Condemned: Criminal Origins (PC) - Part 1

Developer:

Monolith

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Release Date:

2005 (Xbox 360)

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Systems:

Windows, Xbox 360

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Today on Super Adventures I'm taking a brief look at Condemned: Criminal Origins. Man, with a title like that you can tell Monolith were hoping to get a whole franchise out of this one. But in the end they only released the one sequel, and the series has been dormant for the last 8 years. Though if they ever make a third game they should totally call it Condemned 3: Criminal Inquisition.

Condemned was created by No One Lives Forever and F.E.A.R. developer Monolith (currently soaking up the acclaim for their latest non-FPS Shadow of Mordor), and it was an exclusive launch title for Microsoft's shiny new Xbox 360 console. This was actually in development for the 360 at the same time as F.E.A.R. was being made for PCs, and they were released just a month apart, so I guess the company was in a gritty horror FPS kind of mood at the time.

This isn't the first time I've played the game, I managed to finish the thing back when it was new, but it will be the first time I get to see it with all the settings on max. It tried to talk me out of switching the soft shadows on, but I disregarded its warnings as I am from 10 years in the future and such things are no longer a concern to me.

WARNING: The first screenshot in the article shows a gross picture of a bird being dissected.

(Click any screenshots to view them at the original size.)

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Oh that’s great, a loading screen I don’t even want to look at. Nice phone though, I used to have one that looked a lot like it in fact. Not the greatest mobile phone in the world, but I liked how it kinda resembled a BMW Z4 Roadster.

Uh, I'm getting off track here, sorry.

Unreadable scratchy microfiche of redacted FBI files, cool! Seems that conspiracies may be afoot. All I can really make out from this moody series of flickering images is that the game really is called Condemned: Criminal Origins, but it’s a title sequence, so that’s kinda the point. Shame about it being unskippable though.

The story begins with a car driving down an alleyway to a building at sunset. Birds fly past. I'm basically just describing the screenshot here.

This is about the time when I'd expect cast names to start appearing on screen, but it’s not quite that cinematic. It's cinematic enough though to be locked to a 16:9 aspect ratio no matter what kind of screen you're playing it on.

JUMP SCARE!

FBI Agent Thomas doesn’t even get a chance to take his keys out of the ignition before there’s sudden tap on the window and the creepy music cuts out for a second. Nice friend he’s got there, shining a flashlight right into his eyes.

You know, this starts off a whole lot like F.E.A.R. does, with government agents taking a car to a crime scene in the dark. I think I remember the faces being a little better in F.E.A.R. though.

As soon as our hero stepped out of the car I was given control of his movement in the typical first person shooter manner, but uh… how am I supposed to get through this tape? I don’t have a crouch button! I don’t have a jump button either, Agent Thomas is a bit rubbish really.

Oh I see, I can crouch when I need to by hitting the action button at low obstacles. Context sensitive.


A FEW MISERABLE GREY HALLWAYS LATER.

Well I think I’ve figured out what I was called in for. A cop found the body on patrol, lying next to a mannequin, a dinner table, and a whole lot of eyes all over the walls. The way it’s set up makes our investigators think it's probably the work of a serial killer called the Match Maker, but I didn't drag this bag full of forensic tools from the car just to make educated assumptions.

My wireless data transfer allows me to investigate and collect evidence at the crime scene, and then transmit it to my lab tech Lieutenant Rosa for analysis, so we’ll be working through this together over the phone. First I need to determine the cause of death by pointing my UV torch at the corpse and seeing what turns purple, because apparently trauma points glow under ultraviolet light.

Oh shit, that’s amazing… Agent Thomas has feet! He’s got a whole body going on down there below his neck. It's a small thing perhaps, but I do find first person game worlds to be more immersive when my character actually exists in them.

Well I’ve successfully managed to pull out my high-tech digital crime scanner-thing by pointing the UV light in the right place and hitting the ‘Ready Tool’ button. Now I just have to get the bruising framed correctly so that all the arrows light up and the light turns green, and then I’ll be able to grab a scan of it for Rosa.

