Game of the Month: April 2006

With all the videogames that are released each and every month, it can be quite a difficult task to decide which title to spend your hard-earned money on. Granted, you could go by our review scores alone and weed through the long list of names to find something that scored high or low, but who has time for that kind of research?

Luckily, your friends at IGN.com have decided to offer a monthly tribute to the very best game for each system over the past month. While some of us often chime in with our comments at the end of reviews, the reviews on IGN, for the most part, are primarily written by one editor; in this feature, we get all of the editors on a particular channel to vote for our Game of the Month.

How does it work? Simple. Any game released in the past month is eligible for the award and is taken through a battery of tests by every editor on that particular channel. After we've finished evaluating each game that comes down the pipeline, we put our heads together and decide on a single "best of" winner that's worthy of the "IGN Game of the Month" title. Pretty straightforward, don't you think? Now that we have the guidelines out of the way, let's move on and congratulate this month's winner...

Why It Rocked: Nasty, brutish and short pretty much sums this one up. Making players uncomfortable right from the start, Condemned: Criminal Origins is unique in eschewing Nazi zombies and mutated space monkeys and instead relying strictly on the horrors and terrors of human behavior. As an FBI agent assigned to investigate serial killers, players will find themselves genuinely disturbed by the events and atmosphere of the whole game. It's definitely one you'll want to play with the lights on but it's so much more fun if you can stand it in the dark.

Reader Review: The sound is some of the best I have heard in a game. If you have a surround system on your pc, you are in for a good time. Voice acting is great. The bums and crackheads will yell at you from some unseen location down the hall that they will kill you, and so forth. It really sounds like it is coming down the hall. You will hear sounds of things being knocked over (chairs, buckets, bottles....ect) and you will get freaked out, because you dont know who is making the sound. The music is creepy, but I prefer to turn it off. It seems more realistic with just the silence, and then all of a sudden you will hear breathing, or other sounds. CREEEEPY!

-- submitted by timmah1972

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