Screenshots :.
Condemned: Criminal Origins
360
Matt
24-04-2007
"I seem to have grown a metal thumb!"
"Perhaps he's going to surprise him with a present or a wedgie?"
"Pipe vs. ironing board: melee weapon Top Trumps!"
‘Why do we enjoy doing this to ourselves?’ I thought to myself last night whilst sitting – almost perching – on the edge of my living room chair, peering carefully at the final few moments of Condemned: Criminal Origins. ‘Enjoy doing what to ourselves?’ I hear you ask. Scaring ourselves to the point of having to make a dash for the light switch, or actually look over our own shoulder just to check that it was the surround sound system and not some kind of masked intruder making noises behind us. Surely it can’t be a good way to spend a few leisure hours?
Then again, maybe it is. You see, despite having the creeping sense that I didn’t want to play Condemned in anything more than a two or three-hour chunk at a time, each section I completed left me feeling exhausted yet strangely exhilarated, as if I’d conquered my own little mini mental bridge. Presenting itself as a first-person punch/wallop/shooter, the game sees you cast in the role of detective Ethan Thomas, wrongly wanted for murdering two fellow police officers and trapped in a nightmarish suburbia where the homeless are mysteriously turning violent.
With the dual task of wanting to clear your name and find out exactly what the heck is going on, your job is to guide Ethan through seven levels across various different settings. Not content at offering the player the usual methods of picking up guns and weapons, Criminal Origins has the unique option of allowing Ethan to rip metal pipes off walls, take desk drawers out of desks and use locker doors amongst a plethora of other makeshift weapons. Guns are also available for the taking, although ammo is scarce and the game certainly does try to put an emphasis on melee combat.
In doing so it forces the player into having to attack enemies head-on, which in turn really ups the anticipation and downright dread of coming across anything that would want to do you harm. Your foes display a reasonably decent level of AI and will duck, jump and run when appropriate in order to make things more tricky for you. Dish out a particularly ferocious beating to someone and chances are that they’ll turn and leg it away to get some respite before attacking again, meaning that until you finish off your opponent you can never breathe easy or take things for granted.
Your surroundings do nothing to ease the angst either. Dark, dank buildings with flickering lights and scattered desks, lockers and chairs provide you with an authentic sense of decay and destruction. Particularly haunting is a section of the game where you find yourself walking through a deserted school filled with horridly disfigured beings that chase and hound you as you move from classroom to classroom. This is certainly no game for the faint-hearted, and it certainly feels similar at times to what a first-person Silent Hill game would feel like if it were crossed with a dash of Half Life.
Despite all the darkness and general gloom, the game still manages to look good. Lighting effects are particularly impressive and all in real-time, and the general rusty, mouldy feel of a deserted, menacing city is conveyed via some fantastic texturing, although one feels that perhaps they are repeated a little too much at times. Enemies rag-doll around when defeated and are chillingly well motion captured, adding a real edge to scraps and encounters throughout the game.
All that being said, Condemned falls a little flat in some areas. The first is the length of the game, with most players being able to complete the game in around ten hours, which obviously is more than a little on the short side. Likewise, for those ten hours the game rarely presents new scenarios to the player and becomes a little repetitive. Now, it’s not necessarily a bad thing for a game to know what it is good at and to stick to it, but nonetheless one feels that perhaps developers Monolith Productions could thrown a few different moments akin to Half Life 2’s buggy section in to add a bit of diversity to proceedings.
As one of the 360’s first games it was very unlikely that Condemned would be anything more than a capable title that would introduce players to their new console’s abilities and offer a reasonable amount of fun along the way. To give Monolith their dues, what they have come up with is actually a little more than that. Whilst Criminal Origins isn’t an outstanding genre-forming title it certainly offers a slightly different take on traditional first-person games and perhaps with a little added variety it could have been rated as more than being simply a good launch title.
Then again, maybe it is. You see, despite having the creeping sense that I didn’t want to play Condemned in anything more than a two or three-hour chunk at a time, each section I completed left me feeling exhausted yet strangely exhilarated, as if I’d conquered my own little mini mental bridge. Presenting itself as a first-person punch/wallop/shooter, the game sees you cast in the role of detective Ethan Thomas, wrongly wanted for murdering two fellow police officers and trapped in a nightmarish suburbia where the homeless are mysteriously turning violent.
With the dual task of wanting to clear your name and find out exactly what the heck is going on, your job is to guide Ethan through seven levels across various different settings. Not content at offering the player the usual methods of picking up guns and weapons, Criminal Origins has the unique option of allowing Ethan to rip metal pipes off walls, take desk drawers out of desks and use locker doors amongst a plethora of other makeshift weapons. Guns are also available for the taking, although ammo is scarce and the game certainly does try to put an emphasis on melee combat.
In doing so it forces the player into having to attack enemies head-on, which in turn really ups the anticipation and downright dread of coming across anything that would want to do you harm. Your foes display a reasonably decent level of AI and will duck, jump and run when appropriate in order to make things more tricky for you. Dish out a particularly ferocious beating to someone and chances are that they’ll turn and leg it away to get some respite before attacking again, meaning that until you finish off your opponent you can never breathe easy or take things for granted.
Your surroundings do nothing to ease the angst either. Dark, dank buildings with flickering lights and scattered desks, lockers and chairs provide you with an authentic sense of decay and destruction. Particularly haunting is a section of the game where you find yourself walking through a deserted school filled with horridly disfigured beings that chase and hound you as you move from classroom to classroom. This is certainly no game for the faint-hearted, and it certainly feels similar at times to what a first-person Silent Hill game would feel like if it were crossed with a dash of Half Life.
Despite all the darkness and general gloom, the game still manages to look good. Lighting effects are particularly impressive and all in real-time, and the general rusty, mouldy feel of a deserted, menacing city is conveyed via some fantastic texturing, although one feels that perhaps they are repeated a little too much at times. Enemies rag-doll around when defeated and are chillingly well motion captured, adding a real edge to scraps and encounters throughout the game.
All that being said, Condemned falls a little flat in some areas. The first is the length of the game, with most players being able to complete the game in around ten hours, which obviously is more than a little on the short side. Likewise, for those ten hours the game rarely presents new scenarios to the player and becomes a little repetitive. Now, it’s not necessarily a bad thing for a game to know what it is good at and to stick to it, but nonetheless one feels that perhaps developers Monolith Productions could thrown a few different moments akin to Half Life 2’s buggy section in to add a bit of diversity to proceedings.
As one of the 360’s first games it was very unlikely that Condemned would be anything more than a capable title that would introduce players to their new console’s abilities and offer a reasonable amount of fun along the way. To give Monolith their dues, what they have come up with is actually a little more than that. Whilst Criminal Origins isn’t an outstanding genre-forming title it certainly offers a slightly different take on traditional first-person games and perhaps with a little added variety it could have been rated as more than being simply a good launch title.
7/10
