Deeply flawed yet still compelling, Condemned creates a confusing and traumatic gaming experience in the best way.
However, it is one of the most compelling and driving games I have ever played. I played it through in two sittings, and had nightmares for a week. This has never happened before- I've played through the Fatal Frame games, I adore the Silent Hill series, I survived System Shock 2, and have played a great number of similar Survival Horror games and been fine. But something about Condemned shook me deeply.
The key to this game is storytelling. The gameplay is decent, the combat is brutal and intense, but the storytelling is masterfully done, and paired with a hostile atmosphere that grates on your very sanity. The main character is running for his life, not sure of what is going on. He is confused, possibly insane, and finding himself doing more and more acts of random depravity and madness, ranging from brutally beating to death homeless people to collecting dead birds- a confusing, but very nice touch. All while this happens, he starts to experience very threatening hallucinations, and the line between reality and illusion becomes incorporated in the gameplay, where at times your hallucinations begin to control the pathways available to you as a character.
You play as a cop, voiced by Greg Grunberg, who plays Matt Parkman, the psychic cop in Heroes. As you are investigating a serial killer's latest victim, you realize the killer is still in the building, and go after him. He overpowers you, and kills two officers with your gun, then leaves. The police believe you murdered the officers, and begin chasing you.
However, as you continue to run from the police and chase after the killer, you begin to realize that not all is as simple as it seems. The police seem to not care if you are innocent, and you begin to experience some highly unpleasant hallucinations yourself, making the player doubt despite the main character's firm belief in his innocence and sanity. The more you seek answers, the more questions are raised, and the feeling of isolation begins to set in. As you wander through increasingly nightmarish environs, you are surrounded by people, but they are no longer mentally human, instead being something much darker. Hideous vagrants, deranged junkies, psychotic lunatics, and sewer urchins will all come after you, and you run out of ammo very quickly, having to resort to using whatever is nearby to fight.
The capabilities of the game are limited, in this respect- your weapons are limited, and you can't just grab a chair off the ground, throw it at someone, then break off the leg and continue to beat your victim with it. Instead, you might just get a chair leg right off the bat. Not bad, but it would be much cooler to be able to beat down your victim with a chair, then break off a leg to make the beating more direct. The lack of diversity in models is also somewhat distracting, however, you rarely get a good view of who you are fighting, save when you are finishing them off. However, the fighting is consistently a bit too close for comfort, and the AI is rather good- setting up ambushes, obtaining better weapons when available, and fighting each other when applicable.
In many respects, it is the locales that lead to this game's eerie nature. You play almost all of the game in parts of town that are blocked off for good reason, they are toxic dumps. They look like crap, are unstable, and even worse, full of psychotics. There is never a comfortable, pleasant place, and that alone creates a threatening atmosphere. What is worse is that the places are all easily identifiable- an office building, a school, a subway station, a house- all places you find normally very comfortable, are transformed, meth-house-ified, into places that are very hostile. It serves to tell you, "This could happen to your house. This is just waiting to happen." Furthermore, the hallucinations only serve to make the atmosphere even more threatening, as you never know if what you are experiencing is real or just another illusion.
The hallucinations were one of the strongest points of the game. Never before have I had an in game hallucination directly impact gameplay as well as it did here- allowing certain areas to be accessed when a hallucination was triggered, or even forcing and chasing you down another path. They are incredibly unpleasant and lucid, and yet there are some hallucinatory details that are barely noticeable, but there- in many ways this game reminded me of the silent hill series in that respect.
An aspect I really enjoyed was the sense of vulnerability. You have a lead pipe, and that's it. Fight off several insane malnourished homeless people who have similar weapons. While this allowed for some of the most ultraviolent and brutal combat I've seen in a long time, it also made me keenly aware of the fact that I am just a man, not a killing machine. I can be hurt. I can die here, at the hands of some nutjob with another lead pipe. I'm losing it, but I can't stop to get therapy, because I've got to get this psycho who framed me. Prove myself innocent, and try to ignore the fact that I'm most definitely not sane. You are incredibly fragile in this game, and the more you play, the more the player realizes that their character is just becoming another dangerous psycho in this area. This sense of raw vulnerability is something I particularly appreciate, as at no point in the game do you become a gun-toting marine type. You are consistently running out of ammo if you do get a gun, and that alone keeps it scary- knowing that you have 4 bullets left before having to resort to pistol whipping the rest of them.
Another great thing is the ambiguity- most of the questions are left unanswered, and the answers given are so obviously wrong that it screams for a sequel. There is something greater happening in this game, and you aren't even a pawn. You're just trying to stay alive and clear your name, and that's not likely to happen.
Overall, this isn't a happy game at all. However, it is one of the eeriest games I've ever played, having some very disturbing and frightening hallucinations. This game scared me both on an immediate and deeply subconscious level, and in that respect, is one of the best games in the survival horror genre, getting right what F.E.A.R., Condemned's predecessor, failed to. Despite it being in the FPS viewpoint, the combat is nothing like anything I've ever seen on a FPS game, but I was busy being too traumatized to really care. If anything, I feel that is the greatest strength of this game- it is traumatic on multiple levels. It gave me nightmares. it scared me. I lost sleep from this game. I loved it.
Definitely not a game for everybody, but if being traumatized sounds like your cup of tea, then it doesn't get much better than Condemned. Just be prepared to begin doubting your sanity for a bit afterwards.