I love so many of the things this game does. The first person perspective melee combat is decent, and I love the focus on guns being rare, powerful, and having limited ammo. Having to actually pull the magazine out of the gun to check how many bullets you have left instead of just having a bullet counter on your HUD is awesome. I really wish there were more games out there that would treat the actual realities of gun use to balance combat in a different way.

The game's got some pretty good atmosphere and decent scares at points. A lot of this is owed to the game's great sound design. It feels a little weird to be a cop on the run beating up dozens of insane homeless people with a pipe, though.

I found a lot of horror to love in Condemned. The combat is weighty enough, but we have since seen far better first-person combat systems. For one this old, however, it holds up well enough.

I've an issue with some of this games bland feeling level design, and a bigger issue with the games final two chapters. Chapters one through eight all feel completely standard for this era in gaming; ruined city blocks, subways, sewers, abandoned school, library - it's all here. The last two chapters, however, made me want to drop the game. I didn't, I stuck it out, but it was close.

The supernatural elements that get revealed right at the end after only being hinted at through visions fell flat in my opinion. This game at it's best is about clubbing vagrants with blunt objects you pull off the wall in a scary setting; at it's worst it throws boring encounter after boring encounter at you while you trudge through a dark field.

Not enough nu-metal and cheese to truly be the the video game version all those edgy serial killer thrillers that got made in the wake of Seven. Think The Watcher starring Keanu Reeves as a serial killer who serial kills while dancing to Dragula. But it's as close to those as we have gotten, so I'll take it.

It's not really well-worn territory when it comes to games. There's this and i dunno, Murdered: Soul Suspect or the Saw games. So it's interesting, even if it's not great. I feel it's pretty underwritten, and would have liked it if the characters felt like more than expository devices. Ethan especially is as bland as his name.

Also not sure how much i like the unexplained vaguely supernatural stuff, to me the interesting and unique part to this game is the serial killer stuff as supernatural spookiness is a dime a dozen in games.

Gameplay is pretty simple, combat especially is very basic and clunky, but that does work in the games favor. It's not supposed to be flashy or even satisfying. The game is also well-paced and doesn't overstay it's welcome. Decent variety of levels too. Sure, every level is a variation of abandoned and decaying place but they are different kinds of abandoned and decaying place. The investigative stuff could have been expanded more, it's mostly just taking photos while your Hunnigan support NPC tells you about it.

Overall it's a solid game, the foundation of something great, maybe the sequel improves it, i haven't played it so can't say. Kinda surprised no indie or AA studio has taken a whack at making a spiritual successor to this, feels like that is where a great version of this could come from.

text by Brandon Parker

★☆☆☆

“AN ORIGINAL CONCEPT BY JASON HALL AND NATHAN HENDRICKSON.”

If you take every serial killer movie cliché and let them sit under a swinging light bulb in a dark, blood-stained, dilapidated room for a few hours, you’ll eventually wind up with Condemned: Criminal Origins. The opening credits mention something about an original concept being somewhere in here. At first I just thought they meant the concept where law enforcement officials in the future have the right to kill anyone who looks vaguely homeless or might possibly become dangerous someday. Which is really not so original, the idea could have come from any number of newspapers. But it’s handy, since the game is swarming with 2×4 wielding vagrants that you kill brutally without a word when they get upset once you intrude upon their makeshift homes. Injure them enough and instead of, say, arresting them, the game offers you a few different options of breaking their necks or bashing their heads in or what have you while they’re laying helpless. So it’s really just an attempt to try and fit the circle-shape called a police procedural into the square-hole called the first-person-shooter genre.



This Original Concept by Jason Hall and Nathan Hendrickson begins with an investigation at a crime scene in a typical horror movie what-a-stuffhole type building. Don’t worry though; the investigating is made easy by magic automatic clue detecting cameras and flashlights. Wait… my god. It’s the same M.O. as the others. We got a serial killer at work here! Suddenly you hear movement upstairs. The officers on the scene throw a stuff fit and scream for backup while crying, “The killer’s still here!!” The lights flicker and shut off, “That sick bastard, he’s playing with us!”You’d think their first thought would have been, “Oh it’s just some transients hecking around upstairs,” especially if you lived in the bloodthirsty raging hobo filled world that Condemned takes place in, instead of, “Good god, the killer left the body here, waited for an officer to wander into this labyrinthine stuffhole, find the body, radio it in, waited for his backup to arrive, then waited for the FBI to show up, then flipped the light switch off, just to mess with our heads! We’re dealing with a brilliant madman obviously.”

