Buy, Borrow, or Bury: Condemned 2: Bloodshot
I was really excited to play Condemned 2 because when the first game came out it was one of my favorite Xbox 360 launch titles, and I thought it was relatively overlooked. In the first game you played crime scene investigator Ethan Thomas as he tries to solve the mystery behind multiple murders in a nameless city. The basic gameplay could be considered a beat-em-up with light puzzle solving mostly in the form of finding clues to piece together certain murders and so on. The fighting revolved around finding weapons in your environment, and basically using things that wouldn’t normally be a weapon to beat down your opponents. For example, and remember this is in the first game, there was a level where you entered a school and one of the primary weapons was a door from a locker. Anyways, the game was great all the way through until the story got a little hairy at the end, but overall, like I said, Condemned: Criminal Origins was a surprisingly solid game.
Now I’ve completed its follow-up title from developer Monolith, and I have to say that overall my opinion is still pretty much the same. There are some things about Condemned 2 that are better than the original, and some things that are equally bad if not worse. In this game once again you’re thrown into the shoes of Ethan Thomas, but now he’s been ejected from the CSU (think the Condemned version of a crime scene investigation team) as a result of alcoholism and a potential drug habit. Things are going nuts in the city though, and you learn that one of the major characters from the first game has been murdered so you’re brought back in by the CSU to solve the case. From there everything spirals out of control and I’ll leave it at that, because as always I never want to spoil a game for anyone out there. You work your way through levels beating up ruffians and other bad guys as you attempt to piece together the story.
One noticeable improvement is the overhauled combat system. Now you can piece together combos when you’re fighting hand-to-hand with enemies, plus there’s an entire array of finishing moves. Not only that but you can now use the in-game environment to your advantage, so for instance if I’m fighting an enemy and there’s a TV near by I can throw the enemy through the TV. That really helps add another level to the combat which some people complained was a little tedious in the original Condemned. There are a lot of all new weapons including a bunch of old faithfuls from Condemned 1, including pipes, shovels, sledgehammers, axes, golf clubs, baseball bats, rebar, knifes, and so on. Some of the newer weapons (ones that I liked, particularly) were foosball sticks, Molotov cocktails, and even a deer’s antler. That’s right, you can fight enemies with a deer’s antler. Of course there are also ranged weapons including guns, but as was with the first game ammo is relatively hard to find except for some of the later levels and you should definitely not go into the game thinking you’ll be able to shoot your way through it like you would in Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4. The Condemned series is all about melee combat. That being said, there are some new guns like the assault rifle with a red dot, a combat shotgun, and even a crossbow later in the game. I thought towards the end of the game they relied a little too much on using guns (there’s a level or two where you use guns explicitly) which takes the fun out of it a bit. Still, the aiming is spot-on even without a reticule which I really like to see. Having a reticule is nice but without one an extra level of realism is added to the game that helps maintain immersion.
It would help maintain immersion that is, if the story wasn’t so off the wall. As I said in the beginning the story for the first Condemned game ended pretty awkwardly, but I wasn’t too put off by that. In this game they sort of introduce an element that explains some of what happened at the end of Condemned 1, but then they really take it overboard. Needless to say, you’ll run into supernatural monsters and cult conspiracies in Condemned 2. That was a bummer for me to see. One of my favorite parts of the game is solving murders or crimes so if they were able to just bring it back to the roots of solving crimes in a really dangerous environment where I have to fight off delinquents in order to get my work done I’d be happy. Still the jump off the deep-end isn’t too terrible and I was able to maintain either way.
As I said the crime scene investigation parts of the game added a bit of a puzzle element to Condemned 1 and Monolith really enhanced that experience for Condemned 2. Not only will you continue to use your array of gadgets to solve mysteries (digital camera, GPS, spectrometer, UV) you’ll also have to study your environment carefully because you’ll be graded on your prowess as a detective based on if you’re able to perfectly find the total set of clues, answer questions correctly, or just link conversations in the right way to gain more out of the story. One simple example from this new element of gameplay is from relatively early on in the game when you’re – surprise – investigating a murder with a couple friends. You end up getting split up and in the meantime you find the body but you have to give information to your buddies as to where you are so they can meet up with you. Therefore you have to search the area for clues as to what part of the building you’re in. This is an apartment building so first they ask you for which room number the crime scene is at, so you go to check the door number but it’s been purposefully covered up by the murderer so you have to find an alternate way to figure out the room number. It’s pretty interesting stuff and hey, it’s always good to be forced to tap into that inquisitive side of a gamer’s brain every now and then to keep them thinking. The sleuth aspects of the game were some of my favorites.
