The Haunted Hoard: Condemned: Criminal Origins (Xbox 360)

Horror fiction can put us in impossible scenarios facing unbelievably surreal creatures, but no matter how terrifying they might be, there is at least that barrier in your mind that such horrific things couldn’t exist in our world. In Condemned: Criminal Origins though, as FBI agent Ethan Thomas searches the run down projects, he might turn a dark corner and suddenly be hit with a surprise shotgun shot. In that moment there’s a mortal terror that is unnervingly real, the story putting you up against desperate violent men who are just as vulnerable as you are more often than not.

Ethan initially finds himself in the rougher part of town in pursuit of a serial killer known as the Match Maker who poses their victims as if they were murdered by department store mannequins. While already a decent idea to follow that leads to some creepy moments like walking through a department store full of mannequins where people pretend to be them to get the drop on you, there are far more things wrong in the city that all complicate Ethan’s work. Birds are inexplicably dropping dead all around the town, a strange drug is making those who take it irrationally violent and practically feral, and someone at the crime scene of the latest Match Maker killing has his own ideas on how to do his own string of killings, implicating Ethan in the murder of two men so he can string him along in a twisted game. Ethan ends up traveling across the city trying to clear his name, catch the killers, and survive the odd state the slums find themselves in, and for much of the story, this mostly grounded tale supports the action quite well. It is a bit disappointing that Condemned: Criminal Origins feels the need to rope in some supernatural elements then, but it’s not like these come from nowhere as even early on Ethan is experiencing strange visions that let him see black and white representations of a criminal’s actions in an area that he would have no way of knowing otherwise.

These less realistic elements don’t swallow up the narrative to the point it tosses away its compelling use of realistic mortal terror. Ethan is entering new areas poorly armed and with little idea what might be lying ahead, his push through a library, subway, abandoned school, and more having him face the squatters whose minds have been warped beyond hope. They come at Ethan with violent purpose, but they can also be found fighting with each other at times as they really have been reduced to primal rage at anything alive around them and you’re often about as ill-equipped as they are for a proper battle. To hold your own in this first-person horror game you’ll need to constantly scavenge weapons from the environment, but oftentimes these aren’t the kinds of options you’d expect to use in a fight. You might yank a pipe off the wall or a subway sign from its bearings, you might grab a plank of wood from a pile of rubble or scavenge the blade from a rusty paper cutter, all just so you have something on hand when the men armed with similar found weaponry come charging at you with lethal intent. There are some more traditional weapon options, fire axes, sledgehammers, and even the crowbar not feeling too out of place, but it’s not uncommon to be disarmed or find yourself swapping around weapons as you try to go from the first thing you can grab to the best item around. Sometimes you’ll even need a specific option to clear the way forward like the fire ax to break down a door so you might need to part with a reliable standby, but even if you find yourself stuck with something suboptimal in a fight, you can try to scurry away and grab something better nearby in the hopes of turning the tide.

The different scavenged weapons have different advantages in terms of things like how fast they can be swung, the damage they deal, and how far the weapon can hit. Figuring out your preferred option before moving forward keeps you keenly aware of your surroundings, and the often frantic fights have a sort of desperate feel to them even when you’ve started to get a feel for when to swing and when to block. It’s down to earth in regards to this brutal fight for life and there are even tricks like some enemies feinting a blow to get you to guard so that you mistime it. Guns are available as well but surprisingly enough, despite being incredibly strong, there are times you may just leave one behind in favor of something like a desk drawer. Your bullets have a good chance of killing any person they hit, but the guns you find rarely have much ammo in them. If you do exhaust all your bullets in a fight and there are still men standing, you can club them with your firearm, but it is weaker than most any other tool and will even break apart after smacking around enemies too much. A sawed off shotgun’s two bullets might be guaranteed kills if they land, but if there’s a group of crazed killers ahead you don’t want to be stuck trying to bat them back with the weapon after those slugs are gone. Guns are also found in the hands of your enemies, leading to moments like a sudden surprise shotgun shot that would deal incredible damage if it lands square on. Approaching a gunmen is a tense affair, but there is one option that exists to make things a little less dire. Ethan carries a taser with him he can use to stun an enemy and even grab the weapon out of their hands as they reel from the shock, but the taser needs time to charge between uses, has a range limit, and can miss. It can buy you some vital time to get a good weapon in your hand though and even stun a gunmen so that you don’t need to get in their face with something to club them necessarily, its inclusion helpful and a smart way of preventing the combat from getting too nerve-wracking.