The crime scene itself has a dead girl posed with a mannequin that has a scarred face. That’s it, that’s the M.O.. Seems pretty ridiculous, taking the time to get mannequins and pose them like that. That’s the bottom of the serial killer shtick barrel, if you ask me. He puts more time into the mannequin than killing the girl. It’s like the girl is just some after thought, maybe they just keep catching him robbing the department store of its mannequins so he has to get rid of them like that, all he wants is a mannequin without getting caught.

Being an Original Concept, of course it has some Original Loading Screens. They consist of important looking classified-type FBI documents which try to help explain some of the finer plot points, like the endless waves of homicidal bums being simply due to an “increase in crime and drug use,” and offer helpful tips like “use block to your advantage” (so you don’t get mixed up and try to give yourself a disadvantage). There’s also, of course, a wide variety of bullets randomly strewn about on top of the document. Somebody who shoots stuff owns that document, you see, so take it seriously. I bet it was Mr. Hendrickson who thought up the bullets bit, or maybe it was a joint effort, I wish I knew the creative process of the minds at work here.

Each level consists of room after room of the same thing, yet they all don’t really look like any one thing in particular. I can’t ever really tell what the hell kind of building I’m supposed to be in. They all just look like the basement of somewhere. Room after room of some place’s basement, and it’s hard to tell where you’ve been and where you’re going.

In Condemned: Criminal Origins, slow and unresponsive combat is a feature, not poor design. Firearms are rare, so it’s mostly swinging slow pipes and hammers and things. Why make a game half-police investigation and half-first person shooter if you’re just going to dumb down the investigative parts and eliminate firearms yet still fill the game with hordes of enemies whose presence never really has a good explanation? I don’t know!



The story in the game is probably where most of the original in the Original Concept originally originated from. They took a dream-like approach to the narrative and-ah, who am I kidding. None of this makes any sense. I have a feeling the people who made this video game watched and enjoyed a few movies before, and maybe even a particular David Fincher one, but if this game was a movie they wouldn’t be able to get away with half the stuff here. One minute you’re thrown out of a window and land on a car after a guy shoots some policemen with your gun. In the next scene your waking up in your apartment and an old man is sitting there just watching you. A complete stranger, he says, “Oh me? I was a friend of your fathers.” And we’re just supposed to take all this nonsense in stride because it’s a video game and the main character has a special jawbone or something. How do you argue with a special jawbone? You just don’t.

Strangely enough, there are one or more individuals out there that think this series would make a good movie, or make good money as a movie, so that’s what they’re doing. Although it’s not going to be a direct adaptation, just set in the same “universe” as the game. I assume hordes of dirty looking murderous vagrants are to be expected. Maybe they’ll make a game based off the movie and call it “Se7en.”

The lowest form of horror in my opinion is one that relies on the sense of self-preservation, startlement and shock value. And that's precisely the type of horror presented in Condemned. Some of it was true for F.E.A.R. too, but due to the outstanding gameplay you kinda wanted to forgive that. At first I thought Condemned has a F.E.A.R. complex of "great combat, bad horror", but within 70 minutes I realized that this wasn't the case.

The combat starts off very impressive. It's difficult to pull-off a good melee combat in first-person, and Condemned is probably one of the better examples of it. And the enemy AI seems very advanced at first, almost like it's playing mind-games with you. But soon you realize that the combat doesn't really have any more tricks up its sleeve, and gets boring very quickly. Plus some issues with it become apparent. For example, it's clear that head-shots deal more damage, but it's almost impossible to have any precision in a fight. You aim at the head and end up hitting air above it. It's almost a happy coincidence when they do happen.

