Condemned 2 is the closest you’ll get to a Die Hard moment, as you struggle to find something in your environment to get the upper hand against the insurmountable odds. It's tense, sweaty, and yes, very violent gaming done with a unique sophistication to side-step any watchful parents eager to blame videogames for little Jimmy’s anti-social behavior.

It’s not all blood and cracked teeth; Thomas is a cop and so he needs to solve the many murders that have instigated the city’s descent into frenzied bludgeoning. Once you discover a crime scene you’ll need to collect evidence and piece together the clues to uncover how and why the victim met his death. Examine a wallet to ID the victim, use the ultraviolet flashlight to follow bloodstains to the crime scene and search for a cause of death – in one scene a gaping circular hole suggested a bullet wound. Investigate it to make sure.

Collecting evidence and solving crimes between bouts of bloodied rage affects the game’s story. Depending on how well your CSI skills are, you’ll unlock new routes through the game’s dense script. Fail to collect the right evidence and you won’t meet all the story’s characters or discover lines of enquiry that will dig deeper into Condemned 2’s conspiracies. This is a dense adventure, a game packed with twists and turns and you have direct control over what is seen and heard.

This all goes into creating an adventure thick with an oppressive atmosphere that exists in a world of its own creation and with rules of its own making. Random characters will mutter insults as you pass them on the streets (to which Thomas can respond with a suitably offensive middle finger). As a baseball bat cracks Thomas in the jaw he’ll shriek “motherf---er” as the screen judders and your onscreen hero struggles to regain his composure. There’s interaction, but it’s generally offensive and abrupt.