I have to agree with BenCrichton78. This has a more similar atmosphere to older games! Much more action oriented. I don't want to say, that the Wolfenstein: The New Order was more of a war drama with action elements. In contrast, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood has definitely more action elements. The "rooms" are less arena like, because you are in a castle/fortress. The Old Blood also reminds me a bit of the Riddick games especially Escape from Butcher Bay. Oh, and the good news: no loading time problems here, it works like butter. Loading time is almost instantly, just some seconds. Even if you die. Playing on: AMD Ryzen 7 2700, 32 GB RAM, 512 GB SATA SSD, Geforce 1030 GT (very low end GPU that is still on the market today!) on medium setting (everything default), V-Sync turned off. I have 60 fps almost constantly. Thank you machinegames! In contrast: the other game, Wolfenstein: The New Order, has bit issues on my PC: the standard is very long loading time (1-10 minutes) or not responding at all between cinematics, level loading and if you die. Not a single such issue in The Old Blood! Anyway, I don't want to make it long, so definitely get it, if you like the older games, like RtCW, Wolfenstein 2009, even the original Wolf 3D, because here you have also these steel doors, haha :)) And a bit of mistery with the occult (at least in theory).
The game could be 5 stars, yes IT COULD BE. Because of the background story, clever alternate history, great atmosphere, animations/cinematics, a bit of steampunk, the epic sound and music, not to mention the excellent gunplay... but no, I have to give it a big NO in current state. Whatever happened to the DRM free version, it is almost unusable. The loading times between cinematics/levels/section can go from 15-30 second (if you are lucky) to almost infinite time. You die in a fight? No luck for you... The game will simply freeze and become unresponsive. Sometimes the wait helps, but mostly not. You have 32 or more GB of RAM? Doesn't really matter, because the game can fill it up, while loading. But that doesn't help either. The loading time is simply a real catastrophy... cannot explain with words. When they eventually fix it, than I will say, that it is worth the 5 stars. I do not recommend purchase at this time!
First of all: it works great on lower end GPU without any problem (1920 x 1080, high settings, 60 fps on Geforce 1030 GT). Yes, there are some graphical glitches or bugs: two time my weapon disappeared from my hand (it was invisible, yet the animation still showed like it is there in my hand), the fallen bodies sometimes go through walls etc. But these are not too disturbing. The best thing: the game never crashed and I had switched quite a few times between applications with ALT+TAB. I won't write much about the story, the world is very interesting, the sounds, background noise, the little music there is solid. There is a radial quick menu (for this press the Q button) for choosing different abbilites, injections, grenades, explosive traps etc. Most of these you can key bind to the number keys (from 1 trough 9) for fast access. The melee attacks can be quite powerfull, especially later, when you can upgrade your technomancer powers like the electrical charge. I simply don't have time for RPGs, that need hunderds (or thousands) of hours of playtime not to mention huge open-worlds. My playtrough of Mars: War Logs was about 25 hours (I tried to make trough most of sidequest two). For me as a causal player, this was a very nice experience. I liked it! Maybe one day, I will try a different path and have a romance with Judy ;)
Yes, the game is hard. So if you buy it, you should know, what you get. Also, this is an indie game, so comparing it to a AAA game is not really fair. It has a bit of story (don't want to spoil much), but nothing like Dark Messiah. You are the choosen hero by the elders, who give you the task to look for treasures and secrets inside a sealed city. This one doesn't have real 3D animated cutscenes, however it has a 2D comic-style, hand-drawn pictures (with some effects, transitions, zoom ins etc.) and some audio voiceover. Nothing special but it is ok for what it is. The gameplay seems solid, I did play it only 3 hours and died maaaany times. The weapons seems, to have weight and the sounds is really punchy. You can feel, when your melee wepons jits bones, flash, stone, metal etc. About the speed: The game is made on Unity Engine. I played some games in the past on the Windows/MacOS, that were made with it (Colin Mcrae Rally Remastered 2013, Garfield Kart, Loria demo - available on GOG) and I never had really problems with that, as some other users said/wrote, that they had. It works at least for now relatively fluid, I disabled some effects (ambient occlusion, motion blur, no antialiasing and disabled vertical sync). I got about 40-50 fps all the time at 1920x1080 resolution. Computer configuration I played on: AMD Ryzen 7 2700 3 GHz (8 code/16 threads), 32 GB RAM 2666 MHz, 512 SSD, GeForce 1030 GT. Aha, mentioning Unity... dear developers, will there be a Mac/Linux version in the future too? :)
