Condemned: Criminal Origins is supposed to be a scary, thriller-esque action experience with a little investigative parts thrown into the mix. It isn't. Instead, it's a somewhat satisfying first person melee combat action title.
Sure, the game is dark and dirty-looking, but the thriller parts are so naively done that they stop scaring you after about 15 minutes. Sure, there's some clues to be collected and evidence to be found, but that process is so streamlined for the console crowd that all it takes is pressing a key twice and let the game take care of the rest.
So what's left? Some very visceral and graphic melee fighting! At first, the brutality of the fights will make you cringe in your seat. You'll see crazed drug addicts jump out of the darkness with a wooden plank in their hands, trying to bash your skull in. And you respond by slamming a lead pipe over theirs. It looks awesome, gruesome and morbidly fascinating.
Unfortunately, this is all there is to it. You'll walk through dark corridors most of the time, waiting for the next lunatic to jump at you, while switching from planks to pipes to axes. Sometimes you'll get a gun with very limited ammo and sometimes you'll be forced to collect the obvious evidence, but generally the game is very linear and extremely repetitive.
Condemned: Criminal Origins is a mediocre action title that would have benefitted from more features, more storytelling and less linearity. As it is now, it's not really worth its price.
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