Wolfenstein: The Old Blood

My review is influenced by the fact that I don't have a lot of time for gaming anymore, yearn for some atmosphere, a good varied storyline and action, and some good old fashion Wolfenstein shoot-em-up castle fun. I have yet to play ANY of the new Wolfenstein games after RTCW, which I loved, mostly because they got such mediocre-to-bad reviews, except for New Order and Old Blood. I finally jumped into Old Blood and was hooked. The cinematic cut scenes aren't too bad at all, don't take you out of the game's atmosphere, and the story stays focused on mission-based objectives that are more than just run-and-gun repetition (escaping from prison, semi-challenging rail gun sequences, duck-and-cover fights and plenty of weapons and loot). There's some basic stealth, which is satisfying and in short bits, and you can pretty much choose which weapons you want to go with depending on the situation. Just taking out the Super Soldiers alone was a blast and full of tension, just a nice, basic set-up for the player to make his way into the castle prison to find his friend. Loved it. I picked the game up on a $5 sale and it's exactly what I was looking for. If you're a shooter-only guy maybe this is old hat by now, but I come and go through genres, and revisiting shooters happens as I see fit. I'm in my early 50's now so have played PC games for many years, and these fun single player cinematic shooters in the style of the old Raven games never gets old. I'm fine with it being on the shorter side as well, and look forward to playing New Order next.

Version Played: 1.0 (4 years old - Latest Version at the time of writting this) PC Used: R5 5600x / GTX 1070 / Win 10 Build 19045 Wolfenstein TOB is a really fun game and I enjoyed my time with it (10 hours). The hidden secrets were fun and the story was very intriguing but I wish they add more to the end as it felt oddly rushed (I'll explain in the spoiler section), maybe less time spent in the castle would have been better but thats just my opinion. I played on low/medium settings, no crashes, just a visual oddity where textures pop in a little too late when you turn towards them or go around a corner, and an audio bug where a specific enemies sound would still play after you kill them. Music was fantastic too, Definitely get this once you finish The New Order. 7/10 Spoilers ahead: I finished New Order years ago, dabbled in New Colossus afterwards but dropped it because I lost interest with the odd dialogue. Old Blood feels in-between the two where its fun to play and the story is interesting, but I feel NC's bad writting started to seep into this game a bit. Thankfully its only one weird dialogue moment with annette, like she says "why do they hate us so much" after seeing zombies.. like thats your question? Plot wise I dont get why the leaking gas didnt infect everyone, why normal enemies turned into monsters randomly, heck they dont explain if we need to stop the gas (or if its sealed) or how we got rescued (we had to climb through lots of small spaces). I wish the gate to the boss room was actually the entrance to the kings laboratory, I wish we could explore its large underground chambers to find weapons they used to burn the city etc (and use them to clear old zombies that the king trapped there). I wish we could have faced larger waves of zombies rather than the handfull that comes at us at a time, and I wish we could have faced something that felt like an actual threat and not a chained bullet sponge for a boss. A shame really.

Oh, no... am I stupid... I purchased this nonsense because it was on sale and the reviewers were positive that the game upheld the original “spirit” of Wolfenstein3D in a new guise... What do I have to say? Lame gameplay and plain boredome at the beginning - and then immediately afterwards failing to break out of prison like thirty times or so because of shitty and deliberately unfairly set save points (yes, exactly: no manual saving possible)... Too bad about the money... I've requested a refund, because I don't even want to see the rest of this game.

Count 8h in average difficulty (Bring 'em on!) doing most extra nightmare mission, it is quite short. But it is well done. The weapons are fun and powerful, the story consistent and the ambiance perfect if you remember Wolfenstein 3D, probably very good nonetheless if you don't - a mix of dystopian/WWII-epic movie (think The Guns of Navarone) . The map are obviously less of a maze than in Wolfenstein 3D but that's what you expect from an FPS in 2020 (I'm not sure mazes Wolfenstein/Doom-like would make sense with how detailled is the environment map now).

this prequel has more in common with the older games than the reboot that came out in 2013.