Wolfenstein Review

Blast from the Past

Unfortunately for Wolfenstein, we aren't done lamenting for it just yet and the more you look at it the more disappointments start to surface, though it's worth clarifying that none of the stuff we've mentioned so far is a truly critical flaw. It's just old and boring – a disappointment given the history of the developer and the franchise rather than a fundamental problem with the game design itself.

Slow-mo itself isn't reason enough to hate a game – it's just not something worth getting excited about in the slightest.

That idea can't be applied to all elements of the game though, with the actual basics of Wolfenstein being unimpressive to the point of actually becoming a serious fault. That's especially true for what we'll call the 'texture' of the game – the overall feel of movement and combat. It's an oft-overlooked element of a game, but most of the guns in Wolfenstein just don't feel very fun or exciting to use. Luckily, you can put silencers on everything fairly quickly and then you don't have to listen to the pathetic pew pew at least.


That's especially true for the machine guns, the audio for which generally sounds incredibly unimpressive - the first you get sounds like a spud gun - creating some very shallow battles until you're able to upgrade your rifle a bit with scopes and silencers – at which point you don't ever really need any other weapon. Not only does the rifle kill in just one or two shots, but if you stick a bayonet on the end then it can slit throats with ease too. We defeated entire levels by switching slow-mo on and just charging around, one-hit-killing everyone with that one weapon.

On the plus side, meleeing someone in the head does send them into an elaborate and very gory death animation where they slowly crumple on the floor, gurgling and clutching their gushing throat. It's gross, but ends up the only satisfying part of the game, so what does that say?

It's also symptomatic of the increased levels of violence in Wolfenstein, which now allows you to blow limbs off of enemies with well-placed shots and carefully positioned grenades. It's not mutilation and dismemberment at the level of Soldier of Fortune, but you can still expect to see plenty of arms and legs and torsos dotted around the levels. It is war, after all.

Blow up the right explosive canisters of "Dark Sun Energy", which is what powers your magic powers, and you can even expect the limbs to float across the levels as temporary zero-gravity fields come into play.


While dismemberment and zero-gravity both sound pretty cool, it's worth noting that Wolfenstein isn't actually all that impressive from a technological or graphical standpoint, despite making use of a modified id Tech 4 engine. Before we'd clarified that there was confused discussion among the bit-tech and Custom PC staff about whether Wolfenstein might actually be using the Far Cry 2 Dunia engine, or even the Doom 3 engine – which shows how dated elements of the game can look.

The character models and boring designs are perhaps where all of this is most evident, with enemies recycling the same few face and body variations endlessly and all of these and the environments are fairly low-poly and angular. A console port limitation, no doubt.

The textures of the world meanwhile are noticeably coarse when looked at up-close, while the few open spaces where you get a chance to put your sniper scope to work reveal some poor texture fade-out at distances too.

The real problem though, as the architecturally-eyed Clive Webster keenly noticed, is that the world is just too angular to look like a truly modern FPS. All the edges of buildings and roads are perfectly and unerringly straight, rather than having broken or irregular vertices. Even piles of rubble lack any curved surfaces and look like carefully folded bits of graph paper, which means the game has a very clean architecture that doesn't at all mesh with the setting. It just leaves the game looking too old-fashioned and clean-cut where it was cut with a scalpel instead of gouged with a breadknife.