GregHowley.com

I think I'm done with Condemned: Criminal Origins. The game has been frustrating the crap out of me. Once you get to the library level and your enemies all have guns, you'll walk around a corner and be shot to death before you realize there's an enemy nearby.

The plot of this game is fairly straightforward: You're a cop in pursuit of a man who's framed you for murder. So you pursue this guy through a series of run-down, poorly-lit environments. Alone. And without a decent weapon.

I'd heard terrific things about the crazy melee combat, and that was pretty much true. The fighting is very cool. The animations for your enemies as you smack them in the head with a shovel or the handle of a papercutter are brutal in the extreme. And when a man built like a brick shithouse stalks menacingly towards you, swinging the plastic arm he's just torn off a mannequin and cursing in a fit of rage, it is indeed very intimidating. But that alone can only bring the game so far. There needs to be more.

This game's minuses outnumber its plusses. During the first few levels, the sound would inexplicably go dead for thirty seconds at a time. I'm not sure if this was a problem somehow isolated to my own machine - I've had sound card difficulties before - but it was annoying.

In this game, you can run about eleven feet before your sprint gauge runs out. And your running speed is slower than the walking speed in most FPSs.

When they ported this XBox 360 game to the PC, they apparently decided not to take out the XBox 360 Achievements. Thus, there is an "Achievements" option off the main menu, and part of these achievements involves collecting dead birds, which are generally crawling with flies, and collecting random pieces of metal. I don't get it. In fact, there's a whole lot about the illeged plot of this game which I just don't get. Perhaps that's because I never finished it. That actually is saying something, since I tend to finish just about every game I ever buy. The list of games I've given up on is a short one: Prince of Persia, Brothers in Arms, Splinter Cell, Galactic Civilizations 2, and Condemned: Criminal Origins. There may be a couple more, but I can't think of them.

What does the game do well? Well, it's a short list. The crazy fighting. The AI of enemies hiding behind things and then running up behind you, wielding a 2x4 full of nails. The first-person cutscenes that make you feel like you're really there as you tumble down a staircase or hang from the back of a moving vehicle. But overall, I'd have to advise you to skip this game, whether you own a PC or an XBox 360. To give you a hint, I'm finding this game so annoying and frustratingly dificult that I'm reinstalling Far Cry, and I'm gonna go replay that.