Seems that the victim was strangled by hand, by a man with a missing index finger, but there has to be something more, something we’re not seeing…

Whoa. We interrupt this investigation to show a grainy shot of a psychopath carving up the side of a mannequin’s head. It seems that Point Man from F.E.A.R. wasn’t the only Monolith protagonist who was getting creepy visions that year.

So the mannequin head is the clue then?

Definitely seems that way. I pressed 'Ready Tool', Agent Thomas whipped out his ‘make evidence glow green’ laser, and now the etches show up as clear as Predator blood. Rosa explains that these scratches match the MO of the Match Maker (along with the victim being posed with a mannequin, that was kind of a giveaway too), which makes me wonder why I needed precognition to think to look for them.

I'm starting to remember now that the forensic investigation in the game is basically limited to ‘point at the thing that glows’ and then ‘get the glowy bit in frame’, and I don’t even have to choose the right gadget myself. It seems to be here for the sake of the story and mood rather than as gameplay in its own right, but I’ll take this over QTEs any day.

My friend with the flashlight (Detective Dickenson according to the tutorial messages) started yelling at the officer who found the corpse to quit smoking at the crime scene… but it turns out he doesn’t smoke. Realising that the three of us aren’t alone in here, Dickenson kicks a nearby door open and runs off to investigate (without his pistol drawn!)

I chased the detective through to the next room, walking right into this cutscene where he hears footsteps coming from the fire escape above the window and then sticks his head out into the blinding rays of the setting sun to have a look. I think the virtual camera guy could’ve really done with dialling the exposure down a little for this shot.

I mean in this lighting Detective Dickenson looks more horrifying than any demented serial killer.

This finally gives me a chance to get a good look at our hero though, voiced by future Heroes star Greg Grunberg (who somehow found himself in danger of being typecast as psychic cops for a while). I'm really glad it turns out that Agent Thomas remembered to pack a gun in along with all his gadgets, as my own psychic intuition is telling me it's going to come in handy really soon.

Suddenly our cigarette smoking suspect cuts the power, so Dickenson decides that the sensible thing to do is to send me off into the building alone to turn the lights back on while he goes up the fire escape. Suits me man, I’m tired of being blocked by his invisible forcefield, forced to stay a few steps behind him as he strolls around complaining about stuff.

I barely made it halfway down the next hallway before I got a phone call from the cop warning me that a drug addict was coming right for me, and right on cue I see someone dart across the corridor into a room on the right. Fortunately I’m not playing as a silent protagonist, so Ethan does the sensible thing and tries to reason with the guy.

“Federal Agent. Come out peacefully or I will use force!”
“Fuck you!”

Two seconds later and there’s a dead guy on the floor with a bullet through his forehead. He wasn’t even our suspect, he’s just some guy who thought it’d be a good idea to charge at a federal agent in a dark room while waving a table leg.

Huh, that’s a different phone to the one on the loading screen. Not that it matters, I just like pointing out obvious things.

“Oh yes. The city’s full of them now, Thomas,” Rosa explains over the phone. “Addicts, vagrants, psychotic individuals gone terribly bad – they come in all kinds but mostly violent. Be careful.” She's even streaming a little video clip to show me what a lunatic looks like as he beats someone to death. And here’s me thinking that it was weird for an investigator to leave a crime scene with more bodies than he found when he came in.

I tried to ignore the sounds of suffering coming out from the shadows and carried on upstairs to the next floor. This may be a first person shooter right now, but it seems they’ve replaced the reload button with a ‘pull out your magazine and estimate how many rounds you have left’ key, so at best I’m going to get seven more kills out of this thing.

The path to the left is blocked by those shelves, and I didn’t take door kicking classes at cop school, so I can’t go right either. I suppose I’ll just go walking up into the darkness ahead then, shining my flashlight into every corner to make sure everyone here knows I’m coming. Hey that’s a point, how’s he holding the flashlight when both of his hands are full? I suppose his light must be that thing clipped to his bag strap. If only they thought to equip the dude in Doom 3 with a bag, maybe he wouldn't have had so much trouble tripping around in the dark.

Huh, more eyes, like the ones all over the crime scene downstairs. Clearly we’re dealing with one bored individual here.

