- Classic Wolfenstein multiplayer with an occult twist reminiscent of the heart-pounding and award winning class and objective based multiplayer of Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
- Amazing enemies the Nazis throw at you next as they bring their dark fantasies to life.
- Epic combat moments that unfold in movie-like action sequences as you fight to prevent the Nazis from unleashing the power of the Black Sun, a war-ending weapon of supernatural mass destruction.
- Unique environments overlapping this world and the Veil, a world between our reality and the occult underworld that offers you combat advantages but also new supernatural threats.
- The ability to battle with a diverse collection supernatural 'Veil Powers,' as well as Allied and Axis conventional weapons, all upgradable via an in-game black market.
Product Description
Wolfenstein brings the Nazi’s dark obsession with the occult to life with epic action and harrowing shooter combat. Use a powerful arsenal of both definitive and occult-enhanced Axis & Allied weapons to beat back a su... More >>
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So I play an unhealthy amount of videogames. I tend to go to the gamestore at least once a week. I go through a lot of games in a year and I’ve been playing since Attari.To be honest I don’t finish many games because over the years I have developed very specific tastes that are rarely satisfied. I keep getting new games and I tend to give most everything an even shot.
All that being said, I think I’m going to finish this one. (-)I have to say I think the visuals are pretty basic – the level designs don’t seem particularly interesting and I really don’t care much for “powers” in this or most any other games. (+) What is great about this game though is the fluidity of the combat. You feel powerful, but not invincible. All of the guns have a solid/real feel to them. The sound quality is good too. When you fire off a round, youre going to feel it.
This game also seems to reward both reckless and calculated approaches to situations. You can pick up an explosive barrel, run into an area and toss it right into the middle of a group of enemies – its really satisfying. You can also pick up melee weapons – thus far all I’ve found is a hammer and a pick axe and they work great (you can also toss ‘em). The melee is great too. In most 1st person shooters (all of the populars) the melee really doesn’t feel powerful – but here its just fun to charge a guy and bludgeon him repeatedly. I think there are also baonette upgrades- but that might just be for the rifle. In terms of calculated, there are parts where you can sneak up behind some enemies and take them out quietly, you can also upgrade your rife – with a scope and be all sniper style.
(+) This game also has a central hub where you can pick up and participate in various missions of your choosing, upgrade both your powers (slow down time, block bullets, see interdimensionally, magic bullets)and your guns and look for gold/intelligence reports. What I like most about the game so far is that you can just keep following the star compas and fun stuff happens.(Aside from the short loading screens) The game is really fluid you can run into a house and come out the other side pick up a mission, head through another house find gold, upgrade your stuff, kill nazis,go to a new location, kill nazis, find intelligence,pick up a new gun complete a mission. It never seems to slow down much and you feel empowered the whole way through. Thus far I have not died (normal difficulty) from any of my fire fights.
So there you have it. I’ve played all the shooters out there for 360 and aside from call of duty 2 – this one is doing it for me more then the rest.
Rating: 4 / 5
Wolfenstein continues to try to juggle the various beaten-to-death knives of WWII shooter, occult storyline, and “interactive” NPC’s, and amazingly, does all three with only a handful of cuts and dropped pieces. Up front I’ll say this is only for single player, as for some reason I can’t even access multiplayer.
Wolfenstein continues to follow the occult-riddled Nazi escapades of agent B.J. Blazkowicz. Agent BJ (which an alarmingly large number of people call him without getting shot in the face) is dropped into Germany after sinking a German cruiser and finding a medallion that can both ward off bullets and flense thirty men down to the bone. Upon arriving, you discover a similar medallion, just prior to being given a briefing by a member of the Golden Dawn (Alister Crowley makes no appearances to my knowledge) and are tasked with preventing General Zetta from opening a portal to the realm of the Black Sun and stealing the power of the Thules. While so much of this seems hackneyed and dried out, not too mention rather over the top, considering that amount of story gets rammed down your throat in the first ten to twenty minutes, its delivered in such a way that it doesn’t seem like the same ol thing.
Interactions are a bit strange. Some NPC’s are interactive, and will calmly hold a discussion while a German platoon is attempting to fill you with lead. You purchase upgrades through the black market by finding bags and bars of gold(because cash is apparently for sissies), though after finding five dozen bags or so, I’d probably have absconded to buy a Hawaiian island. The finding quests are actually worthwhile, finding blueprints to unlock new weapon upgrades and inject some nice side pieces of backstory, but while being in plain sight, rather than being buried under boxes or tucked behind impossible to spot hidden doors, they require you to scour every square centimeter of every level, since we know most people leave a bag of gold on the sidewalk tucked between two crates, where no one will ever find it, as opposed to in a safe. Searching is rather neat, a simple button hold that actually shows going through the motions of searching cabinets or threading bombs, but its surprisingly rarely used.
Combat manages to be exciting and annoying in turns. Most of your eyes have telescopic night vision, able to spot and alert to your presence when they appear as a speck in the distance even on high end TV’s. the sorcerers you encounter are rather overpowered, and can soak up almost as many bullets as you can. Health is ridiculous, and reminiscent of the Getaway, basically hide long enough for the blood around your screen edge to fade, making this a cake walk even on Uber difficulty assuming that there’s decent cover available. Several of the effects, namely the anti-gravity which allows you to pick off soldiers like slow flying skeet are entertaining.
Overall, this game is okay. Not great by any stretch, as they lock you out of too many neat bits and spoon feed you too much story too soon, but not as disappointing as I’d been led to believe. After all, who doesn’t like a good Nazi shoot? A decent plot and some entertaining asides that manages to stop just short of being grindy make this a solid rent-to-own, though emphasis is on rent. And if your looking for MP Wolfenstein, I’d just as soon stick to the online freeware.
