Wolfenstein: The Old Blood
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is now 10 years old. The unending march of time will always surprise me.
I wanted to play something slightly mindless this weekend so I picked this up during the recent Steam sale for a few dollars. I enjoyed my time with The New Order when it originally came out so I thought I would enjoy this one too.
I did, but only marginally. The graphics and sound in this game hold up really well. I played it on both the Steam Deck and my laptop and performance on both was smooth. The plot is divided into two different parts. The first has your character BJ escaping Castle Wolfenstein and the second is spent in a handful of small town following, and eventually killing, a high ranking Nazi.
I enjoyed spending time in the Castle again. I think the setting is very engaging and it's probably in the running for the longest-running building to appear in video games (the first Castle Wolfenstein came out in 1981). I can't think of another example off hand, but I'm sure there are more out there.
The gameplay is, unfortunately, average. I do wonder if I would have enjoyed it more if I played it 10 years ago, but I'm not sure. I toyed around with a few different difficultly levels and the only difference I could see is how many bullets it takes to take an enemy out. Enemy AI doesn't seem to change, and if the number of baddies that appear does, I didn't notice it.
One of the things I enjoyed least was the pseudo-stealth sections. In this series there are officers who, if they spot you or hear fighting, will call for backup. The main issue I had is that, especially in later levels, there was no real way to sneak towards these officers. One level in chapter 3 was particularly egregious and required the player to silently take out everyone in a cave system before they made it to the officers. If they failed and the officers were alerted, more enemies showed up than were originally on the map. So, a map may load with 15 enemies and 2 officers (it was rarely just one) but would end with 30+ enemies if the officers were alerted.
If the levels were designed like the older Thief games, or even more modern Hitman games, I wouldn't have been as turned off by them. As it's designed, the levels are less of a puzzle and the developers seem to want to force you to fight as much as possible. The new enemies, often popping in from literal closets, also made it hard to plan ahead. It negated player surveillance and by the end of the game I ignored stealth completely.
Overall the game was enjoyable and I didn't hate my time with it, I just wish it had leaned more into stealth or into run-and-gun. The developers didn't seem to split the difference well.