Long ago, in the land of Generica, there lived a pretty young woman named Betti. Because she was alarmingly fond of mango chutney, Betti’s parents insisted that she was to marry the deviously handsome Doucharius, a man to whom her father owed a considerable amount of money and who would occasionally step on a cat if no one was around to witness this apparent act of cruelty, even though the cat didn’t actually seem to mind.
After her marriage to Doucharius, Betti wanted nothing more than to slink off somewhere and die. She therefore engaged the services of Generica’s finest oxcart repairman to bake for her a large, sixteen-layer chocolate cake with asparagus-mint icing, which was delicious but did little to satisfy her craving for a plate of cold self-demise, so she enrolled in a correspondence course to earn a degree in Ayurvedic medicine and psychokinetic hamster fluffing. And everyone except Doucharius–because Betti and the oxcart repairman ran off together in a fit of crazed, self-absorbed concupiscence–lived happily after whatever, and all that stuff there.
Happily, that is, until they played Condemned 2: Bloodshot on the Xbox360, after which they voluntarily removed their own corneas with a belt sander.
The original Condemned: Criminal Origins was the Xbox360’s finest launch title, easily manhandling the likes of Perfect Dark Zero and Kameo: Elements of Power, and edging out Medal of Duty 23 by a solid grenade toss and a half. About midway through, the story began to make half as much sense as Betti’s, but it was a unique and intensely atmospheric game with a likable protagonist and tooth-shattering brutality, registering a solid 8.9 on the Damn-I-Just-Shit-On-Myself meter.
Department store. Enough said.
Condemned 2: Bloodshot fails to live up to its older brother’s accomplishments in every way. It felt like one of those poor sequels that was shuttled off to a different developer because the publisher was trying to milk every reluctant cent from the franchise’s pecuniary udder, and the original developer wisely had better shit to do. This isn’t the case, however, as Bloodshot was actually developed by Monolith, a fact which offers a searing indictment of the word “franchise.”
Consider anything that’s been franchised and compare it to something that’s been lovingly crafted and constructed and fawned over, whether it’s a pizza or a cheeseburger or a video game. You’ll soon realize that “franchise” is actually a French word meaning “around the lip of the commode,” and unfailingly indicates a level of quality on par with month-old piss. In this regard, at least, Bloodshot meets expectations.
Hmm. Turns out metal health will drive you mad.
Where the previous Condemned was a tense, first-person adventure with survival-horror undertones, Bloodshot is a brawling, tedious, button-mashing, stick-wiggling nightmare, with a story so deeply mired in its own incoherence that it fails to even acknowledge that its main character bears no resemblance whatsoever to the guy from the last game. Look at Ethan Thomas, Degenerate Edition and compare him to Old Ethan Thomas Who We Gave a Shit About; has this not bothered anyone else? Like Joanna Dark mysteriously losing her British accent in the fucking prequel Perfect Dark Zero, or R2-D2’s jet boosters in Episode II; it’s lazy, retroactive worldbuilding and makes for poor continuity and bad storytelling. The .001 percent of gamers who will notice or even care about this rebuke you, Monolith.
What is it that keeps the industry pustule known as Final Fantasy alive and weeping after so many mind-numbingly monotonous offerings in the series? Certainly not the edge-of-your-seat action, unless you consider pressing X after every inane, tongue-lolling line of dialog the highest order of interactive entertainment. And it’s probably not the grade-school-sophisticate level of storytelling, either, although that plays a part in it. What keeps the FF faithful slurping from the trough of mediocrity year after year is continuity and characterization, two elements that can forgive even the most obnoxiously dated and uninspired gameplay, and Final Fantasy has each of those things in effluent buckets.
Bloodshot doesn’t. It seems like a completely different world, with a completely different character of the same name, and no one at Monolith had enough respect for the end-user to even draw the guy with the same face. I cared about the original Ethan, a guy cast into circumstances beyond his control and who must fight simply to survive, but instead of being changed for the better by his experience in Condemned, Ethan has turned into a drunk, bitter asshole about whom I care not at all. I can’t stand people like him in the real world, so I have no desire to control one of them in a game.
Didn’t anyone learn anything from the weapon degradation patch for System Shock 2? The next time I crack some tar-shitted zombieghoulhobo motherfucker in the face with a three-inch pipe, and the three-inch pipe breaks, I’m just gonna crawl back into my sympathetic bottle and drink the tears away, ’cause who needs that crap? In my world anything that gets smacked in the gob with a pipe goes down and stays down; when the pipe itself breaks, it destroys my suspension of disbelief and outlines a Venn diagram of shittiness to illustrate just how little my world intersects with the game’s world. And that’s bad.
That’s where Bloodshot really lost me; in the suspension of disbelief. In Criminal Origins part of the enjoyment was just that–the mystery. The what-the-hell-is-going-on moments. The familiar, broken settings. As I slowly found out what was going on in Bloodshot, the harder it was for me to continue playing, because it kept kicking me in the nuts with its Jackboots of Incredulity +7.
Don’t consider this one for a new purchase if you particularly liked Condemned: Criminal Origins, or Bioshock, or Mass Effect, or any game that effectively draws convincing, likable characters and marries them to decent gameplay. Rent, if you must, but toss it a Pop-Tart in the morning and call it a cab as soon as decorum will allow.
And for Pete’s sake don’t tell anybody.
