Another day, another golden oldy!



To sum up :

Shit, Utter shit.

that is all.. wait? you mean I need to say more? ok...

Condemned 2, the unneeded sequel to the launch title Condemned (yes, that one of 970 GamerScore!)

Condemned 1, as an original launch title brought in a good realm of horror and tension.. and was damned creepy whilst playing with a good (if ambiguous) story behind it..
Condemned 2; developed by a different development team; takes that original story and tries to spell it out to you like a 5 year old child... one that is slightly slow and needs help with words more than 4 letter long.
One of the highlight points of the original title was its melee combat system....

So, condemned 2 comes along, building on the title of the first....
Ok, firstly the story.. attempting to build on the 1st, it tries to make sense in its own little world, but fails at that too - first of all is how as a copper who tracked down & beat the serial killer SKX (serial killer 10, he killed 9 other serial killers in the 1st one - yes its that bad).. you now find out you didn't kill him, and you end up teamed up with him in the later part of the story.. to bring down the police unit you where once in.. WHAT?

OK. story not good..



Gameplay then,

As said above, the 1st had a good melee system, required as the lack of ammunition for the small amount of guns acquired made it important.. well, the same is true here too... except.. The melee doesn't work..

The Game-Engine cannot seem to control melee attack distance correctly - At one point a decent distance connects with a punch, yet equally it also fails to make that same connection with another opponent.
Equally, the ability to combo attacks together means little when the game doesn't allow between hits.. that largely includes guard damage... Not that the end result of the combo attack makes much difference to the state of your opponent - The camera has a weird tendency to move (as if indicating your punching/swinging) and resulting in you failing to aim correctly.

The 'AI' on opponents causes them to stagger backwards after a successful punch... just out of range of your follow up punch (which makes you have to push forward to attack).. to which said AI based opponent will punch at you, so you can then dodge (a badly timed RT & LT combination, that likely results in you swinging a punch), or throw a punch or a combo punch.. the latter two of the three will result in you receiving damage from the enemy as a result.

OK, so melee in a FPS is crap, so what about the guns? well, you don't get many, and what you do get is limited in bullet supply.. Fine its a survival horror type game so you'd expect that.. do you also expect that your character cant actually aim straight and so from firing from distance is akin to wiping your arse when you have no arms..



OK, melee doesn't work, story is bad.. its not all bad is it?

Multiple bland levels await you, each one (baring 1 drug induced stroll through to push the story) rendered in perfect darkness, seriously, I've altered my TV's contrast/brightness and its still black, cant see where the fuck anything is, to the point where the equally black 'slime monsters' (yes ) kill you and you cant see them...
often.

The only "saving" point to it is the checkpoint system, which is so schizophrenic in its own part I really can't say if its good or bad.. sure at times, it'll save just before a nasty encounter with some 'slime monsters'.. but at others its like its gorged itself on KFC and forgets to save for the smaller fighters who jump out of nowhere and take that single last remaining health that you escaped with from the big boss fight.. end result... back before the big fight & hope you make it through that & the resulting small fights

Equally bizarre is the level decisions.. there's a level where it ends with you having jumped from a height resulting a damaged leg, and so your lying there with a nail gun shooting hoards of these slime things... to which the level blacks out when you've killed x amount of them.. no explanation of how you escaped, or why the remaining hoards didn't kill you.. its like watching an American sitcom where the characters all die at the end of an episode and yet are all present and correct for the next weeks one...

equally as bad, complete the game and it then makes you play it through again but with a gun.. so what exactly is the point of this???? Have confidence that your melee works, or have it as an FPS... Don't make a travesty like this..

Ok, so what other awful things are there?

How about the achievement to beat people with a set of antlers.. except they don't visibly exist in the game.. you can only get them in the 'fight club' thing.. where enemies will hit you with an invisible object!!! (that is the antlers, you can then pick up this non existent object and hit people with it)

The online side of the game is both dead & requires several people to complete.. As a result, consider the achievements lost unless you are boosting, and these are not easy boosting.

In summary..

Avoid it like syphillis