The game itself is good fun. Balancing leaves a lot to be desired with some weapons being brutally overpowered while others are nearly useless. But all in all, I had fun while playing. That is until... You die and have to reload a "checkpoint". Those are so terribly implemented that it was the most frequent reason why I stopped playing the game for the day. On the surface, they work fine. When you die (and you will, because falling out of bounds insta-kills you), you are put back to the place of the last checkpoint. Nothing wrong here. Except that: a) Currency pick-ups respawn, even those you previously got. Meaning you can just collect everything, go kill yourself/die and collect everything again. You can try avoiding those you already picked up once but it is both annoying (having to navigate in a way you don't accidentally pick one up) and sometimes impossible because currency can be in the way with no way around. I want to play the game with the intended amount of currency, not exploit by getting more every time I die. b) Sometimes when you die and load a checkpoint, the map you already explored becomes hidden again. Really annoying for tracking exploration. c) For some reason, after loading a checkpoint, it makes all nearby enemies immediately beeline towards you. Even those who you've not even seen yet. Some enemies also respawn. It just breaks the flow of the game so much, that I just fully restarted a level every time I died rather than loading a checkpoint. All of it could have been avoided by either implementing a proper checkpoint save system which remembers your progress, pick-ups, killed enemies etc. or just simply allowing quick saving. But I guess that was a no-go because of consoles... Simply put, my main annoyance was the absolutely horrible save system. I give it 3 stars mostly just because of that. It was extremely detrimental to my overall enjoyment of the game. If you can look past this, you can have fun for a few evenings.
A pretty decent game. Challenging, ton of weapons, enemies, secrets, boss fights, skills to upgrade etc. Everything is there. Would be a lot of fun. But it is bogged down by the outright terrible save system. Every time I stopped playing it was because of checkpoints being far and few between. Fight a big battle, explore for 10 minutes after and then accidentally step on a mine which kills you and you can do it all over again. No thanks. It gets super annoying super quickly and is the reason I stopped playing the game. Also, when you load a save from the main menu, it does not even have enough decency to properly remember everything from when it saved. Pickups will be missing, enemies will have different weapons, some monsters spawn again, that experience pickup that dropped before does not now... Losing progress to a bad save system is NOT fun. All could be easily solved by just having a quicksave/manual saves option instead of the pseudo-retro 1-ups (which disappear after every level by the way). I reloaded after every death anyway so it got too annoying to bear by level 4. A real shame because the game itself would be quite enjoyable. Can't give more than 3 stars for that reason.
I got this game pretty long after release, specifically when the last DLC was released. So I didn't experience the early bugs (heard there was a lot of them). But in its current state, there were very little issues. The BAD: 1) Occasional crash here and there. I got 4 in my 30+ hours of playtime (usually at loading screens). Annoying, especially if you lose progress because of it but I don't think I've played a game that hasn't crashed on me at least once. So nothing major. 2) Frame rate issues. The cutscenes are locked to 30 FPS while the rest of the game can have unlocked FPS. This causes an ugly transition from very smooth to jarringly choppy whenever a cutscene starts. If another game is made (and I hope it is), then not locking them to 30 FPS would be great. During the game, there are some locations, which will tank the FPS even on the beefiest systems. A better optimization would help. The GOOD: 1) Satisfying combat. Played with the original setting and it was great. It is difficult but not unfair as a lot of people claim. As you play more and get better at the game, learn enemy attacks and sequences, get better at timing dodges, weaving combos and finding the optimal strategies for each enemy, you will be able to defeat almost anyone, getting hit only rarely. My first playthrough was on Apocalyptic difficulty and it felt great. Currently running New Game+ on Reckoning (even higher difficulty added in a later patch) and I find it easier than my first playthrough thanks to what I learned. And getting those perfect dodges feels awesome. 2) The characters and story. Fury and the Sins (bosses) look great. Voice acting was surprisingly good too (especially Fury and Lord of the Hollows). Story was intriguing and seeing Fury evolve as a character was great. Definitely worth a playthrough even just for the story. I enjoyed this game more than DS2 (disliked the loot focus of it) and about the same as DS1. Let's hope it was successful enough for DS4 to happen.
The typical "Let's just cram in a higher resolution and call it a remaster". Absoluely nothing is scaled, meaning simply that you see much more but it's pointless, because you need a microscope to see it. Broken replay system has already been mentioned multiple times. The worst offender is definitely the censorship: - Preset teams missing (I guess killing Worms named after the English royal family was deemed "inappropriate") - missing/removed due to censorship customization options like flags (42 of them) and soundbanks (voices like "Raj, Whoopsie, Rasta, Kamikaze, Jock etc.) - censored weapon names (Suicide Bomber - Worms Blast, Indian Nuclear Test - Nuclear Test, French Sheep Strike - Sheep Strike etc.). That alone should be reason enough to not buy this.
This game is pretty much perfection. This is how you make a sequel to a legendary game like Wolf 3D. It has decent story, incredible gunplay, variety in missions, enemies and weapons, all with graphics that still hold up to this day. But even better, you can use some of the stellar community mods to bump this game up from amazing to extraordinary. Most notably the Venom mod. It improves the graphics in a huge way and even improves the enemy AI. Really brings this game to new life even in 2020. I make sure to replay it game at least once every year. It is a sweet, compact and pretty much flawless package that all other shooters should take notes from and proves that to be old-school, you don't have to go back all the way to the 90s. By far the best Wolfenstein game and one of the best FPS games ever. If you haven't played it yet, you are doing yourself a disservice.