Beyond the first-person combat, Condemned: Criminal Origins has you exploring various locations with little puzzles and sometimes even criminal investigation portions. You’ll get out some high tech devices to start to take samples or uncover some information about the immediate area, and with many violent actors in the plot you can expect what exactly you’re learning or investigating to take a few different forms. This helps keep the game from leaning on found notes too much and can make some scenes a bit more interactive instead of the characters intuiting everything right out of the gate, but it is more a novelty than a gameplay challenge. It can also lead to portions where you’re wandering around and environment looking for the tiniest sliver of something that glows under a light, but since you’re usually safe during these portions it’s at least a matter of time until you find it rather than something that can have a rude interruption to add some real frustration to the process.

To try and keep things fresh instead is often more about the types of enemies you face or how they’re presented. Early on it is vagrants and addicts mostly, but as you get deeper into the plot you can start to get humans who move in unnatural ways like crawling across the ground at speed or ones with horrific scars that make their features more fearsome. Big tough guys who can take quite a beating start to ask for more careful play since they can hit you hard if you don’t respect their threat level, and near the end you even start to face some fairly competent and lucid fighters that really test to see how well you can guard and pick your moments to strike. Health kits are found in set places in a location so in the midst of battle you can’t often patch up your wounds, the game again achieving a pretty smart means of keeping the attacking foes threatening while having a way to tip things in your favor some since you can run back to a health kit you skipped earlier to recover. New areas often come with new improvised weapons from the environment as well, but it still feels like a wider range of enemy types could have kept the core adventure more exciting since even with the new ones introduced you’ll find plenty who don’t ask you to divert from your usual combat tactics. However, there is definitely a good deal of atmosphere still present as little sounds make you jumpy and worried that someone dangerous is around the corner, and even when you understand spacing and block timing better, you can still be caught off-guard in tight spaces or when more clever characters find ways like reaching in between the shelves from the other side of a bookcase to break that illusion of growing safety.

THE VERDICT: Condemned: Criminal Origins provides moments of intense vulnerability as you explore urban environments with only whatever you can grab to fight with. The enemies are armed with the very same tools as you and are just as dangerous when using them, your planning and spacing being what helps you win but it not so easy to consistently execute. Guns surprisingly don’t exempt you from the omnipresent concerns about your safety and can even leave you more vulnerable than a simple pipe if you aren’t careful, but having the taser always on hand means you won’t be agonizing over every item choice for engaging with the game’s compelling battle concept. The story straying into supernatural elements pulls it away from its greatest strengths and ideas like the investigations aren’t really the most fleshed out, but the horror at the heart of Condemned: Criminal Origins is that you are just a man up against other men, and in such a dark and rundown city, that’s more than scary enough.

And so, I give Condemned: Criminal Origins for Xbox 360…

A GOOD rating. While it doesn’t answer all the questions it raises about the less grounded ideas that roll into the plot, Condemned: Criminal Origins still has a few good mysteries at its heart that feel realistic enough and tie well to the terrors you’ll be experiencing most of the game. To have a man wildly charge at you with violent purpose and have no recourse but to smack them with whatever is nearby is a frightening scenario in reality and translates well into the game with how it handles its health and weapon system, and while the taser tips things a bit in your favor, it also means those moments where you might be ganged up on or need to overcome a man with a gun that would likely end poorly otherwise have a way to keep the player on the path to success without fully bailing them out. Grabbing new weapons in new locations is fascinating even if you can expect the shape of many fights to be similar, but there are more creative moments like the people better at hiding and some of the later more dangerous enemy variations. Investigations could use a bit more to them to make it feel like you’re uncovering the truth rather than just finding the object you need to highlight but it also makes learning the developing story feel more tangible and believable. It’s easy to say excising the less grounded elements entirely could make the game more compelling, but it would probably need something strong to take their place as well to give the adventure some late game energy. It’s not like it handles those less realistic elements poorly either, many of them certainly eerie enough and not really detracting from things so much as sending the game down a different direction than the one it initially seems to be on. Still, thanks to smart area design, eerie ambient sounds, and a core mechanic that leaves you constantly making strategic choices to try and eke out a little more safety in a dire situation, Condemned: Criminal Origins ends up a tense but thrilling horror experience that succeeds by embracing realistic concerns more often than unfathomable scenarios.

A launch tile for the Xbox 360, Condemned: Criminal Origins contains a few amusing elements like finding hidden secrets with messages telling you to press a button to get an achievement in a then new concept for video games, but the conceit of much of the game’s horror still feels fresh almost twenty years after its release. A very human and visceral kind of fear is presented well thanks to smart atmospheric touches and limited player power, but it still doesn’t stray into pure helplessness to tap into this relatable type of fear. It might have been more commendable if it had committed fully to ideas around that concept, but even with its deviations, Condemned: Criminal Origins is a horror game with a distinct and well realized gameplay identity.