I walked over and grabbed the metal plate, causing a tutorial message to pop up and tell me that I can collect birds and metal pieces like this to unlock achievement awards. Birds and metal pieces huh? Well that’s… different. It’s very easy to forgive Condemned for being a bit underwhelming when it comes to achievements though, because it was a launch title for the Xbox 360 and it’s not like anyone knew exactly what they were doing with them back then.

And I don’t know what I’m doing here, because this looks like a dead end. How typical, I chose the only path available to me and it turned out to be the wrong one! Guess I’ll go back and make sure I didn’t miss anything.

Someone shoved the shelves aside, opening up the path leading left! Man, seems like I’m the only weakling in this game, because no one else is having any problems getting doors open and pushing things out of the way.

I'm also having a bit of trouble just walking sometimes, as all this crap on the floor is slowing me down, and I walk pretty damn slow to begin with. Not a complaint, just an observation.

Well it was a good hiding place my shelf-pushing friend, but not quite good enough.

He chose his moment to step out of cover, I chose the next moment to put a bullet through him, and now I’ve got a better kill score in this place than the serial killer I came here to stop.

I crept through into the next room, following the panicked noises of a man who didn’t sound all that happy about being followed, until he disappeared up into the ventilation ducts leaving me facing another dead end. After a couple of laps of the floor I finally noticed a door I’d walked right past several times and dragged my tired legs over to the power switch! At least now I know that the enemies don't respawn.

Well that’s definitely the switch I'm after, the suspect’s cigarette is right there on the floor next to it.

I walked over, flipped the lever, and was flung across the room by an electric shock as a reward.

Oh hey man. I don’t suppose you could just, throw that gun of mine back over to me? Or better yet, how about you don’t touch it at all, that would actually be better thanks.

Our suspected serial killer slowly bent down, picked up Ethan’s gun, aimed it at his head and “Bang!” Then he just walked off with it without saying another word. Checkpoint saved.

By the way, I should mention that the game has saves, auto saves and quick saves, which is arguably not ideal for a horror game. Personally I’d rather be scared by the threat of scary things than of having to replay a chunk of a level, but I can see why some people would rather remove the safety net.

Well the suspect managed to disappear around a corner, but I’ve found another psychopath to play with. This time we’re evenly matched though, as all I’ve got to defend myself is this pipe I tore off a wall.

The guy stepped out and took a swing at me, but my ninja reflexes kicked in just in time for me to step backwards and avoid getting hit. I saw my chance and tried to smack him around the head with my new pipe, but it took Ethan a couple of seconds to pull his arm back and by the time I slammed it back down the thug had his guard up. He blocked my hit and then immediately countered with his own attack, which connected hard enough to make me see red. Though happily it didn't knock me too senseless to get out of the way of his next swing.

Oh awesome, his friend just dropped in from the ceiling! You know, I was pretty confident that I could get the hang of the timing in time to take this guy, but two of them at once is kinda taking the piss. Fortunately I hit the block button early enough to get my guard up in time, and ceiling bloke’s attack was interrupted by my pipe, leaving me entirely unharmed, and him momentarily stunned.

Oh ceiling bloke you glorious dumbass! He took a swing at me, and ended up knocking two of his friend’s teeth out by mistake. That’s one thing I’ve noticed in this: when weapons are waved around, things are going to get broken, with boxes knocked flying off tables and bottles getting flung off shelves. It really does make a difference when an enemy goes stumbling backwards into a chair and knocks the thing across the floor, the interactivity makes even this 2005-era polygon scenery feel more tangible and real. You’d think I’d be totally used to seeing this kind of physics system in action, seeing as I do live in 2015 and have done for over a month now, but apparently not!

It helps that these weapons have way more range than you'd expect. We don't have to get right up in each other's faces to make a pipe connect with each other's faces.

Huh, I’ve got execution moves to finish off a wounded enemy? Well it really didn’t take the game long to give me a chance to be the real monster.

I figured that ‘punch’ seemed to be the tamest option, so I went with that, and then continued through the building in search of my gun.

Well I just used my state of the art CSI gas spectrometer to find a dead bird. I don’t know why the game just made me do that, but hey, gotta catch ‘em all! I can only bring the spectrometer out when my forensic sense is tingling though, so I can't actually rely on this to catch them all.

