This game is quite fun. At the core, it's a series of movement puzzles. The basic moves are jumps, wall runs, vaults and bar swings. The magic buttons you unlock later add a variety of impressive traversal sections: flying, leaping, running on the walls and ceilings like a spider. The graphic style is bright and unique, it aged gracefully and stands out among the drabness of that era of games. The game doesn't have a fail state, you just try over and over - a brave move, in my opinion. This might seem like a total deal breaker. But you still have to do acrobatic sections over and over until you nail them. Where it fails is the combat part. You get the same 5 or 6 enemies over and over, fight them one-on-one, in boring and unfairly restricted arenas. The combat heavily relies on quick-time-events and especially on mashing buttons quickly. This didn't age well, even if this was normal at the time, it feels borderline dumb today. You also get to do combos, but they are trivial. In addition, I think they went a bit overboard with the flying sections of the game. The flying buttons send you flying on convoluted trajectories, you have little of control to avoid obstacles, and it's unclear half of the time which way you are supposed to go. Another complaint is the way the game is structured, you have to beat a level - an open arena map, and then you activate the light seeds - collectable "coins" - that you have to gather around the map. This forces you to explore the map over and over. It gets boring pretty fast to go back and forth trying to scrape enough seeds to unlock new maps. This version of the game is a bit frustrating: the intro, movies and in-game dialogue scenes are unskippable (tip: delete the movie files to skip the intro). The button labels are a bit confusing, whether you have an Xbox or Playstation controller, it takes a bit of time to get used to it. It took me a bit of googling to get it to work properly.
The game teases you with the eponymous Castle Wolfenstein, a giant medieval fortress in the mountains. But you spend little time in it, half of it in prison facilities, so there is not much of grandeur to behold. Then, in what feels like a mid game, you are introduced to zombies. The problem is, there is little interesting about these zombies, and the story ends quickly with a lackluster boss. Overall, combat is quite uninspired. As an extra, you get to choose to go guns blazing or try to sneak and kill officers to avoid reinforcements. Only that the stealth doesn't have many options that make stealth games interesting: you can shank, fire a silenced pistol, throw knife, and that's it. The weapon choice is nothing to write home about. Rifles, two shotguns, a pistol, a grenade flaregun, and two redundant melee weapons. Extra finicky is that some of the weapons cannot be bound to any button on the keyboard, and you have to use a poorly adopted weapon wheel (you have to scroll through the whole weapon list). The story is forgettable, downright skippable. Thematically, it could had potential, but it mixes it with strange admiration your character receives. And the extras - collectible hidden lore-dumps - are not really interesting to replay the game over and over to get each one of them. I didn't bother with the "challenge" levels, which are apparently the same levels from the story, but with extra enemies and a leaderboard system.
