Condemned: Criminal Origins isn’t a perfect game but one thing it has ruined for me is melee combat because I find it to have the best melee combat system I have ever seen and nothing since has measured up in my opinion. So many games I have played where I wonder why I can’t pick up anything I see to use as a weapon because in a real life situation I imagine that is what I would be thinking is what is around me that I could use. In Condemned you can pick up 2x4’s; pipes; planks; doors; conduits; sledgehammers; axes; and many more items so you are never without a weapon. There are a few types of guns that you find throughout the game but at most they have one magazine worth of ammo so you go through them fairly quickly and don’t want to waste them. You also have a taser throughout most of the game that is good for one shot between charges and can help when facing multiple enemies. The parry system was great as each weapon has a different feel to it and different timing for blocking. One complaint I have is that you can only carry one weapon at a time. For the sake of realism I can understand not being Max Payne with an arsenal under your coat but I could easily fit a pistol in my pocket while carrying an axe. You also lose your weapons through each chapter which can make sense in ones that see you travelling a distance but sometimes one chapter starts off in the room next to the previous and in those cases I don’t see why I have to scrounge for a new weapon. You also can’t carry any health kits, they can only be consumed. I can understand not wanting to make the game too easy but being able to carry one or two wouldn’t have changed the game’s difficulty dramatically but would have been a nice option. A small nitpick I had was the walking speed up stairs. It was very slow. The axe and sledgehammer may have also been a tad under powered as some enemies could take multiple hits fro them to subdue when in real life would have caused a lot more damage. Same goes for the sub machine gun whose twenty round magazine needed to be emptied into some enemies to defeat them. Overall though despite the critiques I just made the game play was very fun and I consider it to be an example other games should attempt to perfect upon. There also little touches such as enemies may accidentally hit other enemies and if they do may start brawling with each other rather than fight you. Such is the loyalty you can expect from feral homeless crackheads you encounter in this game and was both enjoyable and believable.
The graphics were great for it’s time. Condemned was released in 2006 and there were games such as F.E.A.R. which were released the previous year and were genre defining for visuals while Condemned was not. It was however above average and still enjoyable to look at for the most part fifteen years later writing this. The lighting; fire; object detail and shadows were all better than most for it’s time. There was also blood on weapons after a fight which was a great detail. The face; hair; and clothing detail is what I saw it lacked most in. Also the models for police officers all had the same face which struck me as a tad lazy. The sound effects were very well done. Hearing where some enemy is scurrying around in a dark basement but not quite seeing them is a great unnerving feeling. The voice acting was also top notch from all involved. The main story was overall fun and worthwhile. Basically the bit about following a serial killer who framed you for the murder of police officers in an effort to clear your name had me engaged and interested. The overarching story about the true motives of that killer and others involved started great but got a bit convoluted and wasn’t delved into enough to answer many questions.
I played Condemned on Linux using Valve’s Proton. It never crashed on me. I did encounter one glitch where an enemy walked through a wall to attack me but observed no other issues. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game allowed me to manually save whenever I wanted aside from during certain cut scenes and provided eight save slots for that. There are checkpoints you can sue as well if you want. There were twenty graphics settings to tweak as well as two AA options and six AF options. The game ran very well and had no major performance issues. Once in a while the frame rate did drop to the 50’s but only for a few seconds and that’s high enough to not cause an issue.
Disk Space Used: 6.26 GB
Game Engine: LithTech Jupiter Ex
Game Version Played: 1.0
Game Settings: Highest; 4x AA; 16X AF; Vsync on @ 1080P
GPU Usage: 30-94 %
VRAM Usage: 1119-1521 MB
CPU Usage: 22-44 %
RAM Usage: 3.2-4.3 GB
Frame Rate: 50-144 FPS
I loved Condemned back in 2006 and I love it now. The game play is great; story is good; voice acting and sound effects are great; if you enjoy melee combat you should buy this ASAP. I paid $49.99 CAD for it at retail when it launched and paid $5 CAD for it on Steam. It is still worth the $49.99 to me. I finished the game in six hours 40 minutes on the hard difficulty.
My Score: 8/10
My System:
AMD FX-6100 | 16GB DDR3-1333 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 20.3.4 | Samsung 870 QVO 1TB | Manjaro 20.2.1 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.10.15-1-MANJARO | Proton 5.13-5