After the first Condemned's ridiculously awful and repetitive gameplay, I'd rather buy 3 copies of Mario & Sonic than 1 copy of Condemned 2. I borrowed Condemned from a friend on the advice of someone on this site who told me how awesome it was... I'll regret that for the rest of my life.

It's not a great game but the atmosphere is awesome and overall, I would give the game an 8/10. I bought the first for $18 and thought it was definitely worth that. I'm renting the second game because I rarely buy non-multiplayer games.

My main problem with the first game was its clunky controls, something they reportedly fixed in the second installment.

Honestly I've rarely ever been more frustrated than I was when playing Condemned. The gameplay was truly atrocious. So much so that I couldn't enjoy the actual atmosphere, because I hated the controls too much.

I felt the same way, honestly. I almost put down the game after an hour because I was irritated. In a rare stroke of patience, I kept plugging away and started really enjoying the game later on.

Naz, I know you've played a lot of shooters, as have I. We're probably the wrong people to talk about FPS controls because I get the feeling you're like me: if even one little thing is buggered in an FPS control scheme, we start howling bloody murder about the control system. People who don't play many shooters probably wouldn't even notice the problems in Condemned.

I even put down The Orange Box for the 360 because I was so irritated at the controls and because I know how HL2 is supposed to control. I'll pick it up again when I get my PC rig going.

I got the PC version of Condemned recently, played through a few levels, and it is a frustrating game, but it is definitely with it's charms.

It is scary as shit for damn sure, played in the dark with headphones, there are definite jump moments! I haven't played through enough of the game but apparently the story gets good and damn creepy as well, but like I said I don't know for sure.

The combat is unique but flawed at the same time. It's nice to see a FPS that doesn't actually rely on the shooting though, guns are next to useless in this game. If an enemy with a gun is killed and you pick it up, it'll only have ammo left from what they used themselves. You can pick up a gun from a corpse only to find it's empty, and there's no HUD for it so the only way to know is to take the clip out and look, cool feature I thought!

From what I've played theres a good game there but you gotta forgive it's flaws, of which there are a few.

naznatips: I assume you tried the 360 version? I only ask because of your mentioning of the bad controls, I'm wondering if they're similar or exact to the 360 version of FEAR (also from Monolith / Sierra, and the game itself borrows alot from Condemned, which might as well be a spiritual prequel to FEAR) which are complicated to shit! It's easy enough to play on the PC.

Hehe yeah you're right Rocketpig. When it comes to FPS controls I'm a perfectionist, and the smallest mistakes in a control scheme will irritate me to no end.

Basically, for me, there are just too many FPSes out there for me to play any that play anything short of perfect. I know that doesn't make sense to a lot of people to limit the games I play in an entire genre to those that are perfect, but it's just how I am, and I really demand perfection out of first person games if I'm going to enjoy the experience. The only other genre I'm like that with is platformers.

edit: No, I played the PC version.   

I wasnt impressed by the visual presentation of the sequal, therefore didnt even bother to look at the game afterwards.

The trailer looks nice and sorta reminds me of Bioshock (even know its not like bioshock at all) it looks pretty nice i mite pick up a copy but where i live there is no place to buy games so it's like a 3 hour drive just to get to a decent shop -.-

Why exactly are Condemned's controls frustrating? The officer is not a super hero, he doesn,t run like hell, he doesnt do "leveling". So what. It offers an immense melee fight, which of course left a lot for improvements, but, after all, was great. I just hope 2 gives a little more variety. And some open space...

I don't like scary games. Scary movies I love, but something about the games really gets to me...