The Wolfenstein franchise has stood by me in the tough times like a loyal, Nazi-killing friend. The classic PC game, Wolfenstein 3-D provided me with sweet, furtive moments of distraction in Computer Science class, and its sequel, the fantastically awesome Return to Castle Wolfenstein, helped me pass the long, lonely hours after a particularly bad break-up during my freshman year in college. These games have given me a lot, and I feel like I ought to give them back something in return, but I just can’t bring myself to muster up that same enthusiasm for the franchise’s latest entry, simply titled Wolfenstein.
I hate to complain. After all, Wolfenstein is actually a pretty decent game. Its art style is intriguing and its gameplay works on a technical level, but there’s nothing here of note to make it stand out from the crowd. The game’s innovations and its glossy sheen just don’t do enough to hide its repetitive missions, simplistic artificial intelligence, uninspired voice work, ridiculously antiquated and buggy multiplayer suite, and numbing shooter mechanics. A new Wolfenstein game should be a seminal event for a first-person shooter fanatic like me, but instead, this one has only made me pine away all the more for this November’s Modern Warfare 2.
Wolfenstein’s sharply animated and gleefully campy opening cinematic sets the stage well. You play as B.J. Blazkowicz, the American secret agent and hero of the last two titles, who has once again stumbled upon a nefarious plot by Heinrich Himmler and the SS Paranormal Division to harness the power of the occult and deal a deathblow to the Allies.
This time, the Nazis have discovered a set of crystals that grant them access to a parallel world called the Black Sun dimension. Using pagan rites and pseudo-scientific manipulation, the Germans hope to mine and exploit the mysterious energy from this dimension and develop a special army that will crush the rest of the world underfoot. It’s your job to link up with friendly resistance fighters, uncover the Nazis’ plans, confront their hideous experiments and occult abominations, and save the world from a fate worse than destruction.
Wolfenstein distills the gothic spirit of the franchise, concocting a sort of unholy melding of classic war films with Raiders of the Lost Ark and less distinguished 80s schlock horror. It’s grim and violent, and yet, somehow this game is lighter than its predecessors, burdened with a sense of humor and self-awareness that I’m not entirely convinced is really appealing. Something feels just a bit off in the presentation. I can’t put my finger on it, but the style and tone never quite “click” here, like they did in Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
The title’s structure is a unique blend of a standard first-person shooter mission-based campaign and a looser, open world role-playing game. The game takes place in the fictional German town of Isenstadt and its immediate surroundings. Nazi soldiers patrol the streets and are under orders to kill anyone seen out of doors.
Two resistance groups, the politically motivated Kreisau Circle, and an occult organization called the Golden Dawn, offer assistance and point you in the direction of missions that help to advance the story. While the mission are pretty standard shooter fare (assassinate an officer, rescue hostages, destroy a building, retrieve an item), you can choose when and how you approach them. Once you complete an objective, you must finally escape back to the center of Isenstadt, often as the walls burn and collapse around you and the Nazis follow in relentless pursuit.
This open structure works rather well for the most part and doesn’t really weaken the central narrative. Unfortunately, the unique set-up can’t hide the game’s relative simplicity, despite a high level of polish. The town of Isenstadt is very small compared to the sprawling levels in other open-world games and the streets are so nondescript they’re nearly identical. It’s easy to get lost and the game’s confusing map and waypoint system doesn’t help much.
To make matters worse, the missions feature a variety of objectives, but the gameplay is largely identical from one to another, and the environments are repetitive, linear, and only momentarily interesting. I was particularly disappointed that the title offered very little opportunity for stealth. I went into every mission hoping to keep a low profile, but try as I might, every encounter quickly escalated into a loud, frantic, and furious firefight.
In an attempt to further develop the single player campaign, the game’s producers have given you access to the powers of the Black Sun dimension. Using a medallion captured from the Nazis, Agent Blazkowicz can enter this parallel plane at will and manipulate it to his advantage.
The medallion arms you with four powers. Veil reveals the Black Sun dimension and allows you to spy details and clues that would remain invisible in plain sight. Mire lets you suspend everything in slow motion, Shield protects you from attack for a short time, and a final ability greatly increases your weapons’ effectiveness.
I was very disappointed by this mechanic. The powers are uninspired and unimaginative. They’ve been done dozens of times before and often better executed. The Black Sun dimension itself is not unique or interesting enough to compensate, and its washed out colors and muted details actually rob the game of its visual panache. It would have been better if the title’s developers had simply doubled down and focused more on perfecting the core shooter gameplay and animating more varied levels.
The roster of guns and sci-fi weaponry is also far too small and exceedingly familiar. I’ve been firing MP40s, Kar 98s, and Panzerschrecks on the virtual battlefields for a decade now, and the inclusion of a snazzy particle beam and tesla gun, while welcome, just doesn’t fill out the merger arsenal as well as it should. Thankfully, you have the ability to upgrade your weapons and powers.
