Video Game / Condemned 2: Bloodshot

"You know better than most that there is scum in this city. Violent, hate-filled, fucking insane scum. There's no talking, no reasoning, just killing... Kill first, or be a rotting corpse for the birds."

— The Masked Man

The 2008 sequel to the horror game Condemned: Criminal Origins.

Set one year later in Metro City after hunting down the serial killer that framed him and clearing his name, Ethan Thomas has since quit his job at the SCU, now living on the streets and turning to alcohol to cope with his still deteriorating sanity while the phenomenon of violence and insanity among the city's population has gotten even worse. But when Malcolm Vanhorn goes missing after calling the SCU begging to know where he is, his old partner Rosa is sent to find him and Ethan finds himself brought back to help in solving a new series of cases, seemingly related to the serial killings of yesteryear. In doing so, he begins to find out both about what makes him so special, and why everyone is going berserk...

Bloodshot has examples of:

• 100% Completion: The game has per-level versions, where the quality of the upgrade you get (e.g. whether you get one, three, or five shots with the Taser, how big an extra segment to your health bar is, what sorts of weapons you can stuff into a holster, etc.) at the end of a level depends on things like how well you did in investigations, whether you completed optional objectives, and how many extra things you did like destroying sonic emitters or tuning in to radio broadcasts, with the best rewards requiring you to do everything.
• Action Commands: Chain combos are featured.
• Actionized Sequel: A bigger emphasis is placed on firearms (including a generally increased quantity of them, an unlockable holster to stow one in, the ability to aim down their sights and reload them from dropped guns or ammo pickups, lockers which have a gun and/or ammo strewn about several levels, and several levels where most, if not all, enemies are armed with them), and the melee system is also enhanced (with the ability to actually use your fists, as well as utilizing combos and chain attacks).
• Art-Shifted Sequel: Almost every returning character looks different, sometimes radically so.◊ Ethan is probably the most notable, seeming to completely change ethnicities between the two games, though he's probably also the best-justified (he's been The Alcoholic for nearly a year between the two games).
• Ass Shove: In the bowling alley, there's a chance a thug might threaten you with this. Using what is unclear.
• Awesome, but Impractical: When Ethan realizes the power of his voice the player gains the ability to unleash a shout that will kill most enemies in front of him in one hit. Problem is the shout has a delay of several seconds before it can be launched, during which the player is practically defenseless. By the time you unlock the shout it's much easier to just shoot the bad guys.
• Bald of Evil: Serial Killer X sports a shaved head.
• Beard of Sorrow: Part of Ethan's whole Grunge make over.
• Bears Are Bad News: Black Lake Lodge features a segment where you are chased by a rabid bear.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Revealed in the climax of the game - the Oro's influence is high up enough that the President of the United States is one of them. Dorland even admits to actual surveillance on the people of the city, with plans to expand it later.
• Black Bug Room: Ethan's hallucinations mysteriously take him to a place filled with oily black monsters, getting progressively worse as black oil starts covering everything in that place, and then never show up again.
• Blatant Item Placement: A bottle of alcohol - which Ethan requires to steady his hands when aiming - is a sure sign a shootout is coming up.
• Bloodier and Gorier: This game ups the carnage significantly compared to Criminal Origins. You can kill enemies in incredibly graphic ways with environmental finishers, and headshots will cause their heads to be obliterated.
• Body Horror: Pretty much anything involving the Oro.
• Boom, Headshot!: An instant kill against any enemy, including bosses, complete with an exploding head effect, regardless of what kind of gun you're actually using - even the silenced .22 pistol you can find in the Preston Hotel, bodyshots with which are weaker than a thrown brick, will blow up a guy's head as if you'd hit them with a shotgun from two feet away. Since ammo is particularly rare, this is a very efficient way to use guns if you can line the shot up.
• Boring, but Practical: In the later levels the Assault Rifle starts showing up very frequently, giving the player easy-access to plenty of ammo for it. In these levels just gunning down enemies like a typical First-Person Shooter game is the easiest option.
• Bottomless Magazines: Can be unlocked by finishing the final level with a Gold rating. The crossbows in the museum level are also inexplicably given this; you just automatically get more bolts for it once you've used up the five you can carry.
• Breakable Weapons: Anything will break if used long enough as a weapon, with them taking extra damage to their condition when improperly blocking attacks (i.e. holding the weapon up and waiting for an enemy to attack, rather than timing the block with their attack to parry it).
• Brown Note: The sonic resonators found throughout the game are what is driving people insane. Getting too close to them damages you.
• The Can Kicked Him: One of the weapons is a toilet seat. You can also kill downed enemies by slamming their heads against a toilet bowl.
• C.A.T. Trap: In the fifth level, Ethan climbs into a CT machine. While he's being scanned, he has a hallucination where the SCU headquarters and the agents are being taken over by a black slime.
• Cluster F-Bomb: The game features almost every principal character saying "fuck" at least once.
