Excellent mod, and a must-play for veteran RTCW fans and new players alike. The customizability via the Game Options is very commendable, letting players turn off the new additions if they want a mostly vanilla experience. For those of us who've played RTCW many times, the gameplay modifiers that add more enemy reinforcements really freshen up the experience and create many new interesting encounters that simply aren't possible in the base game. You actually get rewarded for finding all the secrets in a level. Not a fan of the minimalist HUD that you default to, but there are options to add health and armor values in addition to the meter, and the health meter does do a better job at letting the player know how much damage they're taking at a glance relative to just the values, so no big deal. Other options include centered viewmodels, new crosshairs, the option to keep the crosshair solid instead of bloom, and turning off view bobbing. Some differences between vanilla Wolf and RealRTCW: - All automatics BJ gets his hands on have a higher base accuracy by default. - Both BJ and the enemies have a higher move speed, allowing for more dynamic combat. - Higher enemy pain chance/hitstun rates across all difficulties, akin to Don't Hurt Me in vanilla. - The particularly tanky enemies in the penultimate level are gone. - Powerful new weapons and rebalanced vanilla weapons that are, in general, slightly beefed up and feel better to use, with some sporting alt-fires that mimic controlled trigger discipline for increased accuracy. - Some slight modifications to certain level layouts that veterans will notice. - Rebalanced boss fights. While it's still being worked on, I remember when this mod was in its infancy and still figuring out its vision for what it wants to be, and I can safely say now that it's in its best state and is the definitive way to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein because it stayed true to the original game's design philosophy throughout each iteration.
The core gameplay itself is absolute greatness, especially the large maps by Splash Damage. There is no multiplayer FPS with a greater focus on teamplay than old school Wolfie, and that's what I love about it. With that said, the only good, unmodded vanilla servers are the official ones by Id Software released about a month ago. Unfortunately, you have to wade through a bunch of garbage in order to find them, garbage that will change the way your menu looks without asking, and even prevent you from joining other servers. That, along with XPSave servers becoming the norm, giving newbies a horrible disadvantage, are the reasons this game died way sooner than it should have. I can't see anyone playing it for the first time in 2022 being able to have a good time because of this, but that doesn't change the fact that it was god-tier in its heyday.
The movement is fast and fluid. The story is fun and faithful to the series. The game has charming NPC dialogue, great level design (aside from Forest), a wide variety of enemy types, high energy soundtrack, god-tier replayability because of how different each mission is, good strong weapon sounds (aside from the Luger), I could go on and on. On an even more subjective note, I love the look of the game and think it's beautiful. Multiplayer was incredible, too, and while there's 1 or 2 populated deathmatch servers still up, most people moved on to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. If you loved the single-player campaign, check out the CO-OP mod, there's still public servers up and plenty of regulars who still play.
