Game Review: Condemned: Criminal Origins (XBox 360)

Condemned: Criminal Origins is among the first wave of Xbox 360 games, and it represents the system's first foray into the horror genre. As such, I found it to be largely successful. The game has the morbidity of a Thomas Harris novel, and occasionally approaches the far-out creepiness of a Silent Hill game.

Condemned can only be loosely classified as a "first person shooter;" there are a few guns with a few bullets scattered around, but the game is almost exclusively about melee combat. This gives it an entirely different flavor than typical run-n'-gun games like Doom 3, and contributes nicely to the paranoid and scary atmosphere that this game pulls off so well.

Condemned has an eerie plot, which could have been lifted straight from the pages of a respectable horror/thriller novel. You play as Ethan Thomas, an FBI agent on the trail of a serial killer called "The Matchmaker." You arrive at the scene of his latest crime only to find that he's still there. After an unsuccessful chase, Ethan has his gun stolen by the killer and ends up framed for the murder of two cops.

The rest of the game has Ethan frantically trying to track the killer down while evading the police. As if that weren't bad enough, there is an unexplained outbreak of violent behavior, and there are citywide cases of people turning into raving, psychotic lunatics. While contending with the latter from one ramshackle locale to another, Ethan himself begins to suffer from strange delusional episodes. Unfortunately, the final chapters and ending of the game leave the player with more questions than answers, and I found myself wishing that the game's events had been explained and wrapped up a bit more conclusively.

Ethan's investigation will take him through a series of gloomy, abandoned areas full of dangerous whackos. Your job as a player is to find clues leading to the serial killer while dispatching the crazy locals who will attack you on sight. You begin each level armed only with a flashlight, but you'll find that many items in the trash-strewn areas can be used as weapons; pipes, lengths of rebar, boards with nails, and even locker doors or mannequin arms will make handy bludgeons in a pinch. You can only carry one weapon at a time, so if you're presented with another, the HUD will let you know if it is better or worse than your current weapon in terms of damage, reach, speed, and blocking effectiveness.

You may come across a gun from time to time, but they're often not even worth picking up, since they may contain as few as 1 or 2 bullets, and they make poor melee weapons when empty. Rather than become a typical, frenetic "frag-fest" shooter, Condemned forces you into the disturbingly personal act of bashing your enemies with blunt objects. As a macabre added bonus, the game presents you with the opportunity to perform "finishing moves" on dazed enemies. A menu pops up and you can choose to snap the enemy's neck or perform a vicious head butt, among other things.

The gameplay formula in Condemned works fairly well. You move through levels while fighting enemies and finding clues to further the story/investigation. Progress is automatically saved at checkpoints, and health can be restored with medical kits. But there are some issues that make this creepy investigation a little more cumbersome than it should be. For one thing, Ethan's movements feel a bit sluggish both during combat, and while traversing the game's levels. While the limited sprint function helps slightly, I found myself frustrated, simply wishing that my character could move faster.

And while the game does a pretty good job of guiding you through the levels (even going so far as to mysteriously lock certain doors behind you) I still found myself going around in circles in some of the larger, more labyrinthine areas. A "map-as-you-go" feature, similar to those used in Silent Hill 4 or Elder Scrolls: Oblivion would have been immensely helpful in this game. Also, I found it annoying that you can only carry one weapon at a time.

Certain doors require certain weapons to open, such as sledgehammers and fire axes. So when you come to such a door, you will need to run around until you find the necessary weapon. And if you had to drop a weapon you really liked to pick up a hammer or an axe, then you will probably want to run all the way back to where you dropped it so you can reclaim it. This leads to a lot of tedious backtracking, especially annoying considering Ethan's slow walking pace. It wouldn't be realistic to expect Ethan to become the walking arsenal found in so many shooter games, but it would be really helpful if he could carry, say, two melee weapons, or maybe one melee weapon and one firearm.

An interesting deviation from the action and exploration in Condemned can be found in the game's forensic investigation sequences. These are parts of the game that prompt you to pull out Ethan's CSI gear to find clues. Ethan carries an assortment of high-tech investigation tools like a gas spectrometer, and an infrared beam that reveals otherwise-invisible fingerprints and blood stains. Once you locate something with these, you can then photograph it and transmit the image for analysis via cell phone to Ethan's trusted contact at the FBI crime lab.

These sequences are mainly used to move the story along with expository information. The cell phone conversations also serve to break up the monotony and loneliness of wandering through gloomy levels. But these sequences can be a bit irritating. In some cases, the investigation prompt will lead you to bonus items that aren't central to the plot, such as the dead birds hidden throughout the game for completionists to find.

