Condemned 2: Bloodshot

Friends and foes

Not everyone you meet will try to beat you up. Rooke explains that NPCs play a much bigger role in Bloodshot than in the first Condemned, and aren't all necessarily enemies; sometimes they will become part of your storyline.

In addition, you'll sometimes meet characters who invite an emotional response. You can respond by pressing the right button. "If you do so, you'll see yourself perform some sort of physical action and you'll say something. So it's a way for the player to express themselves." Of course you could just ignore the whole thing and set fire to another tramp.

It's not the only optional element of the game that's there to add depth rather than mandatory toil. Forensic sections - a lowlight of the first Condemned - are back, and apparently this time they're neither compulsory nor rubbish.

"I want to stress that 80 per cent of the forensic moments are optional," says Rooke. "So if you're the kind of player that just wants to take a pipe and beat people up, and not get caught up in the thinking part of the game, you can bypass them."

There is a price to pay. If you do complete forensic moments you'll earn extra mission points which can be exchanged for upgrades. Skip them and you'll lose out. "But it was important to us to provide an optional element to the game," Rooke explains. "We understand a lot of gamers just want to do the action."

Who-who, who-who

He shows us an example of a forensic moment, reiterating that this is all work in progress and that what we're seeing today won't necessarily appear in the finished game. So, er, fingers crossed.

Initially there's a dead man lying in a pool of blood. Your objective is to identify the body. Using your amazing detective skills, you may deduce the man is a policeman by looking at his police uniform, and answer a multiple choice question accordingly.

But which policeman? HQ needs to know the number on his badge, so you look at it, and it says 46. The multiple choice options are confounding. Does the badge say number 45? Or number 48? Or number 49? Or number... 46?

Your next task is to take a picture of the man's face for identification purposes. But if it's out of focus, so you have to do it again. To determine the cause of death, you must use the power of your eyes to look at his wound and decide if he's been stabbed, shot or burned. Now you use your UV light to discover hidden blood traces and establish that the man crawled to the spot where he died. And then you wonder who bothered to come along afterwards and clear up the blood trail behind him so you could only see it with a UV light.

It's not exactly challenging detective work. Horatio Caine could probably do the whole job without taking his sunglasses off once. Okay, so as Rooke says, this scene might not even be in the finished game. Still, they've chosen it to demonstrate how they've supposedly improved Condemned's forensics moments, and that's a bit worrying.

But no one bought the first game because they fancied a bit of high-tech forensic investigation. Condemned: Criminal Origins' appeal lay in being scared and beating people up. The team working on Condemned 2: Bloodshot is clearly aware of this and they're not about to go putting in a Green Hill Zone and a Diplomacy mode. As the game's not out till Q1 next year, there's still hope for the forensic bits. Just not for the tramps.