Citing The Silence of the Lambs and David Fincher's Se7en as their inspiration, Washington-based developer Monolith Productions set a high bar for the first instalment of 2005's Condemned: Criminal Origins, an Xbox 360 exclusive, and in terms of quality and tone, they very nearly reached it. As Ethan Thomas, a junior member of Metro City police department's Serial Crime Unit - a CSI in everything but name - gamers were introduced to the fictional landscape in which the Condemned games take place with a horrific murder, depraved in its execution and ghastly in its consequence. After an inauspicious arrival at the scene of the crime, more than a few players must have balked at the prospect of examining the strangled young woman who lay before them. It was a dirty job - and in Criminal Origins, it only got dirtier.

The game-changer came after a cursory few photographs of the victim's broken body. When Ethan overhears a disturbance in the apartment block and excuses himself to investigate, the lights suddenly go out... and all hell breaks loose. An appalling chorus of sirens and screams arises all around him and he loses his sidearm in pursuit of the suspect, left almost defenceless. Soon enough the psychopath whose trail he has followed approaches our protagonist and with only those weapons he can improvise from the environment around him to hold back the night, Ethan is soon overwhelmed. When the rest of his unit interrupt the killer in the midst of his maniac machinations, they are ruthlessly shot down. It's almost a relief when the crazy finally throws you through a window and the awful noises stop; for a moment, the madness fades to black.

The brief first act of Criminal Origins stands as a veritable tour-de-force of the unique power of our beloved medium to not just illustrate terror, but to implicate you in the experience of it. There was hardly a chance to orient yourself to the myriad means of gameplay that the game introduced before your senses and expectation were plagued from all sides. The sparse mise-en-scene helped to lend the atmosphere a sense of dread that was only compounded throughout, and before Unreal Engine 3 arrived in the guise of Gears of War to raise our graphical expectations, the next-gen shine of the dank city streets and suburban hellhouses that Ethan ventured through rarely failed to impress. But, if you'll pardon the pun, Criminal Origins was an excellent game held back by imperfect execution. The dual mechanics of progression that emerged - first person fighting and forensic investigation from the same perspective - were equally flawed. The CSI moments were promising but much too linear and ultimately unsatisfying, while the brawling, which is what you did for most of the dozen or so hours it took to beat the game, was too simplistic to sustain the player's interest over such an extended period. Considering the excellent atmosphere and burgeoning concept of the original, then, a sequel seemed to be the perfect means by which to address such concerns.

Sadly, Condemned 2: Bloodshot is not quite the equal of its predecessor. A mixed bag of welcome evolution and far less appealing pandering, Monolith once again casts you in the shoes of Ethan Thomas. At the outset he's become a misbegotten soul indeed, cast out by the Serial Crime Unit and driven to drink - and indeed derangement - by the events of the first game in this apparent franchise. Stranger still, he's also bulked up to epic proportions, and by epic, I mean Epic; essentially, Ethan is Marcus Fenix with added emo and an eye on either side of his head. A calculated swap of voice actors means that his darker personage is also meted out in the gravelly tones of a new and decidedly unimproved protagonist. It's a telling alteration from the original design document that very much reflects the expectations that Bloodshot disappoints.

After a bout of bum-fighting, Ethan is recruited back into the Serial Crime Unit for reasons that become apparent with the progression of the scattershot narrative whose cut scene chapters bookend each stage. And stages they most certainly are; such obvious linearity seems like a curiously archaic crutch for Monolith to lean on - that there's nowhere to go except forward lends Bloodshot a sure sense of unstoppable momentum, but not without exposing the seams of game design in so doing. There are instances, too, of such leaps of narrative logic that it's hard at first to take this sequel as seriously as Monolith might like. At the outset of the second level, for example, after branding him "a drunk and a liability," Ethan's obnoxious commanding officer barely stops for breath before advising you to "take a moment to familiarise yourself with your new weapon." Overlook such staid scriptwriting and give the story a chance, however, because it does pick up - the pacing is much improved from the peaks and valleys of Criminal Origins and the leftfield developments that herald the coming of the sequel's climax are refreshing, if not entirely convincing.

The core mechanics of the franchise, meanwhile, are on the receiving end of a welcome overhaul. Crime scene investigation remains a relatively small part of the overall experience, but in Bloodshot it's both better integrated and better implemented. You use one of several tools mapped to the d-pad of your controller to locate and examine bodies and artefacts scattered throughout the game's twelve stages. Each time you come across something to investigate, you're assessed on your developing skills with a mark out of five. Make sure the photographs that you take with Ethan's digital camera are in focus and well-centred on your subject; shine your UV light around to identify otherwise hidden trails and spatters of blood (among other substances); and whip out your spectrometer to pinpoint the transmitters that are driving the population of Metro City to violent psychosis. Do these things well and not only does Ethan progress through the story, but your cumulative efforts are rewarded at the end-of-level load screens with upgrades that include extra health bars, holsters in which you can stash the occasional spare pistol, and brass knuckles, the better for beatings - and considering how many such beatings you'll dole out before arriving at the endgame, it's a good thing that the improvised brawling of Criminal Origins has been so thoroughly refitted.

From your fists to countless pipes and 2x4s to the exploding dolls that drag themselves around a particularly creepy factory, you can use pretty much anything you encounter as a weapon. L2 and R2 are your left and right hands respectively, or whatever you're holding in them; if landed successfully and without receiving damage between blows, particular combinations of button presses net you damage multipliers and bonus moves. You learn new combos as you progress and in nearly every stage you can take advantage of the unique weapons distributed therein, as well as new objects - a clothes press, say, or an assembly line - to improve an already-motley lot of environmental finishers. All in all, the brawling packs a real punch, and there's more than enough variety to see you through the eight to ten hours it takes to defeat Condemned 2's default difficulty.