Other times, these sequences simply feel contrived because the game basically takes you by the hand and leads you step by step through the forensic investigations, even telling you when you're leaving the area in which a clue is located. In spite of this, it can still be frustratingly difficult to find exactly what you're looking for. And I was even killed a couple of times when trying to toggle back to my weapon after getting attacked while following some invisible mark on the floor.

While the control scheme in Condemned is fairly simple, the combat takes some getting used to. The right trigger swings your weapon, and the left trigger blocks. Additionally, you can deliver a kick by clicking down on the right thumbstick, and you have a taser to stun enemies with, though it takes about ten seconds to recharge between uses. So the key to successful combat involves a well-timed mix of stunning, swinging then kicking for a free hit, and blocking the inevitable counterattack. The timed blocking is tricky, and takes some practice.

The enemies in this game aren't zombies, per se. The instruction manual describes them as "… everyday people that are missing their inhibitions towards malevolent compulsions…" As such, they exhibit a certain degree of rationality that makes them formidable - and pretty damn scary. For one thing, they can pick up and use all the weapons that you can, including the guns. They will even switch weapons if they see a better one. They are more than capable of blocking and countering your attacks.

And they don't just line up to be shot or bashed. Rather than attack head-on, they will often scurry away into another room, and wait quietly in ambush. If you find yourself in a U-shaped corridor, they may run away only to come back around and attack you from behind. If there is more than one enemy, they might team up against you, or they might just as easily go after each other, leaving you to finish off the winner. Needless to say, it adds greatly to the experience when the enemies have good A.I., and it creates a feeling of panic when you know you're facing multiple, intelligent opponents.

Condemned has excellent graphics, though it isn't designed to be a visual showboat because nothing in the game looks pretty. The game's levels are all very dark, and all locations are shabby and run-down. While some games might use darkness and squalor to mask mediocre visuals, Condemned uses them to create atmosphere while maintaining an impressive amount of visual detail. Rust, peeling paint, scratches, and dents can be seen on walls and individual objects. Trash and graffiti are everywhere, further adding to the game's unsettling mood. Writing can be made out on cardboard boxes, if one cares to look closely, and light reflects realistically off of surfaces.

The enemy characters are equally detailed. While some enemies look relatively normal (as delusional psychopaths go), others show some extremely disturbing character design details. Notable examples include emaciated, grayish women with long hair and tattered dresses, guys who look like they've been burned and wrapped in metal wires, people in an abandoned department store who dress like the mannequins and make masks out of the mannequin heads, and a maniacal school lunch lady boss character that looks something like Leatherface. Such grisly visual details contribute greatly to the game's creep-out factor.

Condemned satisfies in the sound department as well. The voice acting isn't going to win any awards, but it does the job. The music is usually very minimal and subdued, as befits a game like this. But at certain tense moments, it builds to a cacophony of strange instruments, including what sounds like a didgeridoo. The sound effects, however, are where Condemned really shines.

The incoherent cursing of enemies, and the brutal clangs and thumps of combat come through with disturbing clarity. Footsteps sound differently depending on the terrain being walked on. And you can actually locate enemies by sound. Even with the stereo sound on my Television, I could hear enemy grunts and footsteps and could tell which direction they were approaching from. And somehow, when enemies were behind me, it actually sounded like they were behind me. I can only imagine how good this game would sound when hooked up to a Dolby decoder and some surround speakers.

Ultimately, Condemned is a horror title that demands to be played in the dark, but makes you want desperately to turn the lights on. And that's a very good thing. The game contains plenty of "jump scares," like breakaway floors and enemies that pop up out of nowhere, but it's also creepy on a different level thanks to the compelling plot and the dark visual style. Condemned is all about atmosphere, and everything from the disturbingly detailed imagery to the sometimes-pointless forensic investigations help to create it.

The game looks and sounds very impressive, which makes it all the more immersive. It's clear that the developers put a lot of effort into the game's AI, making for tough enemies that you actually need to be afraid of. The replay value is moderate. Players can choose to replay any level from a menu, and each level has several dead birds, metal pieces, and other bonus items hidden throughout. Finding all or most of them will earn achievement points.

As for my gripes, I wish Ethan could move faster. I also wish that he could carry more than one weapon at time, and that there was some sort of mapping or navigation system in place. While these changes might arguably make the game less realistic, they would certainly cut down on the amount of backtracking and moving in circles during gameplay. I also feel that more could have been done with the hallucination sequences. They represent an opportunity to really mess with reality and freak the player out.

But these segments were far between, and consisted mainly of taking out a few extra enemies against a surreal black and white backdrop. On the whole, though, Condemned is a scary, fun title. It's definitely worth a look for connoisseurs of the horror genre, or anyone else looking for a good action title. First-person shooter fans should be advised that Condemned has slower pacing, and far less trigger-happy gunplay than what they're used to. Bearing this in mind, Condemned: Criminal Origins is a solid title that should not disappoint.