Condemned 2 Bloodshed PS3 Review

My new favorite thing since Silent Hill and Resident Evil 4 is Condemned 2 Bloodshed. This blood thirsty violent renegade – cop – vs- zombie game is just what the survival horror gamer needs to survive until the other titles come out later this year. The fist smashing viscera spurting melee is so over the top that it is funny. You will definitely enjoy this game if you are a fan of this genre. But if you aren’t then for heaven’s sake stay very far, far away from this game.

For those of you who glory in the gory you will notice the little homages to Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, and Resident Evil. You play as a drunken, broken man who has seen way too much hell on the job. The atmosphere is horrific. There is black oily goop splattered everyplace. The first thing you see is a giant cockroach across the screen and it just keeps getting worse.  You begin the game with taped hands, punching out zombified guys. The blood spatters all around. You pick up two by fours with nails, baseball bats, bed posts, electrical conduits and god knows what else to use as weapons. Anything that you can pick up you can throw. You can blow up enemies with gasoline explosions and toss bricks at them.
Weapons are far too few and far between. You can play carefully and conserve your bullets. But sometimes you can’t get back into areas where there are lockers and health. Avalanches of debris, ceilings, wood and furniture from upper floors can fall down and block your way. Sometimes you’ll have to find creative ways around, by crawling underneath or over half blown up walls.

The game can really give you a start because it has such horrifying levels and terrifying enemies.  There are slimy sacks on the ceiling that erupt with disgusting black oil covered freaks. You’ll feel like it’s hard not to panic and want to run the hell out of there when you never seem to have enough ammo.

In Condemned 2 you play Ethan Thomas who was special agent 11 in the previous installment.  Now the guy Ethan is described as having ‘crawled deep into a bottle’. It’s pretty funny how he downs bottles of Rumple Minze when ever he seems to find a few bottles left of a case. Presumably everyone in the neighborhood keeps a supply of cases of the stuff handy, and occasionally throws the box casually down the hall or into the street with half of the bottles intact.

The town that you explore seems a lot like the hotel in Silent Hill 2 and the hospital also. But it is still fun. Metro City  is meant to be scary.  It’s more like it is just a gross out game. There isn’t anything believably supernatural about it. It is more of a horror than a paranormal thriller.

There are a few flaws. It’s in first-person which is interesting with all the different weapons and the punching. But you can’t see as much. The camera doesn’t get all around enough. It is better when you can get  360 degrees camera and use that to change the perspective on the fly.

Another big problem is that you generally don’t have a gun. That is not good. The ‘killing with a toilet seat’ idea is amusing at first, but it gets tedious quickly. The brutal melee style of the game has it’s appeal, but to get the job done you need to provide plenty of weapons and ammo.

The graphics of the nasty dark ruins of the worst parts of Metro City are very good at conveying the theme. They aren’t the best visuals graphically, but the atmosphere is gritty and as disgusting as you can imagine. It could have been done better and the textures and backgrounds could have been more detailed.

You have to solve the crime scene puzzles and they are hard to see with a standard definition TV. Even with the brightness turned up it still is difficult to distinguish the small details. Even the font on the screen for the forensics is tiny and hard to read.  This part of the game play is very old school and seems out of place with the rest of the game.  You are playing as this washed up drunk and then you have to go and get evidence? It doesn’t seem to match that a civilian would have to do that. Why should you have to bother with all these extra screens and menus that don’t add much enjoyment.

When you have to fight more than one guy at a time and they rush you, you don’t have much of a chance unless you have a sub machine gun. That doesn’t always happen. It all seems so futile and your character just isn’t prepared to deal with everything he has in front of him. The frame-rate drops. Occasionally it got stuck and hung there. Especially on the menus it can get glitched and has to be restarted.

On the whole this is a fun game. There are some pretty strange levels involving  dolls, clown masks and metal mechs. It has it’s flaws, but no game is ever perfect. This one is enjoyable for laughs. It also offers several multiplayer levels to mess around with. It’s very gross, it’s uber – violent but stupid enough not to take seriously. It is not for kids at all. Parents should take the warning labels seriously with this one. I give Condemned 2 Bloodshot 8 hurled chunks out of 10.

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