• Combos: There are melee attack combos, some of which get surprisingly complicated.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Malcolm Van Horn looks uncannily like Max von Sydow. This is particularly obvious in the concept art.
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: Invoked to try and trip up players in several investigation scenes, where several give what is a supposedly obvious answer, but which if the player looks around just a bit more can determine is not at all right. For instance, when LeRue asks you which service elevator you're at late in the factory level, the actual number attached to it is the wrong answer - because you can faintly make out that that's actually the shaft number. The elevator number is written on a fallen-off plaque you can find on the ground.
• Concept Art Gallery: The game has one that unlocks as the player completes various tasks.
• Creepy Doll: There's a level of this. It's an abandoned doll factory that is not quite so abandoned after all; its new "owner" is some kind of crazy clown woman manufacturing walking, talking, exploding doll robots.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Hard to say for sure, since both endings in the last game had the same end result - either Ethan shoots SKX in the trunk of Malcom Van Horn's car, or SKX breaks free of his restraints, pulls out a gun, then shoots himself with it - and the extra scene for collecting everything is never brought up again. At the very least, SKX holds Ethan responsible for the shooting.
• Darker and Edgier: Somehow, Bloodshot manages to be darker than Criminal Origins.
  • In the first game, Ethan was remarkably level-headed despite the stressful situation he was in. Here, he's very brash and surly as a result of falling into alcoholism.
  • Out of all the Finishing Moves in the first game, only one (the Neck Snap) was unambiguously lethal. Here, the only finishers available are the neck snap and environmental finishers that always kill the enemy in a rather gruesome fashion.
• Dead All Along: The Agent who helps you fight through the nightmarish version of SCU Headquarters turns out to have been killed months ago.
• Dirty Cop: Agent Dorland and his SCU agents are violent, self-serving police officers who don't care at all about public safety; this is actually the least of their crimes.
• Disturbed Doves: Well, disturbed pigeons.
• Doing In the Wizard: Condemned 2 changes the Oro from mysterious supernatural enemies to a cult using sonic technology to perform all their apparent weirdness.
• The Dragon: Agent Dorland.
• Drunken Master: Despite being a destitute alcoholic, Ethan is still a pretty effective fighter. He's also a pretty good marksman provided that he has a bottle on hand to calm his shakes.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: The Voice. Made infamous by Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation citing it in the review.
• The End of the World as We Know It: At the end, the crime rate across the country has risen to unheard of levels. And it's likely to only get worse.
• Enemy Mine: Serial Killer X and Ethan briefly team up against the SCU.
• Enemy Within: Ethan gets one in the form of the Alcohol Demon, although he's more along the lines of a particularly violent and cynical Trickster Mentor. One of the later levels opens with Ethan beating the Alcohol Demon senseless to get himself over his addiction, though he comes back again in the intro to the final level - citing that he personifies all of Ethan's problems, not just his alcoholism - to give some parting words of advice.
• Fingerprinting Air: Ethan's smartphone is practically a tricorder from Star Trek. At one point, he scans a severed arm in the mountains, and Rosa is able to detect animal saliva all over it and also signs that the animal in question is rabid.
• Flunky Boss: The final boss hangs back and uses an area-of-effect life-draining sonic attack on you, while his Oro Giant Mooks jump into the arena to fight you before coming down to take you on himself.
• Fragile Speedster: The "slime creatures" in the hallucination levels move and attack incredibly quickly, but die in one hit. SKX's "experiments" in the abandoned school and junk barge are about as fast and only slightly more durable.
• Functional Addict: Ethan, being The Alcoholic, has incredibly unsteady aim with any gun — unless you've recently downed an entire bottle of booze, in which case your aim is steady as a rock. For this reason, any level with lots of gunplay usually has a few crates with an infinite supply of rotgut lying around. This ends at the beginning of the level where you take on the Magic Man, at which point Ethan gets over his addiction by literally beating the crap out of the personification of it.
• Game-Breaking Bug: The game can sometimes freeze up, and if it does the save file might very well become corrupted. Xbox 360 players with an older model console can avoid this problem by making backup saves on memory units, but PS3 players and owners of slim model Xbox 360s just have to be cautious.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Every generic SCU agent wears some type of military headgear that conceals their face. Many of the agents wear what look like M80 chemical-protection masks, despite the absense of chemical weapons.
• Giant Mook: The huge drug addicts and the muscular cultists.
• Hammerspace: One of the upgrades attempts to avert this by giving Ethan a gun holster to store one firearm besides his main weapon. The problem is that the image used to display it in the statistics screen for the level you get it in is invariably a pistol holster, yet if you get anything better than Bronze in the stage that holster will let him carry things like rifles and shotguns.
• Going Cold Turkey: For most of the game, Ethan's hands will shake if you go too long without booze, though this is only a problem if you're wielding a gun. After he defeats his Enemy Within, however, he's able to quit drinking without any ill effects.

