Do you want to be scared? Do you like to feel your pulse race? Do you need a level of intensity only found in a Muay Thai ring? Well then look elsewhere because for all that Condemned 2 does to satisfy you it ultimately fails to get you off in the end.
The original Condemned was a dark, creepy and atmospheric nightmare filled with bone-chilling first person bludgeoning that drew you in and kept you hooked. You got to know Ethan Thomas and the world around him quite intimately. Perhaps it’s this close relationship that causes the opening of Condemned 2 to hurt so badly.
Sure, it’s been almost a year since Ethan Thomas was forced to descend into hell, but the changes in his character do not feel like a natural progression. Instead of being a man tortured by the events of his past, turning to alcohol as the only way to sooth the pain, Thomas is portrayed as an angry deadbeat bum. He acts more like a man who’s lost his job and his wife, then a man who stood face to face with pure evil.
It’s jarring and uncomfortable, but not, I suspect, in the way Monolith had intended. Instead of making you sympathize with Ethan’s situation and embrace his new tragic flaws, many players will just feel cold and detached. Surprisingly after the first few chapters Ethan has a major unexplained shift in character and suddenly becomes less brash and feels more like the original. It’s weird, it’s almost like half-way through development someone figured out that Asshole-Ethan wasn’t working and decided to fix it, but was too lazy to go back and fix the beginning. Oddly the same thing happened with level design.
At the beginning levels are cluttered and claustrophobic. Normally this would be great for atmosphere, but because of the lighting and colour palettes it’s really hard to discern where you need to go. There’s even one part where the game forces you to fight black monsters, on a black background, in high contrast black. It’s impossible to see anything and is incredibly annoying, but as I said earlier the game does get better. Levels eventually go from being ridiculously tight and annoying to being a little more open, but still creepy and atmospheric. Again it feels like halfway through development something happened. Maybe a tester, angry at how the game was progressing, went up and whacked the lead designer in the head with a steel pipe.
Article comments
1 - HerrDöpfel
Ugh... thanks for spoilering the bear scene in the review... guess it won't surprise me much now.