Currently Playing: Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is showing it's age. Or maybe I am...
Ah, Wolfenstein. It's reliable Nazi-murdering fun. And in these troubled times, a bit of reliability can be reassuring. There are Nazis, and you murder them. And in this Wolfenstein game, the Nazis come back as Zombies! And you murder them all over again. It's good clean fun. The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi, and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood provides you with plenty of Nazis to murder, and plenty of bullets to murder them with. You'd be in the wrong place if you were expecting anything else.
But, argh, I dunno... I'm not sure if I'm getting old, or if Wolfenstein is getting old, or what, really. Whilst there was nothing particularly wrong with the game, things felt a little tired. Old-fashioned is the word I went for in the title, and I'm sticking, as the pun goes, to my guns on this one. It wasn't that there was anything wrong here, but there also wasn't anything new.
I've played a lot of video-games in my life, and (and teenage boys the world over are not going to like this, I'm afraid,) I find that when I talk to people who have also played a lot of video-games, there tends to be a gradual migration from shooters, particularly FPS, to more puzzle oriented gaming. It's unfortunate, and nobodies fault, but once you've shot enough people, you start to feel like you've shot them all. The adrenaline kick you used to get from a big action sequence, music pumping, guns blazing, trigger finger primed and popping off, fades over time. You've done it before, and it's lost it's novelty. You've shot people on a spaceship, you've shot people in a bunker, you've shot people on a train, on a plane, in a submarine and in more trenches, asylums and burned out cities across Eastern, Western and Central Europe than you can count. You've shot people that are close to you and people far away from you, and occasionally people with too many or two few faces, or who said "Grr, argh, rar, I'm going to eat your brains" instead of "Seig Heil" but you shot them all the same.
And after a while, it's difficult to get really caught up in a game about shooting people. You've shot all the people, in all the places, and you start comparing all the people and the places where you've shot them and essentially ranking them on a scale. (Maybe this is what people want when they say they want "objective" game review, idk?) So, some points:
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood stands out on it's characterisation. Pippa gesticulates in a very human and belieable manner, and whilst her cockney mode of speech is cringe-worth to an actual Brit, it does make her memorable. Likewise, B.J's musings on his childhood, through a little forced, build on the fleshing out of his personality present in the other modern Wolfenstein games in a way that is pleasing.
Enemy pathfinding is no better or worse than average. Enemies behave as video-game enemies, with their own non-logical logic, which makes their movements predictable for an experienced player. It is both palpably unrealistic and utterly necessary for them to hurl themselves into your hails of bullets, run away with their backs turned as you turn up with a sub-machine gun strapped to every limb, and ignore you completely if you happen to wedge yourself into a particular bit of the scenery, despite it having all the real-world tactical advantage of a mouldy lemon. These are things we all know and accept.
There are some excellent bugs, with dead enemies standing up and walking up invisible stairs through the ceiling, or, in one memorable case, rising from the dead, running screaming at my face, before suddenly snapping backward through an open doorway as though on a bungee cord, hitting a railing with such force they ended up bent over backwards at the buttocks so the head touched the feet, before sliding, still screaming, along it out of sight to despawn. This was my personal highlight of the whole game. A around 10 hours play time, it's quite a short game, so I played it whilst fairly drunk over the course of a few evenings and this bug made me laugh my head off.
The zombie sections are fun, with a good mix of kitsch and gore, such that I was able to enjoy it without being too creeped out (horror games are NOT my thing.) The potted plants silhouetted like human forms was a nice piece of craftsmanship, though a tired enough trope that even I who, and I cannot stress this enough, DOES NOT LIKE HORROR GAMES, didn't fall for it, or the jump scares, even once. It was all nice and camp, the way I like my zombies. More Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies than Night of The Living Dead.
The textures are more than a bit flat, with the game looking distinctly aged even with my PC cranked up to Ultra graphics. The same criticism can be levelled at some of the pointless interaction elements - I can sit in a chair at Pippa's house, but I can't do anything whilst in it. The days of us being impressed that the playable character can sit in a chair, and thinking it's terribly clever and immmersive, are long gone. On the flip side however, the Nightmares were a great Easter Egg, and superbly balanced, blending gameplay elements of "old" Wolfenstein with "new" Wolfenstein to create a new experience from the combined bones of both. So not everything old is bad.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with Wolfenstein The Old Blood, but it's unlikely I will be going back. It's a romp, to be played through and enjoyed once or maybe twice, but it lacks the depth or complexity to merit much of a replay. It's a very fine game to pick up in a sale and blast your way through as a brief vacation from reality, but it inspires more nostalgia than excitement. With Call of Duty: WWII lurking on my Steam Wishlist and a Steam Sale imminent on the horizon, only time will tell if my lacklustre response to The Old Blood is a one-off, or a symptom of a more generalised FPS maliase.
