Final Verdict: Condemned: Criminal Origins

Hello, this is my latest game review, it’s my Final Verdict for Condemned: Criminal Origins, I’ll add here that I actually play this at least 10 years ago on the Xbox 360 and I simply fancied revisiting it.

Condemned was developed by Monolith Productions and published by Sega. Condemned is a survival horror game, though in many ways it’s more a Physiological thriller. You play an FBI agent called ‘Ethan Thomas’ and you are called to the scene of a crime where someone was murdered you meet up with another few police officers who show you to the crime scene. Here you use various tools to get certain kinds of evidence and it turns out to be a murder by a serial killing. From here things go south, you chase a suspect through the building only to lose your gun, which is then used to kill 2 officers who you met earlier. From here you spend your time trying to gather evidence, again with the use of various tools to try and clear your name.

The gameplay in this is a little different to most other First Person games involving guns. With this, most of the time you have a melee weapon, but sometimes you’ll get a gun, mostly a pistol to begin, but occasionally a shotgun or SMG or another type of gun. Basically, you’ll have your pistol and when you press R instead of reloading you’ll check how much ammo you have when that ammo goes, you use it to pistol whip people, before it degrades and breaks. You’ll also find that you don’t get more ammo, you just replace each gun with a different one you find.

It means you’ll have to consider the risks of your weapon choice when progressing in the game. Say if you have a pistol with 6 shots left, but find a shotgun with 3 shots would you take the risk of having the more powerful 3 shots or the less powerful 6? You’ll need to weigh up which will benefit you more going forward, yes the shotgun is more powerful, but one shot may miss and you may end up running out of ammo, then again those pistol bullets may not be enough to take down the enemies you’re approaching. The great thing is there’s usually plenty of wood, or metal pipes, or bars you can pick up and boink people on the head with. Enemies generally speaking are just normal people, normal people who are whacked out of their minds on some kind of drugs.

The combat is pretty straight forward you can either hit people with your melee weapon or you can block someone attacking. Earlier in the game attacking without needing to back much is pretty standard, but as you get through the game blocking becomes necessary and when you block an attack it slightly stuns enemies and gives you an opening to whack them in the face. There’s one other thing that helps in combat and that’s the taser. The taser stuns enemies for a limited amount of time, so you want to stun enemies and give them a whack when it’s not on cooldown. That’s the one drawback, you could use it on one enemy and then it has to recharge and you realise it would have been better to have kept it for the enemy around the corner with the crowbar.

The game is pretty easy for the most part with some areas that are a little tougher, but nothing too over the top. While there is that risk-reward aspect it’s rarely to the point where if you’ll die if you make a mistake, it can make things more difficult, but taking your time when things go wrong will help. For the majority of the game you are alone, hunting for clues to clear your name, searching for the killer, and dealing with the super aggressive drug users, but, you are in contact with another FBI agent who believes you to be innocent and helps with dealing with the evidence you find, matching fingerprints or linking an oil splash with a certain brand and that sort of thing. She is Agent Rosa and she also meets up with you on one occasion to help find certain clues and evidence that are needed to make headway in Ethan’s case. You also have an occasional chat with an old man, though much rarer than Rosa and he’s not a part of the FBI.

You’ll find your way moving through several locations all with a creepy atmosphere. The locations vary in creepiness like the subway and surrounding areas surprisingly aren’t too creepy feeling, but the lit-up department store with more colour than anywhere else is one of the tense places in the game What’s also interesting is you also have little episodes of psychosis, which in turn makes weird shit going on in certain places, for example, the world become somewhat abstract with it being all black and white or the area appears to be outside even though you were in a locked building. I find it peculiar how many of the places actually are similar in the way they look, many being grey and dark places and run down, yet they mostly feel very different from each other when working your way through each area, as if it has it’s own personality and doesn’t just feel like it’s all copied and pasted.

The audio in the game is on point, it’s atmospheric for the most part, but can ramp up and makes you feel the urgency of the situation when needed. In some areas when walking around and you aren’t able to see anyone but there’s this droning overtone and you can just hear breathing or something scuttling around it can make for a tense feeling while exploring, all the sound seems to be well executed. The guns sound meaty, the melee weapons sound like they actually have weight, and the areas ambient sounds are great too, your footsteps, the wind, and the bagging of something in the distance all add together for the feel of an isolated investigation mixed with the visuals and weird goings-on it all adds up to a pretty creeping game. Talking about the visuals of the game it holds up really well for a game in 2005 and is probably better than a lot of games that came later.

I do have some issues with the game, it’s far from perfect. One issue is some of the sounds seem wrong. I know I previously said the audio is great and it is, but in certain sections, like where I had to mess with valves the steam made no sound, there were other areas where this happened. I have no idea if this was intended or an issue with the game on PC or just my PC, it wasn’t too much of a distraction in general, but it was noticeable in a few areas, and it’s a shame as the sound apart from this is wonderfully executed. The other issue is I thought it was rather short, this isn’t really an issue in and of itself, it’s more I thought I played the game much longer when I first played it, but this time it took me around 5 hours which isn’t really all that long, but I think it’s a good length for this kind of game I guess the longevity would have increased had I collected all the collectables too. Lastly, this issue is due to playing the game before also, but, when I originally played it I found it much more creepy, certain areas of the game were nestled in my brain as being really ominous and things that happened with certain aspects were truly freaky, but on the second playthrough it loses a little of that impact and I was left a little disappointed with what I thought I remembered. the thing is it does still have that ominous and supernatural vibe throughout and if you’re playing it for the first time you’ll get a kick from crapping your pants.

Condemned does well to feel different to horror games at the time and I wonder how much this game has inspired some of the more modern horror games. It has interesting mechanics with the way melee and guns work, it’s also really interesting that it has you look at crime scenes and find little clues and makes you feel like you’re doing some cool detective work.