The lighting and textures are gorgeous and as I’ve stated recreate environments with a certain haunting and gloomy look from the bloom effect, rather overused in 360 games but not at all distracting. Frame rates never dropped, and were nice and smooth throughout the entire game, lovely! I should state that the character modelling during the cut scenes isn’t very impressive but it works. Various characters just look a bit odd, and square headed that’s all.
I’ve already mentioned that upon getting to the latter levels of this game, I thought I was hearing things as I played. The audio and ambience in this game does this to you, and at certain stages you’ll be on the edge of your seat as you slowly creep through areas just knowing something big is about to happen. For example there’s one level where you’re walking through an abandoned house, and the floorboards creak in various places as you walk through it…then you stop for a second to analyse your surroundings and then hear a single creak from a floorboard elsewhere in the house…Time for a change of pants I think. On other occasions you’ll be walking through a room and suddenly the window/door closes or creaks open for no reason. The game really knows how to unsettle you.
Multiplayer
To make things even worse, there’s some background music on various levels that will creep you out, mainly because of the instruments that are used to reproduce that track. It’s distorted Christmas music but it’s creepy too.Sadly there isn’t any multiplayer aspect in Condemned. It does have a leader board though which is linked to Xbox Live, but I fail to see the point as it only tracks players who’ve played Condemned for the greatest amount of playtime. What’s the point? Surely I can just leave my 360 on for a few days or weeks as the case may be and get a higher rank that way? Seems totally pointless, but then again it is a launch title so maybe they were just experimenting with the Live network?
Replayability
To be honest here, there isn’t much replay value in the game. Once you’ve finished it, the story portion has been unraveled and there is little incentive to go through it again. The only reason I ended up replaying the game about three times was to collect all the birds and metal pieces for achievements.
Conclusion
Condemned is a superb game. It’s the perfect game if you love suspense, tense games with a slight horror aspect to it. Lovely visuals, brilliant use of audio make this a very enjoyable, if short game to play. Multiplayer features would have given this game a better rating, but most players like myself will end up playing through the game a few times, and then selling it off., like I did. Given that you can get this game for less then half price now, I thoroughly recommend purchasing this title. I look forward to the sequel…
Rating: 8/10
Pro’s:
- Quality graphics, and no frame rate drops!
- Tight storyline
- Hauntingly creepy environments
- Top notch audio and ambience
- Simple and enjoyable combat controls
- Violence! So much blood!
Con’s
- Repetitive enemies
- Limited replay factor
- No multiplayer features
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