As for the AI, it becomes obvious that the perceived "mind-games" are all scripted, while the real AI is extremely dumb. They like hiding behind corners, and that's basically their only tactic. Which is very annoying because sometimes you KNOW the enemy is hiding there, but there's pretty much no way to avoid being hit. One time an enemy ambushed me, and after I took a couple of steps back, he decided to hide behind that same corner again like I didn't see him.

Furthermore the level design reveals itself to be extremely linear. Sometimes there's like two paths to the same room, but they usually only differ in what pointless items they're gonna have, and it's usually conduits. And these diversions are so brief that you end up exploring both paths anyway. Then there are these special doors that require a special weapon to open, and it's always somewhere around the corner. So there's basically no consequence for picking one weapon over the other, because you're always gonna find the one weapon you need when the situation arises.

Needless to say, guns are almost useless here. Most times you find them with about 3 bullets inside, which isn't worth trading an axe or a sledgehammer for them. I don't really mind having less ammo in a game like this, but what really bugs me is the in-game reason (or lack thereof) for why you can't carry extra clips. Because you carry an entire forensics lab worth of tools on you, but there's no place for an extra clip?

Speaking about the forensics, they're just busywork here. They're not some fun gameplay mechanic. They're usually just "pull out a tool, point it at something and left-click". Most games that feature forensics have this problem, but here there's so much emphasis on it that it becomes really annoying really fast.

And the final nail in the coffin for me is the movement speed. It's very slow, and you wanna hold down the sprint button the entire time, but then you keep running out of stamina. I dunno why they decided this was a good idea. Being slow does not add to horror or suspense. It just makes you feel handicapped. If the goal of the game was to make you feel handicapped, I'd understand, but you're supposed to beat the shit out of hundreds of junkies, so I don't really get it.

All that being said, the core combat is really well-done. I think, if they made it a bit more complex and let you move faster, this could really develop into a fun first-person brawler. The potential is definitely there.

very original horror game, interesting investigation mechanics. lighting, atmosphere and sound-design are superb, compelling plot and voice acting, melee and firearm combat feels crunchy and satisfying, Monolith was cooking some serious heat back in 2005/06.

there is some ocassional jank regarding the blocking and investigation mechanics though, my first few hours were a bit frustating because of these two things.

unfortunely the game does get repetitive rather quickly, the combat while enjoyable falls into the strike/block loop, movement speed is slow considering the often large levels, the level design itself doesn't offer enough variety to keep the player entertained after a long while of play.

I still recommend giving an shot, I miss when Monolith was still around to create these original games with good gameplay, influences and technical prowess instead of being stuck with estabilished IPs, shame that the sequel is not on PC but I will definitely try it once I get the chance.

Have had this on the backburner for many years and finally got around to it. The game excels in its atmosphere, with every location feeling decrepit and grimy. That is just accentuated by the enemies and combat being brutal to the point the game has an almost snuff film vibe to it. The combat being mainly melee focus makes each encounter much more tense as you cant just run and try to kill an enemy from a distance, you gotta get up close and personal. The game does have guns but they are pretty spare, and when you get them you are only able to kill just a few enemies before you gotta switch back to melee. The story is serviceable, the characters are interesting and their oddities add to the overall weird psychological atmosphere. I personally really enjoy the direction it takes throughout the game, though there are parts of the story that are a bit confusing and underexplained, but I expect the second game will clear some of that up. I highly reccomend giving this game a shot for its unique mix of melee combat and atmosphere which creates some genuinely tense and scary moments

Condemned is a jubilant, evil-grinned celebration of twisted crime thrillers, and even when the story is muddled and the movement can feel sluggish, it still excels with its great combat, astounding sound design/music, and striking visuals, creating an atmosphere and overlying tension that feels absolutely decrepit and putrid, in the best way possible.

