Condemned: Criminal Origins

I got it yesterday and I’m liking it a lot so far. I still have trouble timing my blocks, but I’m getting better as I go.

It may be a one-trick pony, but it’s a god damn good trick.

it’s a god damn good trick.

To paraphrase W.C. Fields: On the whole, I’d rather be in Riddick. :)

-Tom

It’s not confusing, it’s utter bollocks.

During movies? I have to ask what’s going on during breakfast.

As if that’s not bad enough, then I answer myself.

Head twist zombie pocalypse. It’s a binary thing.

I do kind of like the first person finishing moves. KER-RAK! Or was that KHA’AK?

ending really doesn’t make much sense. I had to get an explanation from here.

That being said I liked the combat just the way it was. It really never got old for me, so if your the same the game is great.

I got Condemned and played a lot. It’s so good. I don’t think w/o this thread I would think of it as a 1-trick pony because of how good that trick is. What’s your favorite Condemned weapon? Mine: The Paper Cutter.

I like all the big meaty blunt weapons. Pipes, sledgehammers, etc. The sound they make, and the visceral shock of impact really makes the combat satisfyingly brutal. The shotgun can be hilarious, though. Screaming maniac charging at me, meet pointblank buckshot to the face!

I kind of liked Condemned quite a bit. It gets slow in the middle there for a bit, but once you go to the department store it picks up a lot. That was a fantastic creepy location, almost on par with the better Thief levels.

I won’t spoil it, but finding the coach or whatever in that locker? That was a crap-your-pants moment.

The department store is my favorite level from Condemned too. I liked the table leg on that level, nice, quick, and does serious damage.

Thread resurrection time.

I finished Condemned last night. I played it for about 30-60 minutes each night, doing one chapter at a time until last night, when I did Chapters 8, 9 and 10. The game really picked up the pace, and got more challenging, but not punishingly so. No ridiculous difficulty spikes. For the most part, it remained an adventure game where you’re playing through a CSI-type story.

I actually enjoyed the melee combat throughout the game. I usually got hit, but there’s enough health kits in every level to keep near full health despite the fact that I wasn’t very good at the combat.

I haven’t been genuinely scared in a game in a long time. But I found myself holding my breath many times during Condemned, and I found many moments where my heart started racing and I was successfully startled many times by the game. The sound in the game deserves special praise. They really made the game quiet for the most part so you have to pump up the volume and then when things happen, they’re really able to get you with many finely crafted thrilling moments. The music was also very well done, and really built the tension well. Special kudos to them for making the flash light something you could turn permanently on (except for certain exceptions when you lose the flashlight, which was also exciting because you came to rely on it).

Overall, I’d still agree with all the criticisms of the game in this thread. It really was a two-trick pony. One being the melee combat, the other being that its a nicely present serial-killer investigation. But I found myself liking how they implemented these two things.

Tom brings up a good point in bringing up Riddick: that was a game that had a huge amount of variety, and did a lot of things they did in Condemned, but so much more. But I still enjoyed Condemned overall. As a budget game, it was definitely worth its value. It also helped that it was a fairly short game and didn’t overstay its welcome.

I’d agree that the game isn’t as good as Shogo, the NOLFs, AvP2, Tron, and F.E.A.R., but I do think its pretty good at what it does, and that seems to be the Monolith specialty. They can do a nice variety of games, and do a good job in that particular niche that they’re exploring.

My biggest complaint with the game is the unanswered questions at the end of the game. I hope the sequel has some more answers.

Major Spoilers Follow *****************************************
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(Don’t read unless you’ve finished the game)

I liked the story of the serial killer who was killing serial killers, and the process of hunting him down. I even liked the peripheral story about the dead birds and how something was affecting people and making homicidal maniacs out of homeless people. But they didn’t really tie it all together too well at the end. When Serial Killer X was about to kill me and cut off my finger, and suddenly the guy came in and held him down, he said to go out there and kill whatever was making all this happen, I was confused. So far the game hadn’t yet made the connection between the dead birds, and the supernatural elements of the story, and the grounded real world story of the serial killer. The supernatural stuff had been kept in the periphery. In the reports you unlock by finding metal pieces in the game, and in the “dream” sequences you experience, so it felt weird to me that I would leave this serial killer alone who was just about to kill me, in order to go chasing after ghosts. And then when I did kill the boogieman, they never tied it together for us. What kind of influence did the boogieman have exactly on the serial killers? On the main character? I played through the ending twice, once doing compassion, and once killing Serial Killer X, hoping that the other choice might reveal more answers, but it didn’t.

Does anyone have any speculation on the connection between the two elements of the story? What did the boogieman have to do with the murders? Did he represent the “hate” in people’s hearts, like one of the characters said? But if its “hate” personified, then what does it mean that you killed “hate”? And how was that affecting all the hobos and homeless people, and influencing the serial killers? And even your own character in that last scene?

Lots of discussion of the plot in this thread:

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=35478&highlight=condemned+bloodshot

Thanks mchankwilliams! Specifically, your post here really sheds a lot more light on the story, and it actually makes a lot more sense now.

This is one of those games I picked up super cheap last summer but haven’t spent any time with it beyond Chapter 1. I like it more than I did FEAR, but that’s not saying much given that I enjoyed Quake 4 even more in that period.

Shame to hear the experience doesn’t shake things up much throughout, Monolith was so successful with maintaining a grounded gameplay philosophy with all sorts of quirky thrills and divergent goals in the Nolf’s, Tron, and AVP2. FEAR was too focused and became strained in the end.

I’m mostly curious to play on just to see the Department Store level which often gets special mention. I can’t recall if FEAR even had a single standout level or appealing chunk of progression for fans to clamor over. It never did for me.

I thought Condemned had a few really good levels. The apartment store is really good. But I also found the abandoned school to be very creepy as well.
The library and old shack were pretty good as well.