Sega Nerds

Preview: Condemned 2: Bloodshot

by Graham on February 17th, 2008

Some of you may know, (and more probably won’t know), that I had the opportunity to visit Sega Europe a couple of weeks ago. Over at Sega HQ, I and several other journalists were lucky enough to get our hands on The Club and Condemned 2, and also we had a chance to interview two of the guys from Bizarre Creations, who worked on The Club. It was all very exciting.

Unfortunately we were told to keep our mouths shut about Condemned 2 or someone would forced feed our grandmothers marmite sandwiches.  Fortunately my grandmother likes marmite, the crazy old broad.  So I am free to bring you guys the goods on Condemned 2: Bloodshot. Hooray!

To start off, we were given a quick introduction, which also involved some drinks, cakes and pastry treats, and then got down to the nitty gritty by playing Condemned 2’s multiplayer.

Now, what I should emphasize is the build we played wasn’t finished, so hopefully, the major flaws will be ironed out come release time.

Multiplayer: The art of killing time with some mates…

We only got round to playing one type of multiplayer - which pretty much involved bludgeoning the other players with whatever we could find.

As you all should know, Condemned’s single player focuses less on weaponry, and more on melee weapons, and the multiplayer is no different.

The levels are scattered around with weapons and implements, which can all be used to smash your opponent’s brains in. From the typical (but trusty) baseball bat, to the simple piece of 4×4 or even the rim of a toilet seat, the choice is yours really. But there are some more powerful weapons, like the Molotov cocktail (which can be used to set opponents on fire) and the levels do have some guns on them, but they are very hard to find.

Right you’ve got the idea. But how does it play?

The characters seem to move a lot faster than in the single player, so rather than meandering around the stage you will find yourself running - perhaps not as fast as some other FPS games, but still a fairly decent speed.

Graphically the multiplayer does look good, however the detail was reduced compared to the single player (but to be honest that is to be expected). Also (at least on the level we played on) the stage was very dark, darker than single player I would say. I think the darkness could be just trying to hide any graphical inferiority over the single player. But perhaps it was just to allow for players to hide and pounce upon unsuspecting passersbys… which happened a lot.

The game does have some serious issues, at the moment, with the multiplayer. One most noticeable thing was how jerky other characters moved on your screen. Quite often you would do a shoulder barge (which stuns the enemy for a moment), only to find that just as you are about to hit the other player, they will jerk out of the way - causing you to go into a wall. This doesn’t really affect your character, but it can be disorientating for the player.

Quite often I would find myself about to attack someone, and then they suddenly disappear, and it would take me a good few seconds to get my bearings and find them again. And it wasn’t only me, one guy I was standing next to, was the person attacking me, and we both managed to miss hit each other and ended up running around in circles for about 30 seconds, trying to get our bearings back and get a decent hit in.

But speaking of hitting, that’s another issue right now. Pretty much everyone I spoke to mentioned this problem, the hit detection. Quite often you would be in a fight and trying to hit someone, but you aren’t quite sure if you are doing any damage. And more seriously, you weren’t quite sure when you were being hit yourself.

Annoyingly our controllers had no rumble in them, or the rumble feature wasn’t active in the build we were playing with. If it was, I think our collision detection would have been better.

But as it was, there were many times I was fighting and thinking I was doing rather well, only to suddenly fall down, dead. Or I would just be randomly hitting out, and suddenly have the words “You have killed player 2 with the toilet seat” appear on the screen.

We actually had a tournament with the multiplayer, and unlike The Club tournament (which I won), I’m pretty sure I was a clear loser in the Condemned one. I seriously could not get a decent kill in, I think I maybe killed 2 or 3 people tops - it was very difficult to get a decent hit in.

Overall, from this early copy of the game, I think the Multiplayer will not become the next Halo or Counter strike, but it will be a lot of fun for you and some of your mates if you fancy some mindless killing.

What, that’s it? Just multiplayer? Where’s the single player?!

If you are asking this question, then don’t worry, I did indeed get a chance to play on the single player mode of the game.

For anyone who wanted to play on the single player version of the game, Sega had setup a special room, separate from the multiplayer mayhem. Two by two we were guided into a small darkened room, with two PS3’s and two large flat screen HDTVs, setup back to back.

