Condemned 2: Bloodshot

The sound effects are straight out of the top drawer. Expect to hear men and women screaming, full-blooded, at the top of their lungs, as they exert themselves by swinging heavy weapons. You’ve never heard anything quite this astonishingly and exaggeratedly violent before. The audio is also a core gameplay mechanic. You don’t have a stamina bar in Condemned II; rather, running out of energy is signified by the panting, which gets louder as he approaches his maximum exertion level. Touches like these, as well as the reverberant sound of your footsteps giving you clues as to what weapons you should be searching for, can make Condemned II an intense experience.

Speaking of sound, music ranges from the superb to the out-of-place. In cut-scenes, the score is certainly in the wrong style – it doesn’t really gel. That said, when it comes to ambient sonics, Condemned II sets a benchmark for tension-building audio. Bleak drones, distorted glitch-core – you name it – these aspects make for a frightening game.

The other main aspect of Condemned II is its fear-factor. The main scares come from the ambiguity brought about by darkness. The degree of enjoyment one draws from Condemned II rests upon its brightness level. Before playing, you are given a test to lock brightness to a recommended standard. If you don’t follow these guidelines, you will totally destroy the experience. It’s not scary if you can fully see what’s going on in every room. Condemned II can be completed on hard-mode in two days if it’s not encased in darkness.

If you do set the brightness to the proper level, Condemned II represents an unsettling episode. Its mix of cowardly and aggressive enemies, and the twisting, blurred and downright cursed environments in which they fester, trigger an alarming sense of urgency to back into a corner so that you can’t be startled. Therefore, it’s refreshingly difficult, disorientating and desperate to fight using the appropriate brightness settings.

Sadly, Ethan’s torch possesses infinite energy, a big failure. The tension that would come from having a time limit on it is a grand opportunity missed. Still, even with the torch on, you can’t make out your blindside.

The scary set-pieces in Condemned II often hit their mark. One in particular sums up the excellence of scares inside, when Ethan is transferred to a therapeutic environment – the medical ward of a police station, where you feel that nothing bad could possibly happen. Sighting the need for some nuclear magnetic resonancing [as one does], your fellow employee orders you into a CAT scanner. Going inside, everything turns black. You can almost see it coming, in Hitchcockian fashion. A few subliminal flashes of demonic faces later, and your office has been transformed into one of Freddy Kruger’s victim’s worst nightmares. You want to get out – it’s an intense feeling.

As the game progresses, Condemned II’s emphasis on original gameplay additions somewhat detracts from these scares. It all starts off rather frightening – a throwback to the original – but by the halfway point, the game’s uncertainty between its old and new features causes tension to get lost somewhere in the middle.

So what are the new features in Condemned II? Firstly – crime scene analysis. The best addition to the game, one that is rewarding, creative and ultimately immensely satisfying, is the requirement to analyze how victims died. These are mini puzzles, where wrong answers rarely result in death, rather, lack of cumulative score at a level’s end and the downgrading of skill-boosting upgrades. It represents a big improvement over the first Condemned in that you’re not limited to breaking out your tools when there’s a crime to be solved. You find a body and manually scour a room, searching for evidence with the multitude of devices available to Ethan, zooming in on bloodstains, ID tags and the like. Determining that a bullet-wound had an outward trajectory from a body is a satisfying achievement, made possible by a next-generation feature of gaming that wouldn’t be available on graphically weaker consoles. Sneaky red herrings mean that you can’t waltz through these sections without gearing your brain for action.

There are side quests on each level, ranging from the fun [photographing a museum’s displays] to the ridiculous [destroying “sonic transmitters” – a tiresome link to the game’s plot]. At the end of each level, your crime-solving skills and side-quest points are tallied and result in a score of bronze, silver or gold. For the next level, you get a new skill whose potency is analogous to the colour of your trophy. This adds a nice sense of progression to the game and provides a strong incentive to get the most out of each level.

Remember the Nemesis in Resident Evil 3 that you just couldn’t kill? There are similar gameplay quirks in Condemned II, which are great to experience. If the idea of running away from a rabid bear in a freaky, claustrophobic house is your idea of a good time, then Condemned II delivers. Like the new crime scene analysis, here you have to use your brain; otherwise, you’ll run yourself into a corner and die. These sorts of events, that require quick thinking, aren’t limited to running away from big, scary monsters either. At one point you’ll have to defuse a bomb, which will make you feel like James Bond, in a digital, computery sort of way.

When you aim to shoot, your hand is all over the place – a consequence of Ethan’s alcohol withdrawal symptoms. You need to consume a bottle of spirits in order to temporarily steady your hand. This makes for close encounters with angry hobos. Your alcohol “demon” regularly taunts you in the game, and the style and resulting visuals here are powerful – a good addition.

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