You've got to give the developer Monolith credit: They have a niche.

They do the visceral, gritty, dank, dark, scary thing very well. Condemned, F.E.A.R., and now Condemned 2: Bloodshot. As I play through Condemned 2, I'm reminded of another game that came out about 6 months ago, that everyone was getting ready to proclaim the Best Game of the Year (before Call of Duty released). That game is Bioshock. Now, before I lose you for the rest of this post, you have to follow me; there are similarities in style and in delivery. No, Ethan Thomas has not stumbled upon an underwater Utopia gone terribly wrong. However, I can't help thinking as I'm arming my plastic doll grenade to throw at the deranged bum, that I've played, and enjoyed, this game before.

Ethan Thomas is in hell.  A psychological hell, in which he cannot escape the torment of his past experience. Once a more upbeat view of his ability to impact society and make a difference, he went through what some may think was a metamorphosis to what he is now, but rather a descent into a shell of the man he once was. He is broken; he wants to feel numb; he doesn't want to deal with the nightmares that cannot escape him.

Now, he is in a physical hell. His Rapture is the city that has now corrupted into a realm of soulless demons trying to destroy him. He has been brought back to solve a mystery. What happened here, and what does he have to do with it? He has a role in the outcome and that will tell Ethan about who he really is. Is he the man that was turned by the city or was he still the guy he thought he was, able to change the city and make a difference.

Ok, so there are no plasmids in Condemned 2. No real Big Daddies. Projectile weapons are rare: you have to rely on your fists and whatever you happen to have around you. There are points where you aren't sure if what you are seeing is real, or just a figment of Ethan's imagination; part of his psychotic free fall.  But Monolith delivers something similar to Bioshock: a world that does not have a happy, upbeat setting. You are charged with disposing of countless mindless thugs, but you have to think about how these are all victims of the society they chose to belong to. The splicers, the homeless, the mindless, free of all rational thought and reliant only on inhibition and aggression. Your journey through the game isn't just trying to figure out what happened to your environment, its a discovery of what happened to yourself.

Although I'm not completely through the game (and I'm told that the end is very Bioshock-ian in its conclusion), I find myself being a little more scared playing through at time, looking for clues, turning each corner, waiting for something to jump out at me. Although I haven't really had the chance to check out the multiplayer in depth (one knock against Bioshock), I do think the single player is very intriguing and is a strong first quarter title that will hopefully take us into a strong summer.