Now if you have seen the video that James put up a few days ago, showing 8 minutes of Condemned 2 gameplay, then you will know, roughly, what I went through.

First off I sat through the great opening movie, showing Ethan Thomas sitting in a bar, explaining that he was at a low point in his life, when a guy knocks into him, and Ethan loses it and jumps on him smashing his face in with his bare fists. He’s pretty bad ass, as the video below will show you.

Anyway, the bar owner then pulls out a shotgun and tells Ethan to get out (but less polite). You then meet up with a bum outside, and he leads you to a secret booze cache. Unfortunately the booze has been drunk by a demon-person/thing, who then wakes up several of his friends, who take it in turns to attack you.This whole section is basically a training mode, teaching you the new combat system - which involves different types of blocking and forms of attack. It’s much more advanced than the original’s fighting, yet still very simple to do.

After the fighting, one of the main demons gets you to the ground and beats you senseless. You awake in the same area you were left in, but with a gate open, to a new area. You walk along a short balcony, and are told to grab the aerial on a TV set in a window. This is another training section; throughout the game you will find random TV sets, which you can adjust the aerials on, to get a decent picture. The idea is that the TV shows news reports, which give the player clues to the story.

After playing with the TV set, you turn around to face the bad guy from the first Condemned game, or at least who you think is the killer from the first game. He spits/vomits black stuff in your face. You are dazed for a while and then you chase after him into a building. From here on you have to walk through the familiar settings that are present in Condemned, rooms full of crap, and dark corners… and scary ass enemies that hunt you down.

Now for those that know me, or know me enough, they will tell you that I never completed Condemned. I never got past the second level. Now it’s not that I didn’t like the game, I loved it. It’s not that I didn’t have enough time, as I have completed plenty of games after it.

It’s that Condemned is quite easily the second scariest game I have ever played in my life (Enemy Zero on the Saturn being the first), and I literally couldn’t play past the second level. Yeah I’m a pussy, but that’s life.

Anyway, it was a little different with Condemned 2. Even though the game had some very freaky elements, like when a dog starts jumping at a window inside the first building, I was not that scared. Maybe I’ve managed to grow up in the last year or two, or maybe it’s that I knew someone else was in the room (playing on the other PS3), I don’t know. But what I do know is that I really wasn’t anywhere near as freaked out as when I played the original game.

But that is not to say the game is bad at all. In fact on many ways it is far superior. I have already mentioned the fighting, which is really fun, and the new finishing moves are great. During my play through I had the pleasure of smashing a bums head into a TV set.

To perform a finishing move, you need to beat on an enemy until they become dazed, and then you need to pull both the L and R triggers, and then depending on the situation, you need to steer them to an object that can be used during a finishing move - like a TV set or a table. I’m led to believe there is something like 40+ finishing moves…but best not quote me on that, I’ll need to double check.

My entire play time basically consisted of walking through rooms of different buildings, onto the streets, and defending myself from some unsavoury persons. But not to fret, Sega gave us all a lovely preview of some other parts of the game.

One of the things which Monolith has changed in Condemned 2 is the way you perform your investigations. In Condemned, you were pretty much guided through the process, by an assistant over the telephone, telling you what to do and where to look. It was something that some critics did not like so much about the game, there was no real freedom to these investigations.

The Sega rep showed us all a video of the new investigations process. When you come across a crime scene, you still contact your department, and they help guide you through some of the process, but it is a lot more interactive and free this time around.

Rather than just scanning an area and basically being told what you are looking at, you have to look around yourself. An example being that you come across a body, and you have to identify, using sight, who/what you think the body is. You are given options as to what you are looking at, and you have the choice.

On the day they played us a video to give a taster of just what to expect. On the floor was the body of a male police officer, who had been shot in the back. First off you are given the options of whether it’s a male or female, or if you cannot tell.

Then you are asked to find some clues as to who the person was, and by actually looking at the body, and focusing on the Police badge, you can identify that the person is an officer of the law, and (because of the badge no.) your associate on the phone can tell you the name, and other details, of the body.

You then need to identify how you think the body was killed, once again by getting off your ass and looking at the body and/or crime scene. In the demonstration, the rep walked around the body and upon inspection you could clearly see a large bullet wound in the officers back.

But the officer was not actually shot in the room where he died, on the floor you can see drag marks, made of blood, leading from the body into a nearby room. You are then told to follow the trail and see if you can find out anymore details.

