greenideas

I loved the first Con­demned. It was loads of fun, and I can count on two fin­gers the num­ber of games that I’ve found as legit­i­mately scary. So I was look­ing very for­ward to the sec­ond install­ment. Hav­ing now played through the first level of Con­demned 2: Blood­shot, let me offer a few pre­lim­i­nary thoughts about whether or not it lives up to the promise of its predecessor.

Graph­i­cally, it looks con­sid­er­ably bet­ter than Crim­i­nal Ori­gins. This is to be expected, since the lat­ter was a launch title for the 360, and the devel­op­ers clearly didn’t know much about how to uti­lize the resources avail­able to them. As such, the fact that the char­ac­ter mod­els and ani­ma­tion have dras­ti­cally improved is as expected as it is welcome.

I wish I could say that the game­play has improved as much as the over­all look of the game. Not so, I’m afraid. At least through the first part of the game, every­thing feels much eas­ier. Let me expand on that. The first thing I noticed when going through the com­bat tuto­r­ial at the start of the game was that I didn’t really need to block to keep from get­ting clob­bered. In the first game, encoun­ters usu­ally began with you hav­ing to block a 2x4 being swung at you by a lung­ing hobo. Then you’d have to watch your oppo­nent and pre­cisely time your blocks and par­ries until you had sent the bas­tard to wino hell. Each fight was intense, sav­age, and thrilling. This time around, how­ever, if you notice a bad guy before he spots you, you could poten­tially just run up to him and punch him until he dies. Not fun. But hey, who needs intense com­bat, when you’ve got… minigames? Uh, no. Thanks to God of War and Res­i­dent Evil 4, game devs think that tack­ing a small rhythm minigame onto a fight is suf­fi­cient to take monot­o­nous but­ton mash­ing into some­thing inno­v­a­tive. It’s not.

Unfor­tu­nately, the worst con­se­quence of tak­ing the grit out of the com­bat, is that the game has lost its white-knuckle edge. Play­ing through the first one was exhaust­ing. Each shadow poten­tially hid one or more blood­thirsty cra­zies who could kill you pretty quickly if you weren’t ready for a fight, and the result­ing ten­sion was gen­uinely drain­ing. For this out­ing, if you’re not wor­ried that you’re a cou­ple of whacks away from game over, the best you can hope for is a jump scare when the weird ash-monster explodes from the ceil­ing. It’s just not the vis­ceral expe­ri­ence that I loved the first time around.

What I do like is the sto­ry­telling. I like that our hero has essen­tially become one of the lost souls he mer­ci­lessly bat­tered in the first install­ment. I really like that from his (and the player’s) per­spec­tive, there isn’t any real indi­ca­tion that he hasn’t suc­cumb to what­ever it is that has caused half of his city’s pop­u­la­tion to turn into bru­tal psy­chopaths. Most of all, though, I really like the turn towards hor­ror that this game takes right from the out­set. The city is cov­ered in ooz­ing tar, skele­tal ash-men lurk in the shad­ows, and the weird lip-ring dudes are giv­ing you atti­tude in the most omi­nous way. Good stuff all. I just wish the game­play was able to match the tone of the writing.

Over­all, I have a lot of seri­ous issues with Con­demned 2 that I really hope will resolve them­selves as I get a lit­tle fur­ther along. How­ever, given how fan­tas­tic the first game was, I feel jus­ti­fied in being at least some­what opti­mistic that they will.

And speak­ing of vio­lent video games, Stephen King has come out against the pro­posed Mass­a­chu­setts law that would lump vio­lent games in with pornog­ra­phy as being “harm­ful to minors.” Indeed, he even namechecks RE4. This fur­ther sup­ports my long-held sus­pi­cion that Stephen King is com­pletely awesome.