Review: Condemned 2: Bloodshot

It’s been a little over two years now since my last “official” review and it’s both sad and fitting that the first game I’m tackling since then is the sequel to the title I last reviewed. Condemned 2: Bloodshot came out a couple months ago so and I finished it not long after release so the timeliness of this review also says a lot about my work ethic, or lack thereof. So what did I think? Spoilers: I was disappointed.
Condemned: Criminal Origins began as a 360 launch title and eventually found its way to the PC, where it seemed sites only mentioned it in passing and reviews gave it fairly modest reviews. With nothing better to do I gave the demo a whirl and quickly became engrossed in this dark and seedy world of serial killers and brutal hobo battle royales. It had an exaggerated realism to it where the locales were eerily familiar even the scenario tugged fiercely at the bounds of rationality. It played upon that fear of being lost in that “bad” part of town by making those grim fantasies, grounded in reality, come true. Then at the very end they started introducing secret cults and dark, supernatural warriors.
I had feared that they would continue to head in this direction, because it was towards the end when more of this became revealed that the game started to lose its appeal. Once you start to move towards the more fantastic elements there is also an equal decline in tension and fear, because it’s one thing to be afraid of violent vagrants who could easily exist but it makes far less of an impact when you’re asking me to be afraid of digital boogeymen. I may be getting ahead of myself.
In the sequel we find our hero, Ethan Thomas, has changed from a clean cut, relatively personality-less FBI agent to a scruffy, angry, foul-mouthed jackass. He’s no longer with the Bureau and has been hitting the bottle pretty hard, the city is still rapidly going to shit, and there’s a murder that apparently only Ethan can solve!
Mechanically, the game is mostly sound, with the addition of thrown weapons and fist-fighting. There’s a combo system in here as well, but it’s damn near impossible to pull any of them off since you’re only given a small window of opportunity and are not allowed to take any damage during it. Blocking isn’t about timing anymore since you can simply hold a block with any weapon, but now all weapons can be destroyed with too much use, and blocking tends to make that happen faster, almost too easily. Even weapons made out of steel can be easily broken with a few swings by drug addict wielding a 2x4. There are more firearms this time around, and the addition of iron sight aiming, but in a game focused on melee combat it seems wrong to be using them. Unfortunate, then, that several levels are boiled down to Call of Duty-esque firefights in which you mow down legions of generic-looking tactical troopers, especially when what the series has as its big, shiny, unique gameplay element is the melee combat.
Much of what I liked about the first game is that much of the mystery was left unexplained and I suppose if they didn’t expand on anything in the sequel I would be bitching for that reason as well, but they explain too much too early and it isn’t a very satisfying realization. What I liked about the first game so much is that you were a lone man trapped in a crazy world and while you were busy murdering psychopaths you were all the while tracking a very specific one, taking the time to thoroughly examine his grisly accomplishments on the trail. This is what I liked, being on the trail of a dangerous serial killer while still being able to hit other people with pipes, not this supernatural nonsense of ancient cults and psychic powers and global conspiracies in which Ethan Thomas is our only hope.
It suffers from the same problem both Crysis and Far Cry had, in that they had made this awesome, semi-realistic game that pitted you against other human opponents. In Crysis, especially, you still had the edge over them with your super awesome nanosuit, and it allowed you to attack enemy strongholds from a variety of angles, as well as taking a stealthy approach or a guns-blazin’ one. I was perfectly happy taking out mercenaries and North Korean soldiers, but somewhere past the halfway mark it’s almost as if someone said “Hey, wait, we’re making a video game” and decided it needed to have mutants or demons.
They did improve upon the crime scene/evidence collection bits by having you do some of the detective work your self, giving you a list of choices of how to interpret the various scenarios, adding a bit more of an adventure element to the game. Sadly, though, this aspect is basically forgotten about towards the end of the game and you’re stuck with cultists, and machine guns and your super scream attack that makes peoples’ heads explode.
Multiplayer, sadly, is also an afterthought, where most rounds can be won simply by grabbing the weapon that does the most damage and swinging wildly as people come at you. All the timing and finesse of single-player combat is gone here, and you’re left with a bunch of players running around like headless chickens, madly swinging whatever refuse they’re clutching on to.
It’s not a terrible game and perhaps I gave their creative team too much credit the first time around, because the sequel is treading more familiar, much less interesting ground and if the ending is an indication it is hellbent on racing to the goal line at Generic Street. While when it comes to gameplay it’s more of the same with some improvements and that’s enough to you see you through to the end, you can’t help but feel that it took a horribly wrong turn and abandoned much of its exciting originality only to get lost in a sea of unrealized potential.

Likes: Much improved visuals, combat is deeper, detective work more complex.

Dislikes: Everything else.

Final word: Mechanically sound, an average game that could’ve been better, poster child for “What could have been.”




I knocked this out over the course of the last hour or so and it's screaming to be refined and edited, because that is an incoherent, meandering mess, but I just wanted to get that out of the way so I can move on to other games. Also I'm going with a more traditional scoring system, no half marks either, so a 3 out of 5 should be considered "average."