Every weapon and ability can be altered, often with marked improvements and visual enhancements. You unlock upgrades by collecting intelligence documents and “tomes of power” scattered throughout the game, and you purchase these upgrades using confiscated Nazi gold (a nice touch). You do have to find a black market merchant to purchase upgrades - and that can be kind of a hassle - and the gold and documents are sometimes unreasonably well-hidden, but on the whole, the upgrade tree is one of the highlights of the game.
Wolfenstein is a pretty good looking game. The textures are sharp and smooth and the colors, while limited, are rich and vibrant. As a history buff, I really appreciated the attention to detail. All the Nazi uniforms are meticulously recreated and the game is full of tiny little flourishes that really draw you into its warped world. Unfortunately, the character animations are stiff and unrealistic and the levels are full of the long corridors and cold bunkers we’ve been trudging through for years.
At first, I was enthralled by Wolfenstein’s sound design. The weapons sounded fantastic, the music was exciting, and the voice actors growled with charmingly exaggerated German accents. After a few hours though, I discovered that like everything else in the game, these elements became repetitive and began to grate on my nerves. The same musical cues fired up again and again, the same weapons rattled on endlessly, and the same voice actors kept repeating the same tired phrases again, and again, and again.
The enemy artificial intelligence is serviceable, but doesn’t offer much of a challenge. Some soldiers hide behind cover, peeking out at regular intervals; others rush your position kamikaze-style, with no thought to flanking or advanced tactics; and the occasional blockhead simply stands out in the open, waiting to get drilled. It’s not a crippling flaw – and, truth be told, these soldiers and their rudimentary mechanics would have fit right in back in 2004 - but these antiquated enemies just can’t stand against the crowd of today’s more tactical challenges.
These minor failings do tend to add up, but the single player campaign remains a polished and worthwhile – albeit - repetitive and linear experience. Unfortunately, Wolfenstein really stumbles in the online multiplayer department. It features only three game modes and it is exceedingly difficult to get into a match. You can jump into a game in progress (at least in theory), but if you want to sign up for a game that is just shaping up, be prepared to wait for at least ten minutes. Once the game does start, you may very well get booted from the server with no explanation (I did – five times).
If you are lucky enough to get to play, you can choose to take up the mantle of a soldier, a medic, or an engineer. The medic has the ability to heal fallen teammates (granted he can get to them within a very small window of time) and the engineer can build structures to accomplish certain objectives. As you play, you earn cash for kills and heals, and you can use the money to upgrade your weapons, much the same way you would in the single player game.
The games themselves have a decidedly old-school feel. The graphics are strangely rudimentary, the controls are streamlined, and your movements feel stiff and robotic. I couldn’t find a whole lot of players on the server, and the performance itself was very choppy and full of lag.
Overall, I was very disappointed in the multiplayer suite. Wolfenstein’s multiplayer options won’t offer more than a momentary distraction from the fantastic online worlds of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or Call of Duty: World at War. It’s obvious that the developers focused most of their time on the single player campaign – and I have no problem with that – but it would have been better to drop the multiplayer aspect all together rather than to offer up this sad and broken excuse for a supplement.
On the content side of things, parents should definitely exercise caution around this “M” rated game. I didn’t notice any foul language, but I did come across a handful of scantily clad women in a German officer’s quarters, including one that seemed to have been murdered in some sort of occult ritual. Some SS female assassins also wear skin tight leather outfits (definitely not regulation).
The occult world of the Black Sun and the Nazis’ quest to control its power obviously plays a big role in the game. Magic and pseudo-science permeate the narrative, monsters attack from the shadows and otherworldly portals, cryptic writings and symbols decorate the walls, and Nazi sorcerers chant and threaten you in darkly-toned Latin tongues. In one disturbing cut scene, an invisible assailant brutally murders two nurses before you can rescue them.
Like any first-person shooter, Wolfenstein requires the player to mow through a virtual army with a variety of real-world and fantasy weaponry. The violence here, however, is more graphic than the norm.
Your bullets leave gaping exit wounds and sometimes even take heads or limbs completely off, spraying the walls and the floor with gallons of blood. Some weapons simply disintegrate the Nazi corpsmen and SS officers, while other, small-caliber guns leave them a pulpy, unrecognizable mess. It’s all in keeping with the gothic sort of grind house feel of the material, but it’s certainly not appropriate for young children.
Reading back over my review, I feel that I’ve given you a more negative impression of Wolfenstein than I intended. The violence is shocking and a tad mean-spirited. It is repetitive, it is primitive and it isn’t very challenging. Its graphics and gameplay are a bit dated and the multiplayer options only made me want to exercise my option to turn it off.
This is all true, and yet, at least a part of me enjoyed playing Wolfenstein. It’s not a bad game; it’s just never as good or as grand as it could have been. It can’t live up to its illustrious predecessors, but it’s not a crushing disappointment. It’s a decent game – well, a decent rental at least. I guess when you’re dealing with a fantastic franchise like Wolfenstein, though, that’s disappointment enough.
Caution Rating: 10
