Condemned: Criminal Origins

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Condemned: Criminal Origins is a first-person survival horror game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Sega. It launched alongside the Xbox 360 in November 2005 as one of the console's launch titles, and later reached Windows through a PC port. The game casts you as Ethan Thomas, an FBI agent assigned to the Serial Crime Unit (SCU) in the fictional, decaying city of Metro. The story opens at a crime scene where an unknown man takes Ethan's service weapon and uses it to kill two police officers, leaving Ethan framed for their deaths. Stripped of his badge and hunted by his own former colleagues, Ethan goes on the run while continuing to chase the killer responsible, a figure the SCU calls the Match Maker, and gradually uncovers signs that the city's recent wave of violence runs deeper than a single culprit. Unlike most first-person games built around firearms, Condemned centers its combat on melee weapons. Ethan picks up whatever is lying around a given environment, pipes, two-by-fours, fire axes, baseball bats, and uses them to block, parry and counter the deranged attackers who populate each level. Firearms exist but carry only a handful of rounds before running dry, which pushes most encounters back toward close-quarters fighting rather than shooting from a distance. Enemies are erratic rather than disciplined, often shouting incoherently, dropping into ambush positions, or simply charging, and the combat system is built to make every swing feel heavy and deliberate rather than fast and fluid. Melee weapons also wear out with use, forcing Ethan to keep scavenging for his next improvised tool mid-fight. Alongside the combat, Ethan's SCU badge comes with an actual investigative function. At set points in each level, he pulls out a handheld forensic scanner to examine evidence at a crime scene: blood spatter, bite marks, fingerprints, fibers and other physical clues that need to be correctly identified using the right analysis mode. These sequences slow the pace deliberately, turning Ethan from a man swinging a pipe back into an investigator piecing together what happened in a room before he moves on. Scattered throughout the levels are also a set of stuffed birds, an optional collectible that has nothing to do with the main case and exists purely as a hidden side objective for players who explore thoroughly. The game is single-player only and structured as a chain of self-contained chapters, each set in a different derelict corner of Metro: a condemned apartment building, a subway system, an abandoned school, a shopping mall gutted by time, and similar spaces that have been left to rot. Each location introduces its own recurring antagonist alongside the SCU's wider serial-killer plotline, and the city itself, filthy, dimly lit and full of graffiti and debris, is treated as much a part of the horror as any individual enemy. Lighting is sparse throughout, and many corridors have to be explored in near-darkness, reinforcing the sense of a city nobody looks after anymore. Condemned: Criminal Origins later received a direct sequel, Condemned 2: Bloodshot, continuing Ethan's story within the same world.