• Good Old Fisticuffs: The player's options for punching out enemies have greatly expanded in Bloodshot compared to the original Condemned. While unarmed combat has less damage and reach than most weapon attacks it lets the player strike quickly and string together repeated hits for lethal combos. Plus, Ethan's fists will never break.
• Heavily Armored Mook: The Museum level has many enemies wearing partial plate armor stolen from the museum exhibits. They can take a lot of damage before dying, and are armed with some of the most damaging weapons in the game (swords and battleaxes).

• Hellish Copter: A hostile SCU helicopter is one of the final obstacles on the Peninsula level and the player must shoot it down to progress.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Ethan downing an entire bottle of strong alcohol goes straight into his head, and the effects only last for about five minutes.
• Idiot Hero: Some of the dialogue options give this impression of Ethan. For example, when told by Rosa that the Oro have been around for more than two thousand years, one of Ethan's possible reply questions is "were humans even around two thousand years ago?" You can practically hear Rosa Head Desk if you have Ethan say that. This may be justified when you remember that Ethan has been drinking heavily for the past year, and that the alcohol may have messed up his brain.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Enemies that have firearms are terrible at hitting the player, probably to compensate for how lethal the shots are when they do hit. The player himself may suffer from this without the benefit of any Power-Up to steady his aim.
• Improbable Weapon User: Some of the weapons are absolutely ridiculous, including gumball machines and deer antlers.
• Improvised Weapon: Condemned, now with explosive dolls (!).
• Infernal Retaliation: A few enemies in the factory level are on fire. Contact with them will do massive damage. Fortunately, they die in one hit and will eventually burn to death if you avoid them long enough.
• Invincible Minor Minion: The "Metal Junkies" are giant enemies wearing metal armor made out of scrap. They're completely immune to all normal attacks, and can only be killed with the sonic crossbow or by using a magnet to drop them into a crusher.
• Kill It with Fire: Throwing an alcohol bottle at an enemy then using the taser on them will set them on fire.
• King Mook: The Oro Inferi who tauntings you in the first few levels and who you fight at the end of level 3, fights just like a regular mook, just with more health. The Alcohol Demon likewise is just a regular mook with more health when you fight him in one of the last few levels, however he lacks Contractual Boss Immunity and can be staggered very easily, at which point he can be executed regardless of how much health he has.
• Madness Mantra: The bird knows best when roosting in its nest. The bird knows best when roosting in its nest.
• Malevolent Mutilation: Members of the Oro cult are usually hideously scarred and have gross metal piercings or implants. Its revealed late in the story of Bloodshot that the cultists submit to this disfigurement to enhance their power.

