You play as Ethan Thomas. A former member of a team of law enforcers known as the SCU (Special Crimes Unit), Ethan has become a tortured, homeless alcoholic and spends a lot of his time in bars or getting in fights on the street. That is until SCU calls him back in for an investigation involving the murdered uncle of a serial killer that he helped catch during the events of the first game. He's prone to hallucinations (which the player experiences from his perspective) of eerie supernatural beings and black, tar-like ooze. Honestly, I was a bit disturbed by some of it but I'm a person who enjoys being occasionally frightened. These mysterious head trips remain a focal point of the plot and unlike a lot of people, I wasn't disappointed with where it ended up.
Lets talk about the journey there, shall we? Level design is varied and includes places like a history museum, run down apartments, a hunting lodge up in the snowy hills, and a morgue, among other locations. As you work your way through these worn down, dilapidated versions of every day places you might find yourself thinking these events could really happen. One level in particular has you and two other SCU members going through a derelict apartment complex, clearing out meth labs on your way to a crime scene that you're supposed to examine. Meth addicts occupy various rooms in the building and will attack you without warning. Their strange grunting and gurgling sounds as well as the creak of floor boards off in the distance might very well set you on edge. It's moments like these that made me stop and think,"I wonder if crime scene investigators really have to deal with things like this."
Combat in Condemned 2 takes place in first person and it is intense. Your assailants will come at you with all manner of blunt objects in an attempt to bludgeon you to death. Both you and the enraged homeless denizens of Metro City can pick up objects from the environment to use to fight each other. Pipes are ripped off of walls, posts are broken off of beds, and bricks are picked up from the rubble and thrown with reckless abandon. Guns aren't reliable in this game. Case in point: As I found myself walking down a hallway, gun drawn, a large, shirtless junkie violently broke through a wall adjacent to my location and rushed at me. My clip contained four or five shots. Two shots missed because unless Ethan is intoxicated he can't aim properly and the other shots that hit the mad man were more or less shaken off as he began punching me in the face. I threw the gun to the ground and ripped a bit of bent pipe from the plumbing next to me and knocked the addicts legs out from under him and followed up this action with a swift kick to his face. This kind of visceral first person combat is something rarely seen in games. Most of the time if you have a gun you'll have no trouble using it to fell the opposition but such isn't the case here. It makes for a very interesting experience to be sure.
When you aren't wielding a broken piece of 2x4 to keep yourself from Death's door, you're investigating crime scenes. I have to say I wish they'd make a game similar to this with even more investigative elements. Happening upon a crime scene will lead you into asking and answering questions about things like blood spatter, entry and exit wounds, the time at which a persons arm was torn off, etc. The player is provided with a camera, UV light, spectrometer and GPS. It's cool to see each of the applications these tools have in crime scene context. I was actually shocked at the amount of detail provided in each of these crimes and when I guessed incorrectly I'd quit and load up a previous save just to examine the scene more thoroughly for clues.
As detailed as the crime scene investigation portions can be, there aren't many to be found in the game and I wish Monolith would have included more.
The visuals were more hit than miss for me. Now, it could be that the game is two years old but I don't think the sky should ever have a large grey and white flickering rectangle where there should be some kind of fog or cloud effect. It breaks the immersion pretty badly. Luckily that didn't happen until later in the game and I was, for the most part, drawn in by the gritty, rundown, and poorly lit game environments. The character designs for the homeless are creepy. I never want to encounter anyone with a pig mask or black tar pouring down their chin in an old warehouse. Ever. Seeing a masked, shovel wielding vagrant running through the dim flickering lights towards you is horrifying.
Hearing is almost as bad as seeing though (in the best possible way) and I caught myself jumping at the sound design in Condemned 2. Ambient sound works to the games advantage and small things like metal cans or card board boxes toppling over somehow become the scariest thing in the game. You don't know who or what knocked over the objects in the next room or if there is even anyone in there at all. Once, when I was in a bathroom I heard some rattling. I looked into a mirror and saw some freak running at me with a pipe in his hand and quickly spun around. Because I hadn't heard him until it was almost too late this ended up startling me quite a bit.
So, two years later am I glad I played Condemned 2? Yeah, despite some strange writing choices and some minor bugs later in the game, I can honestly say that I am. The intense, weighty feeling first person melee combat, paired with a crime scene investigative element, that sometimes assumes you actually know crime sciences, is a match made in heaven and if Monolith made another game in this series I'd definitely want to play it. It scared me so much I had to put the controller down and sit in a different room for a bit and that's not something you'll often find in any medium these days.
4/5
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