*PC REVIEW* Wolfenstein

Wolfenstein was a staple game if you had a 386 back in the day! wandering through hallways killing bad Nazi Germans and finding all the treasure you could get your grubby hands on. Though in my opinion none of the remakes have been anything but generic FPS’s with like themes.

That trend doesn’t really change here. I think the reason is because nothing will be as new and exciting as wolfenstein was back in the day. That’s not to say that this new Wolfenstein is a bad game by any means. They actually did a pretty decent job with the game in general, but it does have its flaws.

Lets start off with the biggest flaw. The mouse lag.. Lately any game that seems to be made for the xbox360 and then ported to the PC has a dist inc mouse lag, it seems to be about 15-20 milliseconds or so if i had to guess, but its definitely there. Maybe even more noticeable at higher resolutions. I was playing at 1920×1600 and it was definitely there. You  move your mouse and it just feels sluggish.. Not quite the same as a regular made-for-pc FPS. I guess they just didn’t take the time to really get the engine nice on the pc. This is the second game that I’ve noticed this with recently, so its definitely a growing trend and it makes this reviewer sad. Fear not though, after a while you do adjust to it, but you never quite feel you’re as accurate as you could be.

The graphics pretty much look about like xbox360 level graphics, and currently there a pc games that can surpass this look, so I’ll say the graphics are not top notch, but they aren’t a slouch either. They do good justice in creating a world war 2 atmosphere so I wont complain about them too much. Although the UI is pretty shitty. .First off, why is there no health bar showing how low my health is? Yes I realize this is a game that doesn’t have health kits, you just replenish by not getting shot for a few seconds, but during an intense boss battle, it helps to know just how close to death you are, or how hard you’re being hit, simply putting a bunch of arbitrary blood around the screen doesn’t really let me know, and yes I know there’s an indicator telling you to take cover, but I still demand a bar showing just how much I have so I can better manage how much certain attacks do, how fast I’m taking damage etc…  The menu’s are kind of retarded as well, why is there a spin cycle main menu? so now it takes me 3 clicks to exit the game instead of 2, why do i need an extra click to see a fancy menu rotate? was this really necessary? Its just another completely unnecessary step and is stupid.

The basic premise of the game is that you are in a town of eisen…. actually i’ll just spell it wrong so I wont even bother, but you wander around the (i believe) 3 different sections of the town, which do require loading to get to each section and back, taking missions. Most missions will have you enter a certain house or building and will load up the mission for that area, which you’ll go in, kill everything and emerge the victor of that mission. Then you’ll head back to the town and wander back to the mission giver.. At times i got kind of sick of running through the town all the time to get back and forth to mission givers just to turn the mission in, also it didnt seem you were rewarded anything for turning in the missions which seemed odd… The nice thing that the designers did here though, is add random packs of troops in the city so it wasn’t a completely bore fest, you’d at least get a chance to kill a few Nazi’s on your way back to the base.

If you’re wondering now, yes this wolfenstein does have the mutated creatures you’ll fight, though its not quite as bad as the last wolf reboot with all those zombies. The designers again here did a great thing and allowed you to have shoot outs with human beings up until the very last stages of the game, which is great becuase there is something satisfying about using an mp43 or kar98 on a human target who actually goes down when you shoot him! I actually dislike games which think its fun for you to empty mag after mag after mag into a single regular enemy before he goes down… There’s not fun about that and it just makes you feel like an underpowered idiot…. they do that a few times in this game but not a ton. When you are introduced to the ‘mutant’ enemy things, they don’t bombard you with them, they start out slow and generally only introduce them here or there.. there is definitely more regular human killing than creatures. But sometimes they’ll throw a PACK of creatures at you..

The game also includes a weapon upgrade system, which I like and dislike.. I like it because i pumped my favorite guns right away.. but I dislike it because i have a feeling some of the more advanced guns were feeling pretty weak  because they weren’t upgraded and it ended up being that I didn’t use those guns very much at all. They all felt very similar and all felt kind of weak… “Oh this one shoots a big blue beam of toothpaste, but this one shoots small blue electric beams, this one shoots a semi invisible blue ball of warped space” and i still don’t really understand what the use is of any of them. Off the bat they all spun up slow, and killed kind of slow as well, although sometimes a specific gun can have a major effect on an enemy that 1000 bullets wouldn’t, so that part made it sorta okay, but i was disappointing these higher level guns never really gave me any satisfaction to want to use them..

This brings me to another nit pick… who’s brilliant fucking idea was it to have the 4 different amulet modes bound to 1-4 and the guns bound to 5 through = … seriously, do they think we have mutant fucking alien hands that we can reach all the way over and hit the = key during a fight? The layout for weapon selections is just awful, And i understand you can go in and rebind things, but i’ve never played a game that compelled me to do so THIS MUCH… Wow really annoying…. Although having the 4 amulet modes does add a bit to the game-play, I’d say for the most part it really wasn’t that needed… I mean you have matrix slow mo mode.. you have quad damage mode (its not really 4x i just love quake), you have show me the money mode, and you have shield mode… Its a neat idea, but kind of gimmicky and really I don’t think it needed it.

A couple of the ‘boss’ battles were a little frustrating, mostly exploiting the fact that you run like a slug having sex on a water-bed floating down a level 5 rapids river and the enemy naturally can run fast as shit, and yes you can slow down time, but some of the bosses are still way faster than you even when slowed way down, and they have some powerful melee as well. It just feels cheap and feels more like I’m handicapped in my ability to move or dodge around than my lack of skill. I guess we can blame it on the port aspect but its really just a flaw in design.

Level design is generally okay, but there was an occasion when i’d get stuck not knowing what to do. I completely forgot about shooting through shields and got stuck on the air strip level as they forced you to use this tactic to proceed.. Then I got stuck on blimp because i didn’t see the control panels to lower the bridges, they should have these blinking to show they were usable.

Overall wolfenstein was okay to play. But at times i found myself not really wanting to sludge back and forth in the main city area’s. I got probably 12-15 hours out of it but I didn’t do every single mission. It was starting to get a little long in the teeth after about 10 hours I will say though. In the end if I had to equate this out to a 1-10 rating, I’d probably give it an 8.0. It felt solid, the story line flows alright, and generally it was pretty fun shooting Nazi’s with WWII weapons again, but it has its flaws, and I wouldn’t elevate it to a status of excellent or even great. It’s just a solid shooter.

My final verdict is 3 stars.

Its not COD, but it’s probably slightly better than the last wolfenstein offerings.