At this point the demonstration ended. But we got a really good idea of what to expect from the game, and it was very impressive. At every point of the investigation, you had a choice of selections to pick from. So even though we could clearly see the body was a police officer, we saw a choice of various possible uniformed jobs to choose from. We were told to expect some tougher choices to be made from other crime scenes. So it won’t be so obvious all the time, and you should need to actually look properly at some crime scenes.

We were also led to believe that there are no wrong choices in your investigation. If you think the dead cop was a circus clown (and if the option to select that was there), you could choose a clown and get away with it. However, depending on well you do with your analysis, you do better overall in the game, and I think you unlock more features at the end.

One other thing is that after my time was up on the single player mode, I actually felt rather queasy, like I had motion sickness, which happens very, very rarely with me and games. But this could have been one of several factors:

• The game does contain some sudden and jerky motions, to simulate real life movements, maybe that caused it.
• I was sitting about 1 foot away from a large flat screen in a small room with the lights off, and earphones on.
• I hadn’t slept for about 20 hours at this point, as I had come straight from my night shift job.
• Or maybe I am really becoming a pussy and the sight of a tramp burning to death now makes me feel a little nauseous.

It could have been one of these, or maybe all of them, but I had to take a few mins out of gaming after playing. I do hope it was because I had been working all night, rather than the camera work in the game. Because if it is down to the camera work, then playing won’t be much fun, if you think you’ll be vomiting every 15 mins.

Ok so it’s got more features than K.I.T.T, but does it look as good?

To be honest I did not notice too much of a graphical advancements over the original Condemned game. However that is not a bad thing, I still think Condemned is one of the better looking games this generation.

The game does look very good. All the brilliant uses of lighting and shadow have adopted once again, to make the game nice and creepy. The enemies move well and will run past in the shadows, to try and freak you out, as before.

All the rooms and areas are littered with objects and debris, as you would expect to make the world feel rundown, desolate and lonely.

Speaking of lighting that is one thing I would say has improved, as a few times you will see fire used quite well. You have Molotov Cocktails to use against enemies, setting them on fire and such, and also in my play through I came across an area that was blocked in the street, but had a long trail of petrol flooding the street. Nearby was a trashcan on fire, so being the good Samaritan that I am, I kicked over the trashcan and watched as the street illuminated under the snaking fire path, as it grew longer, until it reached the blockade, (I think it was a car), which then exploded.

It was pretty cool.

Sounds (couldn’t think of an original title here)

Just to point out, normally at these events you are in a room with other people making noise and can hardly hear the game. But as one of Condemned’s great features is the use of sound, Sega not only put us in a separate room, but kindly supplied us with some large headphones to hear all the creepy sounds in a more personal manner.

Again the sound effects were just as good as the original game’s. The atmosphere is very eerie, and you hear noises just at the right times to freak the player out. I think there is more talking in this game, as the enemies shout out more to you, threatening you and making you jump if you don’t know they are nearby.

Basically if you have played Condemned, expect much of the same, but a bit better in both visuals and noise.

Summary:

I cannot wait to play the final build of Condemned 2: Bloodshot, even though the version we played had lots of little bugs and some other minor issues, it was really fun to play with.

I’m still undecided about the multiplayer. While it was kind of fun to play, I really cannot see it having the lasting appeal other games have. Really Condemned isn’t too well suited to death match.

But saying that, it wasn’t terrible, and we should all just think of it as an added bonus. If we ever get to see a Condemned 3, I would love to see Monolith put in an online co-op mode. I think this kind of game could work well with two cops roaming around trying to solve the murders and beating up the homeless. They could have branching missions, where the players get separated and need to meet up again. Or where one person has to go off in one direction in order to help the other player get past an obstacle, or something.

If anyone from Sega/Monolith happens to be reading this, (as I’m sure they always do) there’s an idea for you guys, co-op.

Final thoughts:

Really for any Sega fan or fan of the original this game is a no brainer, I would get it. For anyone who likes something fairly unique and is tired of the standard FPS games, get it. For anyone who just likes violence, get it. For anyone who watched Sex in the City every week, and wears a pink flower in their hair, I’d still get it… but be prepared to cry.

I cannot wait to play the full game. 

Please note: No grand parents were harmed in the making of this article.

~G~

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