While entertaining, this game fails at truly being scary by focusing on combat and cheap thrills in lieu of real scares.
In Condemned: Criminal Origins, you play a confused cop, and throughout most of the game you are fighting with whatever you can get your hands on. You have no idea what is going on, but are experiencing hallucinations that fit in seamlessly with the environment. In F.E.A.R., things are explained far too often, the hallucinations, while well done, are distracting at times, and seriously, nothing is scary when you have a shotgun, laser rifle, and plenty of ammo.
This game was Condemned for the FPS audience, and as a FPS game, it is decent. As a survival horror, it isn't really worth mention. One of the most terrifying aspects of survival horror is the feeling of vulnerability, and when you have military grade weapons and armor, that feeling is very much downplayed.
I feel that if this game had focused more on a stealth element, it would be worthy of its title. The Thief series if remarkable in that it combines elements of survival horror and a need to stay hidden, and shows great potential for the use of stealth in a survival horror- the ability to hide from something much scarier than you. F.E.A.R. could have pioneered this, but they didn't, instead giving you the ability to kill or not interact with anything. Also, I felt the neverending onslaught of clones detracted from the experience altogether, and while allowing for intense action, the more lead flying around, the less scary a place is.
Finally, except for the nightmarish hallucinations, the locales were remarkably not creepy- office complex, shipping yard, underground bunker. While the hallucinations created a cool contrast between these two worlds, I feel the hallucinations were used so rarely that the contrast was barely visible, and the scariness of it all was ruined.
Condemned is proof that Monolith can do Survival Horror. F.E.A.R. is proof that monolith can do a decent FPS, but overall, FPS and survival horror don't mesh well.