Rating: 3 / 5
I am surprised by good reviews here. The graphics reminded me of the original xbox. The nazi’s repertoire of comments was limited to about 3 phases they kept repeating incessantly the entire game, which became very irritating. The AI was sorely disappointing. At one point I’m standing next to a partner in the rebellion, and our enemies are shooting at us….bombs and gunfire were actually whizzing past his head, as I was hiding behind him, and he just stood there stock still. When I talked to him, he said “do you need something” while bombs were literally exploding at our feet. I was not impressed and in hindsight would not have bought this game.
Rating: 1 / 5
Since other people here and on the major review sites have thoroughly covered the single-player campaign mode, this review will focus on the multiplayer component. I’ll preface by noting that I played Return to Castle Wolfenstein extensively. I sunk more hours into RtCW than perhaps any other game on the original XBOX.
Unfortunately, this interation of the franchise simply does not measure up, especially when compared to its multiplayer peers like Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 4 and 5, Resistance 2, or Battlefield 1943.
Balance and design issues plague this title. For starters, the game’s hands are tied by a limit of 12 players per game, so six per team. This is simply too few people to make the class-based squad aspects shine. Other questionable design decisions like automatically respawning unconscious players after five seconds makes the revive skill of the medic nearly useless, since players will have already respawned before medics arrive. Weapons feel unbalanced, using too much ammo per kill and starting with too little ammo. With the emphasis this time more heavily on combat rather than objectives, there are few engineers, so it’s often quicker to die and respawn rather than wait for an engineer to drop an ammo pack. Games often collapse into stalemates at choke points, in which both sides stand toe-to-toe, holding down the trigger and chucking grenades liberally.
Some of these mistakes could be forgiven if there weren’t numerous technical issues as well. My excitement for the game was tempered as the first match I joined was spent glitched through the floor. I could see my character’s legs and nothing else. I thought I was in spectator mode until the opposing team came in and killed me, only to re-spawn again inside the floor. Trying again, a buddy and I made it into a 10-player lobby, but the host dropped and froze the game at the “searching for new host” text. We had to exit to the XBOX dashboard. I’ve given it a few more tries, and come to the conclusion that the matchmaking system is fundamentally broken. There is a considerable wait to search for games, a wait to join games, and waits to be kicked or find “host unavailable” messages. The multiplayer game simply is not fun enough to deal with such a flawed matchmaking system. I can’t speak for everybody, but lag has been a major problem for both my buddy and me. Frankly, I’ve never had a smooth match. This is rarely a problem on the other games listed above.
Not to mention the multiplayer graphics. While the campaign mode graphics are very nice, the multiplayer graphics look decisively last-gen: blurred and choppy, with low-polygon character models and environments. When I first joined a multiplayer game, I honestly thought perhaps a visual setting had been switched out of high-def mode. I’m not a graphics snob by any means, but the multiplayer mode is so poor looking, it’s difficult to distinguish teammates from enemies. IGN’s review puts it more nicely than I would, stating, “it goes for a decidedly retro look and feel.” In all seriousness, the multiplayer looks and plays worse than some “retro” PS2 games.
I rarely write reviews anymore, but I felt a warning was necessary for anyone who was considering the game based on nostalgic memories of the multiplayer Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Steer clear. I expect a flood of used copies to hit the used market this weekend. This game will be in the bargain bin shortly, but by then everybody will have moved on to Modern Warfare 2. There is a reason why no demo was released, a reason why reviews have been slow-in-coming, and a reason why the team working on the multiplayer component was laid off recently. All these hints point to something– the utterly broken multiplayer aspect of this game.
Rating: 2 / 5
BJ is back, once again, battling the Third Reich! As usual, those industrious Nazis are trying to exploit any edge they can get, and they certainly aren’t thinking inside the box. Very quickly in the game you learn that the Nazis have discovered an interesting and questionable source of, well, interesting and questionable power. You, as BJ, spend this game getting to the bottom of this and attempting to thwart these new efforts.
There is a short list of “modern” ideas in this game… a centralized map with a very light RPGish quest style method of breaking up the basically linear game play. There is an upgrade system, and of course, some “special powers” you obtain along the way. Besides that, the game is very much a nod to Return to Castle Wolfenstein style run and gun play. The game play is outdated in that regard, but that doesn’t necessarily detract from the fun in the game. There are a few different weapons in the game, but you get them as time goes on… so there isn’t a huge variety, effectively. Also, not all weapons are useful (or even feasible) given different conditions. Towards the last part of the game you end up using whatever you have ammo for.
The story isn’t bad, but it is nothing earth shattering. You fight Nazis, you discover Nazis are doing strange stuff, and you try to stop them. There are a few cinematic moments, and some very light character dialog. Other than that: killing, killing, killing. Not a problem, just don’t expect much in the story line area. Nothing like cinematics that bluntly explain what is happening in case you can’t be bothered to actually pay attention to the game.
I did everything I could and I completed the game in under 12 hours — as evidenced by the Achievement “Blitzkrieg”. I didn’t feel it was that long of a game, but it certainly wasn’t the shortest game I’ve played. I haven’t even bothered with the multiplayer as I haven’t been interested. I played uncountable hours of RTCW: Enemy Territory, but for some reason this game doesn’t inspire me to even try.
To summarize: Old school run and gun linear action with good graphics and a vaguely entertaining plot. Nothing ground breaking, but I don’t think it was intended to be. It’s a good game, and I enjoyed playing it.
Rating: 4 / 5