To see such an excellent mechanic all but abandoned as Ethan presses ever onward, however, is a sore sight indeed. Besides the brawling and the investigation, you see, there's a third means of play that Bloodshot comes to rely all too heavily on: gunplay. The occasional pistols and shotguns of Criminal Origins and the first five or so stages of the sequel are all well and good; these weapons are an infrequent find and an empowering pleasure to fire into the cannon-fodder monsters that tend to lurk in closets around their locations. They're satisfying to use and brutally realistic in their impact, but the same cannot be said for the assault rifles that litter the later levels of the game. Flimsy and inaccurate to the point of frustration - even after a bottle of bourbon to steady your alcoholic aim - you have little choice but to wrestle against the inadequacy of automatic weaponry when time and again they're pitched against unrelenting armies of clone soldiers. These are not enemies you can stealth kill, either; some spawn with utter awareness of your location, so step into their sights and you'll soon find Ethan's massive head substituted for some bullets. It's an ill-conceived gameplay mechanic that seems to exist for precious little purpose other than to attract the FPS fans - and these are fans experienced enough in their genre of choice to see poorly implemented run-and-gun for what it is. Also, don't expect any kind of cover, and as a postscript, be prepared to marvel as your perfect headshots clip into oblivion against walls and objects invisible to the naked eye. Bloodshot would be a significantly better game without the insubstantial assault rifle - it has no place in this franchise, and thankfully, the very last level replaces your reliance on that appalling weapon with an appropriate and otherwise accomplished addition more in line with the series as a whole.

Aside from the clipping, a miscellany of other technical issues common to imperfect ports cropped up throughout the game. I can certainly forgive the otherwise unapproachable audio for dropping out once in a while, and occasional close encounters of the screen-tearing kind - specifically in the exteriors of the lodge level - don't do much to disrupt the experience. The jarring load screens that appear between stages and cut scenes and game over screens, however, are a real concern considering the unique strengths of the PS3. At higher difficulty settings you'll be restarting often, and the incessant load screens don't discriminate between checkpoints reached mere moments before Ethan bit the dust and those you passed by ten minutes ago - if only Monolith had taken advantage of the built-in hard drive common to Sony's latest console then these points in particular could have been much better streamlined. There have been complaints aplenty about mandatory installs, but trust me when I say that you'd rather spend a little while readying supplies for your first night with Bloodshot than heed the developer's considerate advice to 'please wait' for minutes at a time, again and again.

Stick out the load screens long enough to finish the game and you'll be rewarded with an FPS mode that hardly bears mentioning. More satisfying, although only slightly so, is the Fight Club - a stat-driven hobo hunt that borrows wholesale from Rainbow Six: Vegas, and although online leaderboards lend these brief levels a competitive edge, they're missing the most essential element that made the mode such a hit in Ubisoft's Tom Clancy franchise: co-op play. Multiplayer, courtesy of Gamespy's network on the PS3, is an eight-player affair that might satisfy those how are hungry for more after the curtain has closed on the single player, but lag makes it almost unplayable, and the only mode with anything distinctive about it is Crime Scene, which revolves around severed heads in two boxes - Se7en anyone? Depending on the team you end up in, your mission is either to find and scan the boxes before time runs out, or to prevent the opposing squad from doing so. It's surprisingly fun for a while and pretty innovative at that, but whatever its merits, consistent lag and more popular, if not necessarily better, options elsewhere mean that the online modes of Bloodshot are unlikely to garner much of a following. For all that though, Monolith deserve points for effort - should you be so inclined, there's a lot to sink your teeth into.

Despite its shortcomings, Condemned 2: Bloodshot is a good game by all accounts. The atmosphere remains tense and even terrifies at times; there are moments - the chase sequences in particular come to mind - where you are utterly powerless to do anything other than run for your life, a dangerous gamble that pays off in spades. Other than the lack of a clear theme, the sound design is acutely unsettling and excellent across the board, approaching even the exemplary work that Akira Yamaoka has accomplished in the Silent Hill series. Graphically there's nothing to complain about - the engine that Bloodshot is built on is no longer the powerhouse it appeared to be when the first Condemned surfaced in 2005, but it suffices; the degradation of Metro City and its surroundings are ominous sights indeed, and the BioShock-influenced encounter with Magic Man is as breathtaking to behold as some of the best moments of Levine's masterful adventure. The character models are detailed, if occasionally misguided in their design, and the animation work is at the top of its class. The port to PS3 might not take advantage of that console's strengths, but neither does its translation create any damning inadequacies. And the experience is a lengthy one - well paced at that - that addresses many of the problems that beleaguered the original. However, Monolith has created in turn another array of difficulties for the now-inevitable third instalment to overcome. More visceral than it is chilling, closer to Saw than to Se7en and riddled through and through with as much graphic violence as you're likely to see in any game this generation, Condemned 2: Bloodshot excels in more areas than it flounders, but when at the halfway point it forsakes its strengths as a creepy brawler in favour of poorly-implemented FPS mechanics, it loses its way. A good shooter it is not, and it needn't be - what lies beneath the gunplay is a rich survival horror of sorts that satisfies and thrills on enough levels that the latter stages seem, by comparison, little more than an insulting exercise in enlarging your target audience.

Reviewed by Niall Rough for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).