Condemned 2 also has all new multiplayer, which I was really excited to try out. There are a handful of game modes including your standard deathmatch and team deathmatch modes as well as some objective based modes and variants in between. I saw a preview for Condemned 2 before I had a chance to play it where they talked about one mode in particular that I was excited to play called Bum Rush. In Bum Rush there are two SCU officers on one team that are equipped with guns, and they have to fend off attacks from up to 6 vagrants on the other team using melee weapons. This sounded really cool to me but to be honest the execution isn’t that great. Even though they’re outnumbered, the SCU’s guns are so overpowered that without really even trying they can kill you before you get a chance to attack them making this particular game type a one-sided shellacking. There’s also a crime scene mode where-in one team who is again comprised of SCU officers tries to find and scan evidence that has been planted by the other team. Again, the SCU start out with guns whereas the other team has to find weapons in their environment. This game mode is a lot more fun in my opinion, because it brings some strategy to a game that’s relatively devoid of it, and it also includes use of the crime scene tools that I love so much in the single player campaign. Still though, I find myself spending the most time playing the generic team deathmatch gametype. If you’re able to join up with friends there’s a lot of fun to be had here, even though it’s pretty over the top. Just think of team deathmatch as a street fight straight out of the Green Street Hooligans movie, you’ll team up with your friends to hunt down the opposing team using baseball bats, pipes, and pretty much all of the other weapons I mentioned above. The gameplay is pretty repetitive but it’s still a lot of fun, and there are some things that happen that it’s almost impossible not to love – for instance successfully throwing a toilet seat at an enemy’s face and then moving in for the kill. It’s sort of mob mentality sort of multiplayer game and every now and then you might just sit back and laugh at what you’re playing, but still, as I said, you’ll be having fun.
Aside from the multiplayer there is a bunch of other additions to the game that add a lot of replay value. As you move through the single player campaign you’ll unlock various levels in a separate fight club mode which is comprised of objective-based levels that are quick to start and end and have time trials so you can improve your completion time. Once you’ve completed the game a new FPS mode is unlocked which encourages you to play through again this time using guns predominately, and of course there’s the different difficulty levels as well as collectibles throughout the game that you’ll want to get for achievements. Basically, despite the single player campaign being sort of short you’ll have a lot of reasons to go back and play through either the whole thing or individual levels again.
So that brings us to the verdict on this extremely long review. I apologize for the length but I really like to touch on all aspects of the game. It’s funny that in my first review I talked about a game that took me 40 hours to complete and didn’t write as much as the game that took me maybe 10 hours to complete. Anyways, I think Condemned 2 is solid. It’s no blockbuster, but it’s the perfect game for a rental. I’d give Condemned 2 a solid Borrow if you’re interested in a first person combat game. The story isn’t very cohesive but don’t get too bogged up in it – just enjoy the ride. As always I’d love to hear feedback either via a comment on this review or an email to dmkemick(at)live(dot)com. Thanks for reading!
Last but definitely not least is the lack of DRM in the songs. That means that you’ll be able to play them on any player, not just iPods or in iTunes, without having to circumvent file types or break DRM. The songs are straight .mp3 by default so they can be played by basically any music player whether software or hardware. So how do you get the songs? You go to Amazon.com and search for the album you want, buy it, and they’ll link you to the downloader application that pulls down the songs from Amazon. For an album the download usually takes 5 minutes for me on average, and of course the Amazon MP3 downloader notifies you as it downloads each song so you can start listening before the entire album has finished downloading. The app also plays nice with media players like Windows Media Player by automatically adding the songs to your music library with all proper track information as well as album art. The system isn’t revolutionary, but you get your high-quality DRM free music for a great price and that’s all that really matters, right?
In case you’re wondering what made me decide to talk about Amazon MP3 I’ll give you a little insight. Basically I was browsing the internet like I’m apt to do, and I hit up one of my favorite band’s websites – 
Does that make sense? I re-read it and I wasn’t sure…either way it doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that EA is trying to buy a really awesome game publisher and a lot of people are concerned about what will happen to their favorite Take Two franchises if this deal goes down. EA has had a rivalry of sorts with Take Two for a long time, because Take Two used to have a competing NFL franchised football game on the market that a lot of gamers 
I guess all we can really do is wait and see at this point. The idea behind a hostile takeover is that the company will be sold whether it wants to be or not, so I guess it’s sort of inevitable at this point? Take Two is undoubtedly telling their shareholders to hold off, saying that even at the increased stock price their company is being undervalued, particularly with Grand Theft Auto 4 on the horizon. Projected numbers for GTA4 are easily in the millions, upwards of 9 million copies sold in some cases. That’s a cash cow for Take Two, so if investors are told to just hold back and wait until GTA4 comes out Take Two might be able to avoid EA because, by that time, they’ll have made enough money to be too costly for EA to purchase.
He also got me excited about 