Condemned 2: Bloodshot (Xbox 360)

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Ethan Thomas, the protagonist in Sega's first-person adventure Condemned 2: Bloodshot, has stumbled into a deteriorating roach motel and damn, if there isn't one of those creepy male mannequins blocking his path. The mannequin's wearing a suit and a vaguely smug smile on its off-white enamel mug. By itself, the mannequin is just an oddity, but when Thomas advances up the corridor and then reverses his steps...

The mannequins have doubled, tripled, quadrupled in number. They're all wearing identical smug smiles, and now, they're blocking the way out. One of them is wearing a prosthetic arm, a fairly potent weapon in the hands of a drunkard, or a madman or a drunkard madman. Get a move on, the game says, in the creepiest way imaginable. Get a move on or the mannequins, well, best not to discuss such unpleasantries.

This is what Condemned 2 does and it does it very well. It creates a wondrous atmosphere of suspense and, at times, horror. Static-laden TVs and radios crackle and sputter out reports of a looming horror. Gibbering lunatics provide aural clues as to Thomas' next brawl; their cackles and odd grunts serve to keep a scene tense even when they're not in view. A weak flashlight manages only to keep the environments, even the outdoor ones, remarkably compact, claustrophobic. Condemned 2 puts the emphasis on flickering shadows, errant noises, and the expectation of something awful rather than on strict moments of "Friday the 13th"-style killer-under-the-bed moments of spontaneous terror (although there are a few of these to be had, especially during the doll factory stage), and this certainly fits in well with the game's cerebral approach to its mysteries.

Players are tasked not only with surviving, but piecing together a series of crimes. Here, Thomas will be asked to interpret blood sprays, follow blood trails to their sources, determine causes of death (Hint: It's never natural causes), and uncovering clues as to a victim's identity. Looking at a blood spray, for example, calls up a list of choices, and it's a player's job to guess whether it's the result of bludgeoning, splatter, gunshot, etc.. Correct responses are rewarded with bonuses at the end of a level and, oftentimes, the pursuit of clues and the sheer, simple joy of getting the facts right proves to be more of a draw than the game's vicious combat. It's too bad, then, that Condemned 2's investigatory sequences aren't fleshed out further. Instead, they're the sideshow, an attraction oddly detached from the goings-on under the (very bloody) Big Top.

Sega and Condemned's developer Monolith hailed combat as this game's great new improvement. The first-person brawling has indeed been improved in terms of the hero's ability to perform combination hits and use elements in the environment -- say, a television set -- as tools for a spectacularly gory finish. The brawling engine allows some nice opportunities for pummeling, however, and it's a great kick to take the steam out of an oncoming creep by hurling a brick or bowling ball at him. Better still, enemies will sometimes fight each other, and it's undeniably fun to finesse one bad guy into taking out his frustrations on someone else.

Yet the game does not address many of the perils of first-person combat, such as the jerkiness of the main character's limbs, the disorienting swoops of the camera as Thomas extends his arms to strike a foe, and the debilitating lack of peripheral vision. Simply, Thomas fights as if he were a flailing eight-year-old schoolgirl whose head is, roughly, attached to a bobble. Monolith has forgotten the cardinal rule adhered to by every boxer, UFC fighter or wrestler under the sun: Never take your eyes off your opponent. It's infuriating to hurl a haymaker and lose track of an opponent in the process. It's slightly more infuriating to realize that said enemy has actually flanked Thomas and is now serving him generous portions of beatdown and whoopass.