I downloaded this the other day from the PSN from reviews by friends saying it was alright. To recommend a beat-em-up or a fighting game to me is pretty hard. I know what I like in fighting games and it has to be damn good for me to give it a thumbs up. Think God of War 1 & 2. I have flagged off games like God Hand(actually I didn’t mind it, I just didnt have time to get through it), Heavenly Sword, Assassin’s Creed and Devil May Cry 4(to some extent). So, yes, I am a hard man to please. Not to say there arent elements of the latter games that I didn’t like, it just wasn’t enough to make me think ‘damn that was awesome’.

The Condemned 2 demo he;d my attention for around 6 minutes. For a beat em up game, the controls were very clunky and not well thought out. Very few games use the R3(clicking joystick) at all, let alone use it for an action like a kick. Combine this with the fact that the same joystick is the one you use for viewing means that a failed kick can either not strike, or move your view, or move the view then strike at the empty spot. In fast paced combat this would be a huge problem till you developed the right sensitivity. Luckily, the gameplay is some of the slowest I have seen for this kind of game. Within the first area I fought 4 guys. 4…. And they weren’t even together. I appreciate that you are meant to feel the atmosphere of the game, but thats damn slow for a beat em up. The punches and combos don’t connect as you would expect and the entire feel is that of a FPS when you run out of ammo.

There are weapons and whatnot to increase the violence of the attacks, but I only managed to get a pipe in the beginning, and after swinging wildly and connecting(not on the person but they seemed to fall over anyway) I lost interest in looking for more. For a game where the character moves around at a walking pace, the enemies are pretty fast, and the darkness of the game makes some ground roaming critters quite hard to kill. Im sure there are more ways to kill things, better things to kill them with and in general heaps more to the game, but it is NOT a beat up em. It’s a first person shooter, where you only have melee weapons, you need stealth and tactics like say, Manhunt. For FPS fans this game would be quite awesome, if you are expecting a nice beat em up, maybe its best to look elsewhere. For me, there is a slim chance I will play this again, and an even slimmer chance I will change my mind. 2 Stars.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 6:12 pm and is filed under PC, PS3, Rant, XBox360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.