Condemned 2

Those of you out there who are avid Zero Punctuation viewers will probably be taking this opportunity to call me an unimaginative prick (and other synonyms), but if you'd take a minute to read back through my last review, you'll see I've had this one in the pipeline for about a week already. All I can say is "damn you Yahtzee, why couldn't you have done Dark Sector this week?"

Now that's out of the way, I'll dive head first into my review. I never played the original Condemned, because ever since I realised nothing inside my TV was possible causing me any harm, with the exception of Kanye West and his sonic brain rape, I decided that any game with the intent of scaring me was personally asking me to pick it up, take it into a corner and take a big smelly dump on it for being so stupid. Condemned 2, on the other hand, attracted my attention because when I saw it, I knew it was probably my only chance of getting a brand new game really cheap. So, I picked it up, as you probably would, and took it home remembering a colleague's tales of removing enemy jaws with blunt objects.

When I got it home, I had to leave it alone for a few hours while the sun was still out. This partially to help the game have me soil myself, but mostly down to the fact that it's literally impossible to play with any other light source. With my nose touching my monitor, I could scarcely differentiate between one dark broody shape, and another dark broody shape. Some contrast would have been nice, but I had other things to keep me entertained during daytime, so I left it to it's own devices on the shelf while I realigned my spine.

When I was finally able to play the blasted game, I found myself intrigued by the idea of playing an angry drunk, who was also some kind of cop, but not really because... I don't know exactly why not, having not played the original. Maybe the local constabulary didn't need another Father Jack Hackett on the force? Either way I quickly found myself in the middle of a bum fight, with horrible things being shouted at me while I tried removing the bloodstains from my shirt, having just bludgeoned three people to death with a plank full of rusty nails. Remembering I was supposed to be playing some kind of cop, I was a little worried about the consequences of murdering 3 people who startled me while pissed out of my face, but even right up to the end of the game there was no mention of any of the innocent people I'd killed throughout my Condemned 2 experience.

Instead, the game introduced me to someone in the same clothing as, aside from what looked like a mask, only attached more competently than some plastic surgery, who politely introduced himself by introducing me to his pet brick. This was apparently no more than a hallucination, and I'd just passed out in an alley with a 5-star hangover. Seeing as this smug, masked bastard showed up every 20 or so minutes, I spent at least half the game convinced that he was the serial killer I was chasing (choosing to ignore Ethan's comments of "You're not real"), until I ran into the real serial killer, who everyone in the game knew I was really chasing, including Ethan, and there was a brief reiteration of the back story between these people. I guess that was just my fault for not playing the original, or generally being a bit too thick to follow the story properly until the second half of the game.

Everything started off well otherwise, with lots of fights against psychopaths and some eye-twistingly confusing hallucinations and occasionally blinding me which really gave me a sense of vulnerability, which is more important to any horror game than the blood and gore everyone else is always looking for. There's even a bit where you have to walk around a burning building with a knackered gas mask on which blinds you even more and doesn't give you the option of taking it off. At first I was just annoyed at the fact I could hardly see anything, but then I remembered that was the point, and so I was impressed with how creepy it made everything. Imagine swimming underwater in a canal or something and you get the idea.

Considering that I purposefully make myself unpopular with horror movie fanatics by laughing through someone's misguided attempt at scaring the pants off me, Condemned 2 was well on it's way to earning a respected place in my mind shared with Bioshock as the only games I remember that ever creeped me out in a good way. Unfortunately, after the aforementioned burning building mission, you stop fighting a load of nutjobs in favour of fighting people whose only excuse for attacking you is that they're a bunch of bastards. A betrayal story is fair enough, even though I'd seen it coming a few levels beforehand, but combat quickly shifts from the satisfying "crunch" only made by combining brick and flesh, to the distant and samey "pop" from a headshot.

Unless you have a story that makes you feel like a complete bastard and someone else's bitch simultaneously (as in Bioshock), the best weapon in a horror game is a lack of weapons - vulnerability! Condemned 2 did this really well until some random point in the game when the design team thought it'd be cool if you suffered worse wounds tripping over ammo, guns and medkits than in enemy encounters. I could live with the stungun, but when you turn an horror game into an outright FPS without really increasing the number of enemies, you stop impressing me and start bringing yourself down to Blacksite's level of crappy firefights and general shittiness.

Introducing a superpower didn't help either, especially when I figured out the cool down was literally something in the region of 5 seconds. I don't want to hate Condemned 2, but things just went arse over tit when someone tried turning it into an FPS, only darker in the literal sense. To my amazement, Yahtzee didn't have anything to say about quick time events in Condemned 2. Well, he may have been able to ignore them, but I'll be damned if I will. I generally don't mind them that much, but when it starts fucking around with normal combat, you may as well print off sheets of various control pad buttons and hang them in a firing range as far as I'm concerned.

There are, however, only two types of quick time events in Condemned 2. One involves chaining together combat moves (which I'll get onto shortly), and the other is pressing the A button (probably X on the PS3) so Ethan remembers to say something. I'm sorry, but if I see a bunch of psychopaths made primarily of armour, you wont need to remind me to swear. And you're put in that situation about 5 times each mission. Now, onto the more annoying ones.

If you've ever played a first person perspective game of any kind with melee combat, you'll know that it's just instinct to keep mashing the attack button, especially when you're surrounded by little bastards. Condemned 2 has an interesting way of dealing with enemies of different strengths. For the wussies, you can punch them in the gut and laugh at them in their foetal position on the floor, finally understanding why people did it to you at school. For the big bastards, you can use a chain attack, pulling the appropriate trigger when told to. This is a good idea in theory, until you realise that you initiate one of these attacks by quickly pulling one of the triggers twice. Remember what I just said about mashing the attack button when surrounded? Well, if you do that, you start a quick time event to deliver the biggest amount of hurtin' you can to someone who needs help picking his trousers up in the morning. If you didn't have a meter that had to be filled before each of these attacks, if wouldn't matter, but you do, and as such, it does. Even when you actually perform these attacks, there's no immediate feedback saying whether it registered your frantic mashing or not, so more often than not, you end up releasing the big scary man you just pissed off.

Call me just another reviewer who hates everything sent my way, but I'd just like a game that doesn't soil itself before making it through to the end. I want to love new games, but someone, somewhere down the line makes a retarded mistake and leaves us with just what we need, more mediocrity! Maybe Dark Sector will be consistent... I heard a cockney shouting hate about it, but then again he was called Stacey...