Wolfenstein

I have just been plowing through the sequels of nineties FPS’s lately. This time it was back to Castle Wolfenstein for me… although, technically, I am not sure if that castle in the distance is actually the Castle Wolfenstein, you know the one I escaped from (with the plans) back in 1981.

This is the best looking game I have played in awhile. When you devote most of your gaming to the Wii and $5 steam games you forget just how awesome computer graphics are these days. They seemed to have captured every little detail of a war torn 1940’s German village. That is everything except the German accents. These are some of the cheesiest German accents you will hear outside of a corn stock production of The Sound of Music. It’s like they just did a search and replace on the dialogue file swapping “W” with “V.”

However, this game, like Wolfenstein 3-D before it, is all about the shooting. Wolfenstein does a good job with this. The guns feel powerful and do lots of satisfying limb damage when blast away at those damned Nazis. The twist with this game is that you gradually develop supernatural powers that allow you to shield yourself, change time and inflict extra damage. When you engage these powers the world turns bluish green and you are shifted into a sort of H.P. Lovecraft dimensional space complete with floaty monsters and howling wind sounds. This looks neat, but rarely do the powers have anything to do with puzzle solving the way the gravity gun did in Half-Life 2. They are just there to give your player an extra advantage during tougher gun fights. Playing at normal difficulty, I never really felt that overwhelmed by the enemies but, overall, I enjoyed the game play and the shallow story line.