Condemned 2: Bloodshot

by Ashley Coomer - 2008/02/04 6:01am

After the events of Condemned: Criminal Origins, poor Ethan Thomas has spiralled into a world of depression and neglect. Thankfully though, Ethan Thomas is not real, which is why the magical world of videogames is such a wonderful place… unless, of course, you’re Ethan Thomas! As though things weren’t bad enough being framed for murder and kicked out of the FBI, his partner has now gone missing meaning it’s time to stop wasting away and do something about it. To the Thomas mobile!

While there’s no doubting the first game was violent, Condemned 2: Bloodshot cranks it up even further to a point where the action is now even more diverse. Your life will once again be in your hands with dependence on melee weapons as protection against the deranged enemies of the game. While Condemned placed you in a map with guns and makeshift weapons, Bloodshot will include those and also add in better skills for those who know how they like to serve their pain, whether that’s by throwing someone into a screen, battering the crap out of them with anything to hand or going as far as setting them on fire, it’s all in a day’s work for the world’s favourite FBI agent (after Mulder and Scully, obviously)! However this leaves us with a bone to pick with the game, and that is, won’t this detract from the level of success Condemned served? We’re probably a bit crazy, but one of our favourite things about the original was that when the odds were against you as you tried not to waste your final bullet, it was genuinely scary. Hopefully this back-up plan won’t tread on it to a high degree. We’ll see.

While the changes in melee combat may eradicate the frights slightly, at least Monolith is working on making it more intense with the audio this time round. Sure, the tracks played in the original were amazing compositions for a horrortitle, but for the majority of the game, that’s all they were – a track, played over the top. Condemned 2 will be different in that, to cite an example, if you raise a metal pipe in the air in an attempt at hitting an enemy, string instruments will play along to create suspense as to what’s about to happen.



There are other areas of Condemned that have been improved for Bloodshot, such as the detective elements of the game where you use forensic tools. In the original you would arrive at a crime scene and be told what to do, but this time round there is a lot more choice on the player’s part. The Serial Crimes Unit will be asking questions over the phone and instructing you to investigate certain things, and you’ll have a choice about what to tell them, as opposed to it being an automatic response once you’ve investigated. There won’t be a right or wrong answer as such, but Monolith has us convinced that your investigative skills will be rated and the more detail you go into, the more you will find out about what the hell is going on.

A very promising side of Bloodshot is the multiplayer, something clearly missing from Condemned. There are four different game types which we’ll move on to shortly, but first, the bad news… the maximum players online is eight. You do the math, as this really doesn’t say a great deal. It’s clear why Monolith has decided to set the maximum amount of players at such a small number, of course, as you can imagine games with 16 or more people running around being quite hectic and as always, lag is the fall of online games.

The first two game types are Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, something almost everyone will be familiar with, but the game mechanics aren’t standard fare. It’s more of a race to get the good weapons than anything else, with many of the maps sporting only a few weapons. As if that didn’t add a little spice to the recipe, we learn that you begin the game with just your fists which are handled differently to the way they are otherwise – fists are assigned to the L2 and R2 triggers when you don’t possess a weapon.



The next multiplayer mode is Bum Rush, a team-based mode where the SCU are loaded up with machine guns, versus tramps under the influence… of no weapons at all! Okay so that makes it sound as though the tramps are heavily disadvantaged and in a way they are but what we didn’t tell you was that what they lack in weaponry they make up in numbers – in a full game there will be two on the SCU team and six on the other. The goal here is for the SCU to stay alive for as long as possible and for the tramps to spoil their day!

Finally in terms of multiplayer is Crime Scene. Again, this game type has the SCU and tramps as teams, with the influenced defending a case and the SCU trying to get it, and a full game will consist of four versus four. This is perhaps the most team-focused multiplayer mode the other side of Team Deathmatch for several reasons. Chief amongst them is that the SCU have machine guns again, but to counter that, the tramps have the ability to move cases around the map at their will. To aid the SCU in finding the case is the gas spectrometer telling them how close they are, but this cannot be used in conjunction with weapons, meaning the player carrying this would be best accompanied in case things get messy. In another countering move, the tramps have a gadget that can throw the SCU off with ease, rendering their gas spectrometer rather useless. Interesting and exciting stuff, indeed, and we’re eager to get our hands on the final product to play these.

The only thing we’re really worried about is how successful Bloodshot will turn out to be, as it genuinely deserves the popularity it is destined for. Criminal Origins hasn’t even sold half a million copies to date, and it was one of the best X360 launch titles, in our opinion. Hopefully, though, this is just taking unimportant things into consideration – it’s a damn good game from what we’ve seen of it, and really, that’s all that matters to us.