Wolfenstein Review

It's finally here! The newest installment in the series that birthed the FPS. Fitting that it will also be my first review. I am a long time Wolfenstein fan, so I was expecting a lot out of this game. In some ways it exceeded my expectations and in some ways it failed them.

The game picks up the story of series hero William "B.J." Blazkowicz as he is sent into the German town of Isenstadt to find some information on the newest supernatural exploits of everyone's favorite reich.

The game starts off looking like your average WWII shooter. You get an MP40, kill nazis to help someone who doesn't like them, rinse and repeat. This game is your typical FPS in style and functionality, but it's good. It seems to be very "don't fix it if it ain't broke" and it doesn't force change onto the player just to do it. That isn't to say it's an average game. Bizarre happenings and Nazi super-technology are a cornerstone of the Wolfenstein games, and this game doesn't disappoint. It is a fun, simple and straight-forward shooter with fun and varied level design and so many different kinds of enemies you can't just upgrade one super weapon and kill everything the same way. However, toward the end the enemies will just surprise you and get lucky and you'll just seem to die as soon as you run into an area. On occasion it gets annoying when you've fought your way through a couple of rooms swarming with Nazis only to run in a room right before a checkpoint and have six of the bastards shoot you with a rifle all at once and kill you instantly.

The graphics in this are very good. It uses the ID Tech 4 engine, which you may know from Quake IV, with some tweaks and enhancements. The cutscenes are smooth and very well animated, and the visual effects are awesome. When you enter the Veil, everything in the world changes and it looks like a whole new place. There are a lot of subtle blues and the lights look almost like they're shooting out glowing blue smoke. I also didn't have any frame rate hiccups, even when I was getting attacked by enemies throwing Veil energy at me, machine guns go off, grenades exploding and my Veil powers causing havoc. Speaking of which, Wolfenstein has Havok physics, which are always a bonus. One thing that is kind of neat is the physics are applied to doors. It's kind of cool when you know there is an enemy on the other side of the door to just open fire with a machine gun and have the door fly open from the bullets and kill said foe. The physics usage doesn't get lazy either. In pretty much any Havok-powered game, you kill an enemy and they ragdoll to the floor most uninterestingly. In Wolfenstein they mix physics-real deaths with scripted ones. Sometimes the enemy falls to the floor, but they might also hop around for a second before face planting because you shot off their leg, or stumble and fall over a railing to their death. It's also quite fun to shoot one of the enemies in the throat and have them fall to their knees, gurgling and clutching their throat as blood sprays out from behind their hands. Veil powers also let you see some cool death effects. When an ungrade makes it so that any enemy you touch flies away and turns into bones, you might be tempted to stop using guns.

In terms of story, Wolf is somewhat lacking. It tries to have drama and twists but the characters have no... well character and the plot is spread too thin. One thing that I do applaud, however, is the amount of research that went into this project. The ultimate goal the Nazis are after is actually based on something that was looked into by Nazi occult specialist groups. and the two groups you help, the Golden Dawn and the Kreisau Circle, are also both real groups. It really adds to the plausibility of the game.

The voice acting and sounds are very good, and if there was more story Wolfenstein could have actually been quite cinematic. The Nazis speak their accented English, with the occasional German phrase thrown in for good measure.

Another thing I appreciate is nods to long-time fans. One of the final bosses of the game, Hans Grosse, was the first boss you fight in Wolf 3D and in this game he weilds the same dual chainguns. There are another couple such occurences, but I have to say my favorite is the loading screen when you are on the final level.

One thing I really don't like is the collect-a-thon component of the game. In every level you can find treasure, intel and tomes of power. The intel and tomes unlock upgrades for your veil medallion and weapons, while the gold lets you buy said upgrades from the black market. One thing I can't stand is games where it's like "find x of these!". I understand it's supposed to add replayability, but to some people it can be very annoying. The only good this about the collecting of items in this is that it serves a purpose, unlike games like Red Faction: Guerilla where they have a bunch of things to find and destroy and whatever in the world that bascially are only there for achievements.

The multiplayer component will be very familiar to those who played the free Return to Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer game that was released in 2003. You pick one of three classes, each with their own pros and cons, and you go on actual objective based missions or you can do deathmatch and a couple other game modes. The engineer class and the medic class fall short of the soldier in terms of the lack of weapons choices. The engineer and medic can only use the Kar98k rifle or MP40. The engineer can complete the objectives, such as bombing walls and disabling objects, and can also throw down ammo packages for players to pick up. The medic class can drop health packs and also revive downed teammates, provided they are willing to wait for you to get to them instead of just respawning. The soldier can use the kar98k, Mp40, Mp42, flammenwerfer and panzershreck and can drop claymores. The multiplayer upgrade system rewards you money for damage done to opponents and objectives completed which you can then use to buy weapon ugrades, equipment upgrades and class specific upgrades.

The multiplayer objective mode is where Wolfenstein really exceeds. It isn't just capture the flag or king of the hill. You actually have a mission to go on with multiple objectives, and the goal of the axis is to prevent you from completed said goal. In one level, for example, you have to steal intel from a Nazi building. This entails finding a shell for a tank parked in front of the house, loading the tank to blow open the front door, running in and grabbing the intel, then getting to an escape vehicle back near the spawn point. It is a lot of fun and definitely worth playing.

With epic boss battles, fun and straightforward shoot-em-up Nazi killing, a lot of fun powers, and fantastic multiplayer, Wolfenstein is a great game that is only thrown off by its moderately short campaign, occasionally frustrating bits, lack of story and collecty-ness.

Overall Score: 82%