Condemned: Criminal Origins - Final Play: Chapter Ten

A good scare is like a good joke. It’s simultaneously unexpected, original and non sequitur. The problem in coming up with literally hundreds of good scares to populate your average ten-hour game is cliché, the arch-enemy of comics and horror masters alike. Once that shower scene has been used x number of times, it just doesn’t work anymore. Cliché fears often push writers into the realm of the ridiculous. I think Condemned walks the line very well between the twin gulfs of the cliché and the preposterous. Its final cut-scenes are dominated by a character development noir piece, which fleshes out the relationship between Nathan and Rosa. There are a few unavoidable plot twists of course, but nothing on the groan-inducing scale of Miticlorians.

As far as I can tell, leaderboards now are a requirement in all Xbox 360 games. Condemned has three; one for total kills, one for melee kills, and one for total playtime. The current world record holder for time played is “vicious skillz” with almost 346 hours. My question is does the guy that hides under a creaky Condemned staircase somewhere, leaving his 360 on for 14 days straight really deserve such recognition? I won’t even get into the role these leaderboards probably play in fostering game addiction.

If you regularly check my gamer card to make sure I’ve actually finished the games I review, you probably noticed that one of my awards listed under Condemned is the compassion award. Without spoiling the end for anybody this simply means that I showed mercy and didn’t shoot one of the game’s more notorious bad guys. We’ve seen these types of canned moral conundrums in games before (Yes KOTOR I’m talking about you), but making one into a live award is interesting. Will I eventually be able to infer something about a gamer’s personality by checking their list of moral related awards, or even more interestingly, could Microsoft introduce a universal alignment rating on Xbox live? The alignment score could function a lot like your trueskill rating, ranging from “chaotic evil” all the way up to “lawful good.” This type of meta role-playing could add a very interesting aspect to Xbox Live.

Something I forgot to mention in my previous ratings of Condemned are the context sensitive finishing moves. When an enemy is sufficiently beaten, they often kneel down and sort of sway back and forth a bit. If you walk up to an enemy in this state, a picture of your d-pad materializes with some cryptic-looking names assigned to each direction. The animations for the finishing moves are decent; however, both the kneeling and the d-pad picture really remind me that I’m playing a game. This is something a survival horror game really can’t afford to do. I hate to keep mentioning Chronicles of Riddick, but the finishing moves in that game were dead-on. In Riddick, finishing move kills happened automatically within the normal context of combat, requiring no additional suspension of disbelief.

After finishing Condemned my favorite weapon ended up being a melee one after all. The flaming two-by-four is one of the most visceral weapons I’ve ever seen in an FPS. It doubles as a light source, both for you and for your opponents, and provides some Frankenstein moments when you catch the far off flicker of a zombie’s torch through the twisted trees of the orchard level. The fire looks very believable and provides the added worry of burning your face off.

My favorite CSI tool is Nathan’s smell-o-meter, which aided me in sniffing out some of the better hidden corpses. The tool operates on a hotter or colder principal, showing how smelly your current location is with a series of red and green lights on the top of the device. The reason it works for me is because its the first time I’ve thought about how a game’s location might smell, and it left me wondering how the device discerned between the odor of a corpse and the raw sewage of a particular level.

Overall, despite being a very derivative experience, Condemned comes off as a competent FPS horror game. Clunky combat and downright silly finishing moves don’t add much, but the overall art design and noir storytelling attach a lot of gritty atmosphere to this title. There isn’t much replay value, unless you enjoy searching buildings for bird carcasses in varying states of decay. Although you won’t find me crouching under that staircase with Mr. “vicious skillz” anytime soon, I did enjoy my time in the world of Condemned: Criminal Origins.