”Beads of sweat dripped down my forehead as I stumbled through yet another darkened passageway. Gripping the blood-stained fire axe in my hands, I strained to make out any semblance of visual detail in the darkness, an underpowered and unreliable flashlight my only guide. To claim I had been the victim of a bad evening would be an understatement; having been thrown out a window, pushed down a flight of stairs, slapped around by a shovel, shot, bruised, poked, and framed for the murder of two police officers, my only comfort was in my newfound capacity to murder the drug-addled homeless that riddled the underside of the city. Those contemptible hobos had ruined my days for far too long, but now it was time for payback. Oh sweet, sweet payback...

Let’s be clear – I don’t have anything personal against the homeless. However, when a game is developed that focuses on non-stop waves of crack-heads coming at you brandishing any blunt or pointy objects within reach, one can’t help but take glee at the ability to brutally put them to death in a variety of sadistic and punishing ways. Such is the case with Condemned: Criminal Origins. Originally a launch title for the Xbox 360, the game has now been ported for use on the PC, and amazingly is one of the better ports I’ve seen.

In Condemned, you play Agent Ethan Thomas, an upstanding member of the FBI’s Serial Crimes Unit. Ethan has been dispatched to investigate an ever-increasing wave of crime and serial killings in the area. Crime is in fact on the rise to a downright chaotic degree, and Ethan is on a quest to try and determine the cause and how to put an end to it. This in turn leads to a series of unfortunate events such as those outlined above, and eventually Ethan ends up framed for the murder of two police officers, and is on the run not only from the pipe-brandishing homeless, but also his fellow law enforcement agents. There isn’t much else about the story I can go into detail about without spoiling some of the more interesting aspects to the game, but let’s just say that the pacing of the plot was such that I was eager to progress through just to determine what the next twist would be.

Gameplay:

Condemned is effectively summarized as an action / horror mix. Much like F.E.A.R. (the two games are actually based on the same engine I believe) there is a primary focus on the act of killing in a creative and brutal manner. To this end, the combat in the game has been tweaked to the point that this is by no means a generic first person shooter, and features a very well refined mix of melee and ranged combat action. In fact, the game’s environment is littered with objects that can be used as weapons – and hostile NPCs are aware of this too. During combat, it’s not unusual to find either yourself or an enemy running around wildly in search of a suitable implement of bludgeoning, such as ripping a pipe or conduit from a wall, or pulling out a desk drawer to beat some doped-up hobo over the head with before he breaks your knees with a sledgehammer.

And the combat in this game is grotesque, to say the least. Four basic combat moves are available by moving in a certain direction while attacking, as well as a generic “block” maneuver – and all of these need to be used to their fullest potential to gain the upper hand in combat, as due to a highly limited health margin, even a single enemy can almost spell disaster for an unprepared player (and believe me, the game will try to catch you by surprise around every corner). This just makes melee combat all the more satisfying however, as once you finally bash an enemy to his knees, you can proceed to either slap him silly until he finally gives up the ghost, or walk up to him and use the 1-4 keys to initiate one of four scripted finishing moves; my personal favorites being a mix between the head-butt (complete with a hazy after-effect once your foreheads collide – remember that this is all done in first person) and the sucker-punch to the temple. Even some of the more conventional weapons in the game have alternative uses – weapons like the fire axe and crowbar for example are not only good at splitting skulls, but are also required to get through certain doors, either to progress through the game or just access a secret area. A final point worth mentioning is the rechargeable tazer that Ethan always has ready in the off-hand, which will momentarily stun an enemy long enough to sneak in an attack or even steal his weapon.

Once the fire-arms came into play however, I was torn between joy and disappointment. There are a number of guns to play with, such as your basic pistol or revolver, a shotgun (a prerequisite for any game where you’re blindly stumbling around in the dark), hand cannon, and even a sub-machine gun, but here’s where the developers made a clear choice in favor of gameplay over realism – and I’m not quite sure it was the right one. First of all, all guns in the game are restricted in ammo by what’s in the gun. When picking up a weapon, you can push a button to cause Ethan to briefly pull out the clip and count the bullets to see how much is left, but once a gun is empty, it’s empty for good. Curiously however, NPCs (sometimes, at the least – I’ve seen variations) often carry an unlimited supply of ammo, as they can empty an entire clip, pause to visually reload, and then begin offloading in your direction again. So apparently, our highly trained FBI investigator didn’t actually take it upon himself to learn how to reload a weapon or carry additional clips with him.

This moves us nicely onto the next problem – Ethan only knows how to carry one weapon at a time. Any time you pick up something new, be it a tiny water pipe or a hefty shovel, the existing item will be dropped in favor of it. This often made for some really awkward gameplay situations, as I was forced to temporarily throw my .45 pistol to the ground in favor of (for example) a sledgehammer, go through several rooms to open a door, then run all the way back because I didn’t want to lose my fully-loaded weapon. Which ultimately doesn’t count for much anyways, as weapons don’t carry through level transitions. Thankfully, each level is quite sizable and lengthy.

Speaking of length, I hate to say it, but Condemned suffers the same problem as most other shooters of this kind – it has an interesting storyline and fantastic scripted events, but can also be beaten in a weekend. Counting my skills as an FPS gamer, there was only one part in the game where I had to actually reload more than once, and this was during one of the final battles where I was stripped of most of my other equipment anyways and couldn’t rely on my cheesy “tazer a guy in the balls and then whack him upside the head with a 2x4” tactics anymore. For a game with no multiplayer and a rather linear path, this is harsh news indeed – at the very least, some kind of co-op play would have been novel (one segment involving a mirror shows that they even went to the effort of giving Ethan a complete proper range of external player model animations), though I really did appreciate the unlockable concept art / production footage. Seeing beta / alpha versions of a game I’ve just beaten always makes my geek senses tingle.

Moving on to the subject of graphics, words cannot express the joy I feel in the fact that I just recently made the plunge to a top of the line graphics card. I was proudly able to jack everything in this game up to maximum on my Radeon X1800XL, and the game simply flew Aside from some hitches loading new areas, the game seemed to keep a constant 60FPS, and I consider this a significant thing simply due to the beauty of Condemned. Granted, the game’s tightly focused (and very dark) environments gives the developers a very generous level of breathing room for doing stuff behind the scenes to make the game run better, but an insane use of bloom and shader effects made the game look very pretty in my eyes. Granted, this is coming from someone who purposely purchased a Xion II case just because it looks all glowy, but I feel this is definitely one of the better looking first person titles I’ve ever played, and it really shows what potential the next generation of gaming can bring us.

Not to mention the cutscenes. In fact, every facet of animation in this game has obviously been the subject of some considerable production effort, and while the movements sometimes look a little funny or odd, everything is for the most part very smooth and lifelike. This is all the more true while playing through the game however, as the developers even took to the effort of implementing these animations in the first person mode too. Every action you take will have some kind of visual response from Ethan, be it watching his hands as he climbs a ladder, to the evident emotions of feeling and surprise at getting ambushed by some jerk with a shovel and toppling down an entire flight of stairs, head over heel. It eventually got to the point where I was literally cringing every time something painful happened to my protagonist, simply because the level of feedback was conveyed so perfectly. At the same time, it’s also worth mentioning that this level of appreciation can be completely subjective, and players who are less inclined to become deeply immersed in the games they play may find some of the scripted events annoying (like not being able to manually jump, but instead having to hit the Use button for each scripted action – i.e. “Climb through window” or “Jump down hole”).