Imagine making a peer to peer game and forget to include proper Error Messages for online play
Solid old-school gunplay, great atmosphere and art and decent platforming
As I elaborated in the individual Reviews, both Titles are a clear must-buy. 100% carnage in fun gunplay, two engaging stories with very different tone and focus and decent, grounded stealth gameplay. The Old Blood features a slighty crippled Console, while TNO achievements are buggy as hell, but other than that, you owe yourself to try these masterpieces.
After 50 hours of relentless Nazi-killing and Uber Completion I can safely say this is in the Top 5 of best shooters I ever played. The gunplay is absolutely juicy, even the most basic assault rifle already feels like carnage, and don't get me started on how over the top the semi automatic shotgun feels. The stealth is decent, simple, gimmickless without wallhacks or executions from a mile away. I was honestly surprised by the story, yes, your comrades rarely appear in gameplay but their personality and traumas carry the narrative. Sadly, the game does not feature any supernatural lore or gameplay like The Old Blood or older titles, it's completely focused on the political dystopia and sciene-fiction elements, probably to appeal to a more mainstream audience. All in all an exceptional effort by Machine Games, these days even uncensored in Germany so the purchase is an absolute no-brainer, get the Two-Pack with The Old Blood, which is an even better standalone addon, and play both.
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.
*Zsh* Now QUAKE *Sip* that was a REAL game *Ah* They don't do em like these anymore
