Wolfenstein: The Old Blood

The Good + Still enough nazi cannon fodder + Veryt satisfying gunplay + Sawn off shotgun, groovy! + Dual wielding + No carry weapon limit + More action orientated gameplay + TOB at times feels like a reboot of RTCW + No 3rd person cutscenes like in TNO + Good graphics and soundtrack + Great voice acting + Nazis still speak German + Lean around corners + Play Wolfenstein 3D + Secrets The Bad - The story is even more generic and bland than TNO - BJ's still an idiot who keeps walking into every nazi trap - When shit hits the fan, every enemy on the map magically knows your position - Zombies feel out of place and are boring enemies - Bullet sponge boss fights are still a thing - The game sure loves to take your weapons away - At times slightly confusing level design - Every action requires pressing 'E' - Useless power armor - No auto pickups - Wonky stealth - Still can't hide bodies - No music volume slider - Checkpoint saves The Ugly - The first chapter's forced stealth - BJ sometimes refuses to climb ladders (known bug)

Better than New Order, surely, but still not great. Performance is smooth, graphics are not that good but the sound and voice acting are great. They have seemingly hired german native speakers for the voiceovers, and it shows - there are only a few small syntax errors. The game is quite short, content-wise.

Well...it's not cup of tea but... The graphics are doom 2016 like , so being a game from 2015 its at par with... The music is there but not memorable... The sfx are great and create the overall atmosphere of the game...punchy and very well panned out. The gameplay is where the game really shines...it's run and gun ID software style...so this is the point together with the visceral, brutal and sometimes silly story arch of the Wolfenstein games, that really made me try a shooter outside my slow paced rpg/shooter like games. Brainless but fun. Can't help to think that if this story were taken seriously, i mean no supernatural and just plain alternative WW2 reality, this could be something much much greater....just a thought.

I like ToB straight approach: few cutscenes, no gimmicks, no forced stealth, scalable difficulty The story still has it's moments and goes for a decent home video action/horror atmosphere, characters are also decent if a little unmemorable. Gameplaywise it's simple, featuring only akimbo and leaning as "gimmicks" which both integrate very well. Akimbo brings some element of strategy into the mix as you deal more damage, but also burn your ammo faster. Leaning works great, both dynamically and on-demand, and gives the game a more cinematic feel without taking control away from the player. Proven Old-school standards like pickups and secrets add depth and a plastic feel to the levels, and the option to "overdrive", meaning stack beyond max health adds strategy to higher difficulties. Overall a brilliant and varied mix, and now: the problems. The game features a console for advanced configuration, at least in theory, as most commands are sabotaged in this version, saying "This is not possible in retail" or something like that, it's just infuriating that anyone thought crippling a singe player game like that was reasonable. If Machine Games was that serious about achievements and online leaderboards (which don't work in this version anyway) they should just mark more radical commands as cheats. Ultralow configs are an accessability issue for low-spec gamers, and Machine Games does a great disservice to them. Also the cutscenes more often then not crash the game, as well as chapter transitions, making a permadeath run completely impossible. This is especially sad, as otherwise I would have considered a "Mein Leben" permadeath run completely adequate for a gem like this. Still, I think the pros outweigh the cons for this one, and I sincerely recommend this title. It's my first Wolfenstein title and it's completely Uncut in Germany thanks to new legislation.

The story may be not as well done, but TOB feels more like a Wolfenstein game than TNO. The combat feels better done as well. It feels as long as it needs to be. It's less plot focused than TNO, and I personally feel like that makes it more enjoyable. The atmosphere and levels feel really nice too.