Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Disappointing"

The weakest PC-game ever produced by Monolith, and to my knowledge- unless I missed one, I've played (and enjoyed) all of their previous games.

Also, this is the first Monolith production that not only did I not much care for, but I could not force myself through to the game's end. I think I at least made it 2/3rd's of the way through it before I quit and un-installed, which is something I rarely do with any game unless it's pretty bad or boring. The Punisher was the last game to evoke such a reaction, and that was a couple of years and several dozens of games ago.

I must completely disagree with Gamespot about the keyboard and mouse being suitable for this game... IMO, you better have a gamepad or be quite flexible with creating new key-bindings, solely set for this game, for the various melee attacks which you'll be using, as there's not much gun play here. I no longer own a pc gamepad (i prefer to play my gamepad-style games on Consoles) and never could get comfortable with a new set of alphabetical bindings. No way was I going to proceed using the default numeric melee controls. That game-design idea just sucked!

Speaking of game-design, ACK!! If you thought FEAR suffered from bland, uninspired, or repetitive level design, try this game- and by comparison, FEAR will seem like a LevelLord Masterwork of Level Design! Yep, this is that bad.

Condemned reminded me of a re-imagining of sorts of the game Manhunt, and it falls short in every regard. It just feels rushed and unfinished too. The whole CSI-tools element of the game seemed like a gimmick which only slowed the overall game-play, as it's poorly supported by the story. Another game gimmick is that you can only carry one "weapon" at a time, (you have room in your "pockets" for CSI tools, but only one weapon?!) so this forces you to use whatever you can find in the environment as a combat weapon. It was fun for a while, but become boring after a short time. Simply put, it's a poor port of a Console game that needed more tweaks prior to the PC version's release. Perhaps that's just me, and I'm being far too critical.

If the idea of cheap scares, an incomplete story, whacking people with pipes, re-bar, 2X4's, and other varieties of hand-to-hand combat (over and over and over again) sounds like too much fun to pass up, and you have a gamepad, go for it!

I'll take Manhunt's gameplay over Condemned: Criminal Origins' any day.