Aha, it makes sense that the only things left untouched by junkies in this craphole of a building would be the medical kits. Well, the opposite of sense anyway. These things are awesome as they heal up half my heath bar each and they sound like Max Payne’s bottles of painkillers when I use them. Sadly unlike Max Payne’s painkillers, I can’t take them with me. Agent Thomas might be wearing a huge coat and carrying a bag, but they’re already full of forensic tools, so I can’t stock up on health items and I can only hold one weapon at a time.

Still I can get a few different attacks out of a club, depending on the direction I'm moving when I hit the attack button. Like a swipe from the left, or even a swipe from the right. So there's that.

The downside of not being a silent protagonist is that there’s nothing stopping my guy from explaining how much of a fuck up he is. Fortunately Dickenson has a fire axe over on his side he can throw over to me (AKA. a red keycard).

Whenever I find a door with this pattern of scratches on it, I know I’ll have to go find an axe to open it. Then I can just throw the thing away and get a faster weapon if I feel like it.

As soon as I stepped inside a dude threw a chair at me, knocking the light and sending it swinging back and forth, which was nice. I love it when these guys interact with the environment even if it is 90% scripted. He hid behind a pillar and waited for me to come over, so I raised my fire axe and interacted with his head. There’s a bit of a delay with this thing, but I can’t argue with a one-hit kill.

I’m spoiled for choice though, with all these weapons lying aroung on the walls. You can see at the top right how it compares to this pipe I just found, so I can make an informed choice about what I want to be carrying around. Well what I want to carry is a pump action shotgun, but I’ll take what I can get. It’s cool when enemies take when they can get too, especially when they rip a power conduit off the wall and make the lights flicker. Speaking of enemies, I’m sure I saw another one run down here; that’d be psycho number… six I think.

Oh I just remembered something. When Dickenson threw me the fire axe he also mentioned that I’m carrying a taser and I can use it to stun enemies. There’s no weapon switching in this, I’ve got one button for whatever’s in my right hand, one for the taser in my left, and one to give people a good swift kick with my mighty boot.

Oh damn, I like this! The dude is utterly paralysed, letting me walk up and club him over the head without drama. Also unlike my health bar, the battery on this taser is already recharging! I’m definitely getting on top of this combat now. I can still hear noises though, so there’s someone else in here (probably waiting to smash through a barrier behind me).

Hang on, I just heard a door opening. I must have just gotten the prerequisite number of kills to open up the next area. Hopefully it’s Dickenson in there waiting for me and not another angry dude with a chair.

Well fuck, it’s the guy who stole my gun. He’s got carved wooden hair, eyebrows enough for three men, and man does he love punching me in the gut and calling me a bastard. Why is he so pissed off with me all of a sudden anyway? All I’ve done is tried to get the lights on, tried to get my gun back that he stole… and maybe killed a couple of people I dunno. Man, if Dickenson got pissed off at the dude smoking at the crime scene, he’s not going to be impressed with the rivers of blood I’ve left in my wake.

Okay, STOP PUNCHING ME ALREADY! It got old a while back. Hey is that Dickenson’s voice outside the door?

NO!

Those two were the only likeable characters in the game so far!

And the guy finishes off the hat trick by throwing me out of a… hmm, I’m going to say second storey window, but I didn’t really get all that long to count windows on the way down. What an asshole! Still, he had a cool voice. The game has great voice acting all round in my opinion, which makes sense I suppose seeing as half the characters in this scene apparently shared the same actor.

Oh, I killed 9 enemies? More than I thought, but lower than you’d expect from the first tenth of the game. Shame I only found a third of the collectables, even after being lost and wandering in circles for a while. The trick with them seems to be that metal plates are marked with eyes all over the walls, and you know a bird’s nearby when you hear the sound of flies. I’ve still no idea why I want to be hoarding them though.

The loading screen for level two explains that certain areas of the city have reported thousands of bird deaths, with bodies littering city streets and public parks, but to be honest I’m still not convinced I want to start collecting them. Not that I could anyway, seeing as Agent Thomas just got dropped out of a window to his death.


The investigation concludes in part two!