Combat is not exactly on Sekiro levels or anything, but those latent senses I formed during my time with that game were coming out with this one. It has some surprising depth to it with blocking and counters, with a very minimal focus on guns considering their scarcity, but when you pick them up, you always have the upper hand. The focus on melee combat with a touch on devastating guns is a great yin to the yang of F.E.A.R. 's focus on gunplay with minimal focus on the hilariously over-the-top melee system. Bouncing off of that, instead of F.E.A.R.’s array of heavy military weapons, the array of weapons in Condemned, if you could even call it that, helps the game imbue its squalid and low-class environment, where everything and anything scattered around seems like a weapon. Some of my favorite examples of this were both detached locker doors and school desk tops in the school level. I will admit that the taser basically works against everything great about the game’s combat, but I had the best experience possible in that I accidentally forgot about the taser and spent the vast majority of the game not using it. However, I still cannot force myself to ignore it and it being one of the worst parts of the game. Enemy AI is just as engaging as the actual combat, where they stalk you and take cover and hide to try and get the jump on you as much as they can. When you get to overall movement though, it sounds good on paper, but in actual practice it’s a total nightmare, and not in a good way. The deliberate slowness could help with pacing if the game was strictly linear with no puzzles, but it is such an insane pain in the ass when you’re backtracking or trying to look around for supplies/weapons, and the sprint button has such a fast disposal and slow recharge, creating this sludgy loop of fast, slooooooow, fast, slooooooooow, fast, slooooow that can make progression just garbage. However, the movement and stamina actually works pretty well for combat, adding a lot of weight and strategy into the process. I understand that having faster movement would make this game even shorter than it already is (the game’s length is not a problem, trust me, I’ll get to that shortly), and there’s okay ideas in its implementation, but it seriously needed some reevaluation in its final form.

The story is not really a huge part of why this game excels, because at its core, it’s pretty vague, nonsensical, and seems like a mishmash of several murder mystery movies, most notably Se7en but also Minority Report and Oldboy to a lesser extent. However, it serves as a good catalyst for its levels, and does a lot to create this coherent carnival of amazingly creepy and offputting locations. I think all the people saying the game quickly loses its footing are smoking loud (or just referring to the story, most likely), because in my opinion the game starts good and keeps getting better and better, with the last few levels all feeling standout. The game is impressively short, beaten in only 6-7 hours, but not one level feels like it takes away from the upwards-accelerating haunted phantasmagoria it feels like. I’m a big fan of when games just have a seeming apocalypse going on in the background of the story that is mostly irrelevant to the central plot/conflict (we learn this is sadly not the case in the sequel). In terms of atmosphere, progression, and setpieces, the department store level is an absolute masterpiece and sets an insurmountable standard for the rest of the game (as great as what’s left is).

Sound is such a huge part of why this game excels, and even when this is mainly in reference to the game’s incredible sound design, it’s also like jazz, in how it can be about the sounds that don’t get played. There are so many subdued and drawn-back moments of terror when music is not there to make it more tense. All you’ll hear are footsteps, breaths or rattling chains nearing you, and that is so much scarier than hearing le scary music or le shock sound effect, just you, silence, distant noise, and your brain to make of that what you will. This unseen terror is very deliberate in tying into the game’s “background horror” where the world seems to be ending around the protagonist while he’s preoccupied with other things. Especially great is the game’s forgoing of an in-engine reverb system and uses what I could call “pre-rendered reverb” to get the echoing of people’s voices and noises in a much more realistic manner. Voices in another room absolutely sound like voices in another room, and it really puts you off-guard the first few times you hear it, adding to the overall immersion in a fantastic way. In continued regards to sound, the score is great at its shining moments, but as explained earlier, is used sparsely in order to let the sound design shine.

To me, Condemned feels like a combination of two games among my all-time favorites: Cry of Fear and BioShock 1, which both happened to release after Condemned, and while it shares similar flaws to both of those, the terror and atmosphere is still clamoring at me weeks after I beaten it. It is simply psychotic to me that Monolith managed to release both F.E.A.R. and this game in the exact same year. Thoroughly unbelievable; The absolute cooking that was going on in that studio between 2004 and 2005.

Such a cool-ass game with nice, little details that give it a survival horror feel. I love how you have to check your ammo manually, rather than it just being on the HUD. I love how it can be really creepy and daunting, even without any enemies present. Doing actual crime-scene work that was (probably) realistic was a neat mechanic too, using all the gadgets was so cool.

Going through this horribly run-down part of town and exploring these abandoned buildings riddled with hobos trying to kill you was so enthralling, I couldn't get enough back in the day!