Condemned: Criminal Origins is perhaps the most realistic depiction of American Law Enforcement in any media ever. After being accused of murder, FBI Agent Ethan Thomas immediately is suspended but not apprehended. In an effort to prove himself innocent, he begins to systematically murder the poor and less fortunate, as well as the mentally ill, with blunt objections and occasionally unregistered, illegal firearms.

Much of the plot is fundamentally concerned with the death of two police officers in the beginning and the occasional, wholly innocent and often already dead victim of certain serial killers. Literally no regard is given to the dozens upon dozens of squatters, junkies, scavengers, homeless, or as I like to call them, "urban survivalists", because they are literally not seen as people. I have a feeling that this game could not be made today.

Jokes aside, Condemned: Criminal Origins is delisted from steam, but you can easily buy a physical copy or a legal cdkey. I bought my copy of the game, having previously had it on console over a decade and some ago, from a very legal source and the game was honestly still sort of cursed like a creepypasta. The famous Bart's Department Store level at one point, was mostly derendered and turned into a Max Payne nightmare sequence, as I hopeless ran around in literal pitch blackness and encountered the occasional door, window and random goon floating in the abyss. Thankfully, a simple restarted fixed everything.

The game is not immediately playable upon installation due to its age, a very common and unfortunate fact, but I followed one of the community guides, downloaded some fixes and installed them effortlessly and more or less, played a homebrew HD remaster of the game in fullscreen.

This game holds up better than most of its genre. The soundtrack is used sparingly, but extremely effectively. The sound design is some of the best in any game, with audible wind displacement from heavy weapons being thrown at you, the realistic physics of objects tumbling around and falling around the environment builds so much depth that is completely and utterly lacking in a lot of modern games of the era. The voice acting for the main characters is a bit cheesy, but effective.

The best performances went into the various urban vagrants you fight, who has some uncanny and realistic AI, perhaps on par with FEAR. They flank, feint and react to sounds you make in the environment. I once grabbed a gun that physically knocked a can off a shelf that alerted several enemies and in another instance, I had someone track me down in the dark because of how I knocked a bucket into a wall with my foot.

The player can strategically turn off the flashlight, plunging yourself into darkness so you can stalk, reposition and ambush enemies. However, periodically flashing it on will not only reveal your position again, but also reveal how the enemies are moving and operating against you. Sometimes they fight each other, sometimes they coordinate and swarm you. In the library, they worked together to lure me in and encircle me. The AI is honestly insidiously smart to a degree that every fight felt like a genuine fight for every inch of advantage. Few games will ever match this.

Condemned has incredible art design that fans of STALKER will adore. Some of the vagrants are dressed almost exactly like STALKER bandits, the urban decay and visual evidence of scavenging and squatting, make for some profoundly unsettling, urban decayed americana. Chipped paint falls of of walls, unfinished buildings creak and fall apart and decayed, condemned dwellings show clear signs of non-conventional modern lives of the non-working hyper poor.

Something so special about the early 2000s, Manhunt era of games. Vagrants and junkies are fairly original, instead of wearing generic ski masks, many of them wear repurposed garbage bags taped to their face or literally just obscure their visage with tape. There is this weird, "corpse found by river" type of industrial bondage that is hardly seen anywhere else.

This game has a surprisingly good plot that is delivered in small doses, but becomes actually very intriguing by the end. Honestly, the weakest part of the game is the supernatural elements. It is far more terrifying to just keep it as simple as drugs, poverty and inadequate, ineffective housing and policing causing everyone's decay into subhuman mutants.

That being said, while the game excels at tight corridors and claustrophobic fight, the best parts are the occasional larger skirmishes. When the city is in full force riot to the point self defense laws are in place, as well as police trying to violently reassert order on the streets, you get just a back-alley taste of the bigger picture and it still somehow manages to build an unseeable, but felt scale to the epidemic.

The second to last mission has incredible gimmicks that best utilize the fun pseudo-science CSI equipment of the era as well as the terrifying feeling of being in a house besieged by lunatics, which concludes with you more or less being like one of the many creeps you have been fighting, running around in the dark and attacking a capable, but cowardly, retreating enemy.

Its a short, sometimes punishing game, but its still worth getting your hands on.

I regret that a long ass time ago, I was spoiled of its best parts in an episode of X-Play of all things, on TV. Bart's Department Store and THE LOCKER SCENE (you know the one) must have been so effective to first time players, there is a reason they are both talked about today, but I still argue the Apple Orchard house and riddle investigation in general, is when all of the mechanics came together perfectly. Honestly, the game would be a lot better if it ended there, simply.

Condemned: Criminal Origins gets 8 decayed birds out of 10. A masterpiece of its time that is still influential today.

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Mods used:
Ultrawide fix
4GB patch
Upscaled textures (looks better than expected)

This game really showed its age.
It's a melee-focused F.E.A.R.
Firearms feel buggy? Feels like some shots just don't land where and when it should. Melee is more fun anyway.
The inputs don't feel tactile. Feels delayed. Could just be a bad port.

The movement is intended to feel weighty, but honestly I think they overtuned it where navigating hallways feel extremely janky. I get that you're supposed to feel the effect of simulated poor footing in dark and uneven terrain (messy, ruined hallways littered with trash and debris), but it servers to irritate more than make things fun/challenging.

Playing on Hard, medkits feel almost irrelevant, where if you messed up you die in two hits anyway (except for that last sliver of health), and the medkits stock up to 50%, so either you survive fights by taking only one hit and move on to the next medkit (which is almost always right around the corner after the next), or die and redo.

Level design? It's just an endless maze of corridors with props you can interact with and doors (some of them scripted).

The forensic tools feel like a tech demo for advancement in animations and materials/shaders, than an actual useful gameplay mechanic. You're railroaded and handheld into using the right tool at the right time. Hell, it literally autopicks the tool for you. There are no room for mistakes and exploration.

Story-wise? Eh, it's very Bush-era horror-thriller i.e. flat and littered with gratuitous violence. If you think Batman is a moral beacon you will love this. Go through hallway, beat up derelicts of society. Backtrack a little, open super secret room that you definitely 100% could have missed unless you're a superhero analyst. Go through more hallway, beat up more derelicts of society.

I cleared the metro station. After that, it's more corridors. I closed the game for good.