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My favourite type of game is the first-person melee fighter, which is an unfortunate preference because the good ones are rarer than Fabergé eggs. Only a handful of games feature first-person brawling or swashbuckling at all, and in many of them like Skyrim, Dishonored and Dark Messiah it's only part of the overall experience, mixed together with magic and stealth. Games which rely on the mechanic almost entirely, such as Zeno Clash and Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, are scarcer still.When you consider how difficult it is to make first-person melee combat feel good, this isn't particularly surprising. Not only do you have to deal with control systems that simply aren't designed to replicate the surprisingly intricate nature of one person swinging a heavy thing at another person swinging a heavy thing, the first person perspective also severely limits the player's field of view and ability to judge distance. If you want to replicate this experience in real life, get a stick and sit on the floor. Now clasp it between your feet, close one eye and try to swing.
That's generally what swinging a weapon feels like in games, clumsy, slow and flat. You'd have to be insane to try to base an entire game on such an awkward mechanic. So it's rather fitting that insanity is the overarching theme of Condemned: Criminal Origins, the first and perhaps only game to really get to grips with first-person melee combat.
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