real slow downs were noticed. The only obvious difference was the achievements which you can unlock using the Xbox-360 to gain more gamer score. I did find it easier to control on the PC version especially with fast reactions to look around my surroundings. But the Xbox version is easier to control when using buttons to trigger gadgets.
Monolith succeeded in making a great game, it’s scary, engaging, exciting, interesting, and just purely damn fun at times all at once, but the levels you have to play are extremely linear the puzzle's are quite straight forward, and don’t provide that great a challenge. Admittedly the game can be quite frustrating looking for that one well hidden crucial clue which can make the game a bit boring, but that is about it.
