Wolfenstein. A name that carries great respect in the gaming industry. Wolfenstein 3D is said to have revolutionized the first person shooter genre by being, well, the first one ever. Return to Castle Wolfenstein was one of the biggest games on the original Xbox, especially in the early days of LIVE, with its multiplayer setting a high standard for the time.
So with these two behemoths of the gaming industry – intentionally overlooking the other not so successful games – Activision had a lot to live up to with Wolfenstein on the 360. Would they create another game to revolutionize the genre? Will they reach the unbridled highs of the Return to Castle Wolfenstein’s multiplayer? Sadly, neither.
The biggest problem with the game is its lack of identity. It tries to carry the history of the series on, while also updating the game with a more serious story, and it just does not work. The main character is B.J Blazkowicz, an American spy, which is perfectly fine if the game was anything like its predecessors and had its tongue planted firmly in its cheek, but it doesn’t. Without the humour the character comes across like an arrogant tosser, garnering little to no respect from me, and making him impossible to relate to. If you are going to keep characters like Duke Nukem, Serious Sam and BJ, then you need to keep the cheesy one-liners.
This carried on into the story and BJ’s interactions with the other NPC’s. You have been sent to the fictional German town of Isenstadt to stop the Nazi’s in their nefarious plot to unearth a demonic army. You work with the resistance and an agency called The Golden Dawn, both have the same plan: stop the Nazi’s. They treat BJ with love and adoration, sending him off to do all the soldiering and manly deeds. I was hoping for a more developed storyline involving the resistance, but no, it’s more of a one-man-takes-down-army situation. The NPC’s themselves are vapid and emotionless, failing to draw me into the story and again, furthering me from the game.
All the missions are set around a kind-of open world environment, I say kind-of because it is more of a series of small areas with loading screens in-between them. A little disappointing. They work reasonably well with sporadic fights with the Nazi’s to keep you busy between missions, however, all the locations are really close to each other, creating a cartoon like WW2 village. Surely the Nazi’s would notice that the Resistance have a HQ right next door to their main building, and the Golden Dawn have a big symbol painted on a door around the corner? Silly Nazi’s. The missions themselves are pretty good with some stand-out moments set through a variety of interesting levels. Obviously some are better than others, but there is more good than bad here.
BJ gets to play around with an interesting array of weapons and abilities. What I mean by that is you also get to tap into the Veil – the same thing the Third Reich is abusing for its plans for world domination. You have your standard range of WW2 weapons with upgrades available from the shady black market brothers, but you also get to play with three very special guns. These guns are experimental weapons that the Nazi’s are developing, and boy are they fun to use; turning Nazi’s into skeletons with beams of energy; zapping them with bolts of electricity; eviscerating them with the Wolfenstein equivalent of the BFG.
Using these weapons along with your veil powers are key to taking down certain enemies. The powers themselves all boost BJ in different ways; slowing down time to shoot fast enemies; using a shield to deflect bullets; boosting the power of your weapons to rip through the afore mentioned shields. When you’re in the Vale everything goes a light green tint, with enemies and allies appearing in different colours. Although helpful, it does suffer a little from Batman: Arkham Asylum syndrome, where you end up spending more time in the effect, missing out on all the work the developers spent on the graphics; they are pretty solid, some parts are a little bit of a let down but the water effects are akin to Bioshock.
With all these interesting weapons to shoot, and interesting environments to explore, surely you are going to have a great time, right? Yes and no. Wolfenstein is filled with insta-death moments, giving you no explanation as to what happened, and even having the audacity to give you tips after you have died. Surely it would have been better to tell me that I can’t deactivate the veil while I am touching a veil door before I do it? What a kick in the teeth. These popped up throughout the entirety of the game, each one different yet similar in the fact that it made me hate the game with a passion.
There were other fundamental, or annoying little errors throughout, each of them adding up and making the game harder and harder for you to lose yourself in. With each good moment something would happen to push you back down again. The boss battles give the perfect example of this: interesting enemies to be taken down in different ways, but, the majority of them are so easy that you do not even realise they are dead. The campaign took me around 10 hours to complete but there are a lot of collectables hidden throughout to draw you back for that elusive second play through.
Not one for hidden gems? Then hop on over to the multiplayer, which is sadly a let down. I never had the pleasure of playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein online but I did hear great things about it – class based objective games and the like. Wolfenstein has the same game modes as its predecessor but lacks the polish of modern MP games; the graphics and frame rate are not as smooth as the single player; the menu system at the start of each round is slow and clumsy. That being said, it was fun for a few hours. Frantic, yet fun. It does not do enough to draw me back to it, especially since it is so hard to get a full game.
It is a shame to see a game that held such great promise fail to meet our expectations. If only the developers would have kept some of the original charm and built upon that, rather than trying to bridge the gap between old-school and modern gaming.
VideogameUK verdict: 5/10