• Men Are the Expendable Gender: The vast majority of enemies in Bloodshot are male, with the only females being a Unique Enemy in specific areas.
• Mundanger: Across the game you deal with enormous hordes of violently-insane homeless and addicts, hallucinations, heavily-armed SWAT-type guys, and some genuinely insane shit. The single most dangerous thing you deal with, however, is a good old-fashioned, rabid bear. Notably, it's the one (non-hallucinated) enemy you directly deal with in the game but never actually kill, even by setting off explosives right next to it.
• Neck Snap: The default finishing move if you can't get a grabbed enemy to an environmental kill, and both variants of the level-three chain attack also end with one.
• New Game Plus: The FPS Mode, which gives the player a gun at the start of most levels, and infinite ammo.
• Nightmare Sequence: The first and fifth levels are nightmares.
• Nostalgia Level: You'll have to return to the abandoned school you tried to track down SKX in in the first game. It's even worse for the wear, somehow. And the corpse of the boss you fought in the kitchen is still there!
• Not of This Earth: Subverted. The metal fragments that the Oro use to enhance their power are suggested to be of alien origin by a TV reporter, but the scientist she's interviewing says that they are of earthly origin, but made with a previously-unknown manufacturing technique.
• Numbered Sequels: Standard example, complete with a subtitle that doesn't particularly apply specifically to the game (the game even goes out of its way to namedrop the previous game's subtitle instead).
• Off with His Head!: Happens about halfway through the game to mayor Rachael Mars in the museum. This is also how Ethan finishes off the armored knight enemy later on in that same level.
• Pipe Pain: A common type of weapon. There's now even an extra challenge to defeat 50 enemies with a pipe.
• Progressively Prettier: Rosa in the first game was a slightly overweight, middle-aged black woman with frumpy clothes and hair. Now she has the body proportions of your average Hollywood actress, and much better fashion sense.
• Posthumous Character: The murder of Malcolm Van Horne is the event that starts the plot of Bloodshot and gets Ethan back into action. Nonetheless Van Horne delivers a lot of exposition and explanation through recordings, flashbacks, and cryptic clues.
• Puzzle Boss: Both the Magic Man and the final boss are fought non-conventionally instead of with the game's standard combat system.
• Race Lift: Ethan has gone from being Ambiguously Brown to pasty white between the games. Could be justified because he's been a sickly wreck since the end of the first game. Becoming a reclusive alcoholic doesn't do good things for your looks.
• Regenerating Health: Bloodshot has a segmented health regeneration system similar to Resistance: Fall of Man and later Far Cry games, where the current block regenerates after a time and needing medkits to refill emptied blocks. You start with three blocks, and can unlock up to one full fourth segment depending on how well you do in the Trenton District level.
• Schizo Tech: Ethan has a forensics lab in his cellphone, and yet all the televisions he comes across use antenna. Admittedly it's because Ethan is going through places that have long been abandoned, but that just brings up the question of why the televisions still work at all.
• Schmuck Bait: In the second level, you find a message in blood warning you to stay away from a certain room. If you ignore the message and go in anyway, a thug with a shotgun will immediately barricade you in with a mattress and start firing. At this point in the game, guns do the same damage to you that they do to enemies, which means that you will die unless you have lightning-fast reflexes.
• Secret Legacy: Ethan is the legendary Remedy to the Oro, a human with naturally tuned vocal cords capable of destroying the heads of those who hear his voice.
• Shock and Awe: The taser from the previous game has been nerfed by requiring the player to find batteries to keep it charged.
• Soft Glass: Zig-zagged. Ethan can punch glass without injury, but using a glass pane as a finisher results in shards fatally jammed into the enemy's face.
• Stage Magician: The Magic Man, an Oro outcast who holes up in an abandoned theatre and has a squad of insane showgirl assistants.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: The first death you investigate in this game is that of Malcolm Vanhorn.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Having been left mentally scarred and badly traumatized after everything he went through in the first game, Ethan has become much more angry, bitter and volatile, having turned to alcoholism as an unhealthy coping mechanism for his constant hallucinations and crumbling sanity. No one could through what he endured in Criminal Origins and come out unscathed.
• Throw-Away Guns: Like in the first game, you still can only carry one magazine's worth of ammo for your guns, but you can reload that magazine from enemy guns dropped on the ground, the occasional ammo box in an SCU locker, or a second copy of the gun in a holster you can unlock about halfway through the game. Then when you finally run out of ammo you can actually throw it and bean someone in the head with it.
• Title Drop: Rosa namedrops the first game's subtitle when she refers to the Oro as potentially "the origin of crime itself".
  • There's a news report you can catch snippets of by Tony Rhodes called "The Condemned City".
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Having descended into alcoholism after the first game, Ethan is much ruder and more short-tempered.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: There are few levels which ditch the melee combat mechanic for assault rifle vs assault rifle shootouts against SWAT soldiers. These seem more fitting for FEAR than Condemned. Unfortunately, aim-steadying booze isn't nearly as useful as Bullet Time.
• Unique Enemy: Most special enemy types only appear a handful of times, and usually only in one or two levels.
• Universal Ammunition: Ammo pickups refill your weapon regardless of type, though taking ammo from another gun requires it to be one of the same model as what you're currently holding, with the only exception being the typical one for the shotguns that all feed from loose shells.
• Verbed Title
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Subverted. If you lose the final Action Commands combo punching sequence at the end of the final battle, the Big Bad just whips out a gun and shoots you in the head. Although, this does bring up the question of why he doesn't even consider doing it unless you screw up.
• You Don't Look Like You: Every returning character from the first game has undergone a drastic redesign.
• Your Head A-Splode: It's incredibly easy to pop heads with guns (even the otherwise incredibly weak silenced .22 can do it in one bullet), but most importantly, it's the most visible manifestation of the Oro's power. They need special training and metal implants to do so, but Ethan Thomas can do this at will.
  • One part of the Doll Factory level has an industrial vise you can use to crush enemy heads.

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