Game Review: Wolfenstein

It's been an eight year wait but the Wolfenstein series, one of the grand-daddies of first-person shooters, has finally made it's way into this generation. Known simply as Wolfenstein, can the latest instalment in the veteran series re-establish itself in an increasingly huge market of first-person shooters?

Things don't start off promising as we find the protagonist, B.J Blazkowicz (I wish I was kidding), disguised on board a Nazi U-boat off the coast of jolly old Blighty. However, it's not long (maybe ten seconds into the cutscene) before our all-American hero abandons all subtlety and, after a daring attempted escape, finds himself cornered by the crew. But, just as they're about to fire, a mysterious blue light emanates around B.J, shielding him from an onslaught of bullets before disintegrating his surrounding enemies. When his bosses realise that the strange light came from a medallion linked to Isenstadt, a German town that has recently become occupied by Nazi cultists, B.J is sent undercover to investigate the goings-on, and then put a stop to it.

As you can tell based on that opening cutscene (a lot of which should have been playable, instead of leaving you sat there completely bewildered for about five minutes), Wolfenstein boasts one of the most hilariously contrived plots in video game history. There are some brilliantly bad moments dotted around the cutscenes - like a heavily accented Russian man with a Stalin 'tasche and an eye-patch standing in a pub full of snarling Nazis warning B.J not to "blow our cover", or how everyone in Isenstadt seems to know the apparently undercover protagonist by his full name - that come around without even the slightest hint of irony. It's so horrifically, shamefully bad that it's almost good. Except it isn't really. It's just rubbish.

It doesn't get much better while you're playing Wolfenstein. Most of the single player is spent wandering around Isenstadt, a sort of psuedo-free-roaming environment that pretends to encourage exploration (loading screens will be full of "Search every corner of Isenstadt for gold and intel") but punishes you for doing so by respawning enemies every time you walk round a corner. By the time you've fought your way through, picked up the minimal gold that was lying around and gotten to the market to spend it, you'd need to spend about a quarter of it on ammo for your weapons anyway! Still, maybe this is a blessing in disguise, since the weapon upgrades are mostly useless (more on that in a minute) and the story isn't nearly interesting enough to make any intel worth reading. That, and exploring Isenstadt is probably the most depressing thing in the world. Every street being a dreary mixture of grey and brown, and with Wolfenstein's graphics looking so dated it's probably one of the ugliest games that's been released for a while.

The missions are a little better, since unlike the areas in Isenstadt they have some purpose and direction. It goes without saying that they're a little generic - this series helped define generic back in the 90's - but they're well paced, and grant you access to all kinds of new powers and equipment.

There's a good variety of weapons to choose from in Wolfenstein. As well as the obligatory weapons that appear in every WW2 themed game (MP40, Panzerschrek, etc) there are a couple of fancy, futuristic weapons, such as the particle cannon. Mixing these very different weapons together works very well; not so much because it adds variety, but because storming round an underground Nazi fortress firing a huge disintegrating beam into anyone that so much as mutters "Achtung" is a hell of a lot of fun. At least until you run out of ammo. The only irritating thing about the weapons was swapping between them, since with a PS3 controller you're never quite sure how much pressure to apply to the R2 button, so a lot of the time it either doesn't swap at all or it brings up the full weapon menu instead of instantly swapping between two weapons, which can be a real pain in the middle of a fire fight.

You'll also have powers, accessed through the aforementioned medallion. The three main powers allow you to control time, deal extra damage and create a personal shield, and can be used to quickly get you out of any tough situations you find yourself in. The other, more basic power, which lets you see the world through an alternate dimension (I honest to God cannot believe I'm writing some of this stuff with my tongue out of my cheek), showing you any secret passages, enemy weak points, and areas where you can recharge your medallion. It's a decent extra but most of the time it's fairly pointless. You'll use it but only because it's there, not because it ever feels particularly necessary to overcome difficult obstacles.

The same can be said for the upgrades system. As I said earlier, you can spend any gold you find lying around on upgrades for your weapons and powers, although in my experience with Wolfenstein it turned out to be pretty frivolous. Since the bigger weapons and later powers are so expensive to upgrade, I just ended up ploughing all my money into the sniper rifle and time control power, and coasted through the game near enough effortlessly with just that one weapon and power, and didn't feel the need to use the otherwise awesome futuristic weapons.

So then, Wolfenstein is ugly, contrived, dated, stupid, clunky, rarely challenging, and the protagonist is named after fellatio. In short, pretty damn bad. It's not as if there are no saving graces - I'm going to bring up that particle gun again - but they don't do much to make up for everything that Wolfenstein does so clumsily. Still, it's not without purpose. Maybe, in twenty years time, developers looking to bring back Halo or Bioshock will look at Wolfenstein and go "Actually, no". Unless they're spearheaded by Activision, of course.