When it was released as an Xbox 360 launch title, Monolith and Sega's Condemned was lauded as a frightening, brutal new franchise unlike anything the gaming world had seen before. Sure, it borrowed elements from just about every survival horror game ever made and its particular brand of first-person melee combat has been seen in a number of other titles, but there was just something different about this game. Thanks to the power of the Xbox 360, the game's visuals were stunning, managing to make dilapidated train stations and abandoned malls look eerily beautiful, while the atmosphere was downright disturbing (hats off to anyone who didn't get freaked out by the mannequins). Given the game's cliffhanger ending, it wasn't surprising to hear that a sequel was under development almost immediately after it shipped.

Condemned 2: Bloodshot picks up the story a few weeks (or months?) after the events of the first game. The city is still a mess, full of raving lunatics and dead birds, and it appears that our hero Ethan Thomas has been seeking solace at the bottom of a very deep bottle of booze. To make matters worse, his creepy confidant Malcolm Vanhorn made a cryptic call to Ethan's former FBI buddies right before disappearing. They set out to find Ethan, who's in the process of brawling with a disfigured madman whose mouth is cut and held together with hooks (think Kakihara in "Ichi the Killer"). After getting kicked out of his favorite dive bar, the player takes control of Ethan in a back alley.

The majority of the first level is a tutorial in which the player learns how to use some of the new moves in Ethan's repertoire. In the first game, the hand-to-hand combat was very simplistic and not particularly powerful, so it paid to have a blunt weapon in your hands at all times. While lead pipes and conduits are still better than bare knuckles, a new combo system makes the weaponless combat a bit more effective. Using the respective triggers, you can throw right and left hooks at your enemies until they finally hit the pavement. Timing the strikes just right will give you a bit of extra damage, provided you can hit the correct trigger before the timer ticks down.


However, if you choose to get up close and personal with a foe, a quick double-tap of the right trigger will launch you into a slow-motion mini-game of sorts, allowing you to brutally pound on your foe's head. It's a satisfying system, but it's not as impressive as the new "finishing move" mechanic. In the previous game, a felled foe could be dispatched by smashing his face into the floor or breaking his neck. Now, you can grab a stunned enemy by the neck and walk him over to pre-designated hotspots marked with a skull. Once you're there, the game will launch into a brief cut-scene in which you'll do things like toss his body into a dumpster or crush his skull against the sharp edge of a table.

After learning the basics of combat, we were launched into a hellish, hallucinatory dream sequence of sorts, in which Ethan was trying to track down a twisted version of Vanhorn (complete with black goo coming out of his eyes and ears). We were guided by a series of old televisions that were broadcasting a disturbing signal of a man in a mask spouting cryptic messages, and we couldn't help noticing that he was wearing the same shirt as our hero Ethan. We ended up making our way deeper and deeper into the bowels of an abandoned building, where we fought what could best be described as demons. Although this sequence was certainly interesting, we're hopeful that the game won't stray too far from its roots. After all, sometimes the real world is even more terrifying than our nightmares.