So last night I was able to grab the new Wolfenstein by id software and published by Activision. I sat down and played straight on through with maybe a 20 minute break in the middle, so I’m going to try to put everything I thought about this game now while it’s still fresh.
I guess I’ll open up with some of the story of the game, but people who have played any of the Wolfenstein series should know at least something about it already. Every Wolfenstein iteration has the Nazis who are doing experiments on people and are producing evil zombies in an attempt to take over the world somehow. This version of Wolfenstein is pretty faithful to that aspect. You play as William “B.J” Blazkowitcz, an American spy who is sent to Isenstadt to help deal with the Nazis there. From there, you meet with two groups: the Kreisau Circle and the Golden Dawn. The Kreisau Circle is a group who is trying to liberate Isenstadt from the Nazi threat while the Golden Dawn is a group of scholars who is researching some ancient technology that the Nazis want their hands on. Anyway, you end up doing a bunch of missions for these groups and you kill Nazis, zombies, Nazi zombies, and the like.
Now for some gameplay aspects. As you begin the game, you’ll quickly realize that “Hey! This is a first-person shooter.” So yeah, no surprises on how this game plays for now. I felt that the controls actually felt very much “Return to Castle Wolfenstein”-esque, meaning it just felt very similar. What I did immediately notice though, is that I picked up a few more guns, buttons 1-4 didn’t change my weapons. Buttons 5-0 were reserved for that. So what do buttons 1-4 do? They’re used to access your special abilities that you gain pretty early on. You first get to use “The Veil,” which is kind of like a rip in your dimension into “the Black Sun” dimension. With it, you can move slightly faster, see hidden objects and passages, and find an enemy’s weakpoint.
Along the course of the game, you gain even more abilities that you can use with the veil device. You get three: The ability to slow time, a shield, and shield-penetrating bullets. You end up using all three of these abilities to solve easy puzzles or just wreck enemies. Something that was kind of annoying though, was that even though I was playing on normal, unless I abused all of my veil abilities, it was hard to not die. Maybe I just suck, but with veil energy pools every 10 feet away, there didn’t seem like any reason to not constantly use your powers. One of the drawbacks of this though, is that you have watch your screen become green and blurry all the time. Which sucks. It’s unappealing and detracts much from the game’s graphics.
I mean, when you aren’t in the veil, the game looks pretty decent. Obviously not Crysis level, but what you would expect from a 2009 PC game. My GTX 260 was able to play this on high settings fine and I did not have any points in time when the game would be bogged down by anything. I’d say if you toned down the settings a bit too, you could probably play this pretty well even on older machines. It’s not the most beautiful game, but I think the environment fit well for Wolfenstein. I enjoyed not using the veil whenever I could, but it turned out that I had to use it often.
What seems to be more common in FPS’s now is some sort of easy to access map with quests point system on it. Wolfenstein isn’t any different. I guess they tried to make the game more RPG like by giving it a journal where you see the entire map, view your objectives, intel you’ve collected, upgrades, and stats. It’s simple, but it works – they make it easy to plot courses to any of the safe houses or the black market arms dealer. It also lets you choose what mission you want to make active, so your marker will point to it. If you just roam the town, you can pick up side-objectives by just talking to people too. This gives the opportunity to earn a little extra gold and discover more intel.
There are a decent amount of weapons in Wolfenstein; from the classic MP40 and Kar98 to tesla guns and particle canons, you’ll find something you like and stick with it. What’s nice is that you can upgrade your weapons too. That means if you particularly like one of them, you can pretty much stick with it for the entire game. I ended up using the MP43 a lot just because there was tons of ammo around for it. If you want to use one of the more powerful weapons though, you might end up spending a lot of your gold on buying ammo. The amount of gold is limited too, so choose your upgrades wisely. You can even upgrade your veil abilities at an expense. Remember though, not all weapons are created equal. You will end up burning through your more powerful ones’ ammo when the need arises as normal weaponry just won’t cut it. Oh, and one more thing – in order to upgrade your weapons you must collect intel. Without certain intel, your upgrades will stay locked.
As you play through Wolfenstein and happen upon more supernatural enemies, you’ll realize that there actually aren’t too many types of them. There are overpowered flaming zombie things that can kill you quickly, these other zombies that run around on all fours to try to eat you, some ninja-like zombies that are quick and dodge bullets, and the annoying zombies that produce shields for enemies or shoot plasma at you. Of course, you also have the Nazis, but they’re relatively easy to kill when the others aren’t present. Oh yeah, the Nazis also have these supersoldiers that wear something that looks like a tesla-armor from Fallout 3, but they only come out rarely and are pretty easy to kill. Other than that, and the bosses, it’s pretty much it. The entire game is one long fight though. When you finish more story-important objectives, the town of Isenstadt becomes more dangerous as Nazis and the Kreisau Circle start openly fighting. More parts of the town become destroyed and you end up using a lot of ammo just traveling in between objectives.
The missions are pretty much all the same, but it doesn’t really matter since you’re playing this to shoot a bunch of Nazis; not to explore and think a lot. You go to your mission start point, get carted off to a new map, “infiltrate” (walk in the front door using your abilities while blowing shit up), kill people, and leave. You’re pretty much alone all of the time against a ton of enemies, but hey – would you rather have it any other way?
Overall, I’d have to say that this was an enjoyable 6-8 hours of gameplay. I basically skipped all the little side-quests and whatever, but I don’t think they would’ve offered too much – just more killing and some money. The story is typical Wolfenstein and so is the gameplay, with the addition of the veil abilities. For an end of summer release, I would have to say that id software did a pretty good job since there isn’t much else at this time. Gaming season is right around the corner though, so maybe this would be good to get back into the swing of things guys. It might be worth the 60 bucks as long as you play it and return it within a week. If not, wait till all the blockbuster games are released later and buy this off the used shelf for cheap while you’re waiting for your favorites to drop in price. In any case, it’s fun and will keep you occupied, so I’d have to say it’s recommended. Nothing special, but fun nonetheless.
Here’s some screens!
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