Reboot of the classic FPS has all the Reich moves
It's still Wolfenstein. Gamers with fond memories of the original shooter, which virtually made the genre on PC, will feel a pleasing pang of nostalgia at beginning in a dungeon cell, armed only with a knife, as they kill a guard they entice into the cell, take his gun, and rampage through an at-times confusingly laid-out castle full of cobbles, stonework and swastika banners, gunning down hordes of German troops, armband-wearing Nazi officers, and deranged scientists. As our returning hero, the unfortunately monikered BJ Blazkowicz, escapes the castle for the nearby village of Paderborn, the plot is gradually revealed in small scraps of information: letters can be found between high-ranking Nazis discussing the progression of their plans, and sometimes debating their wisdom; conversations can be overheard; occasional cutscenes will flip back to the OSA headquarters where Blazkowicz' superiors will discuss the latest intel and developments regarding the German operations. It all adds up to Operation: Resurrection, in which the final goal of the SS Paranormal Divison (commanded by Heinrich Himmler himself) is to resurrect Heinrich I, a medieval German warlock and feared warrior, who could not be killed and so was sealed away underground by an ancient mystic.
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People fear the Nazis, yet this one was so incompetent he somehow
managed to get bloody hands from electrical torture. |
As befitting its roots, the gameplay is pleasantly old school. Made in a time before regenerating health and cover-based twitch shooters became the norm, Return features pitched firefights between BJ and his Nazi foes, where often the player will have to find and flank his opponents rather than waiting for them to pop their heads out like shooting gallery ducks. Staying in one place merely invites a flurry of grenades to land at BJ's feet, and even on normal difficulty with full health and armour, these are capable of reducing our all-American hero to a red smear and some bloody giblets. Lacking the regenerating health of a Call of Duty protagonist, who apparently sits behind a wall and waits for the bullets to drop out and the wounds to seal themselves up, BJ must instead utilise his ludicrously efficient metabolism to scarf down wine, dog food and full roast dinners (no longer inexplicably left steaming hot on the floor a la Wolfenstein 3D) to restore his hit points. More effective first aid kits can be found, but these are far less common, and the limited availability of health items ensures that the game rewards players that try to avoid being shot in the first place. Keeping a close watch on ammo levels is vital - enemies will drop MP-40s and bullets for it like swastika-themed pinatas, but it's so inaccurate that the Empire's Stormtroopers would turn their noses up at it. The American Thompson, by contrast, is a brilliantly effective troop-mincer, but ammunition for it is harder to find than a virgin in Essex. All other guns can give up and go home once you get a hold of the Venom Cannon, a ridiculous portable chaingun capable of reducing even armoured soldiers to a red mist in milliseconds.
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Deathshead's Super Soldiers would appear
in future games, but they were never as
dangerous as this final prototype in the X-Labs. |
The game won't go easy on you though, and for every strong weapon BJ discovers, the game hurls an even stronger enemy type at him. The hair-tearing zenith of ludicrously punishing damage sponges occurs in Deathshead's X-Labs, where his crazed genetic experiments to create a Super Soldier are found. Culminating in an old-school boss battle with the first completed Super Soldier, who will take more bullets than were actually fired in the whole of World War II before he goes down, the player's resilience and patience will be tested by Nazi elite units, flamethrower wielders, rocket-firing prototype Ubersoldaten, and the crazed legless Lopers (pictured below), a terrifying package of grotesque design, high damage and annoying speed that is rightly remembered by many gamers as one of the most nerve-wracking and difficult-to-fight enemies in the entire game - especially the section that throws a handful of them at you simultaneously. Also complementing these science-bred monstrosities are undead and demonic horrors inadvertently released by the Nazis' hubris, including medieval warrior zombies, fire-breathing medieval warrior zombies, an enormous zombie and ghost-summoning demon, and Heinrich I himself, with his elite retinue. And what secret-history-of-WWII game would be complete without elite, statuesque, leather-wearing midriff-baring female Nazi cultists with machine guns? Not this one, that's for sure.
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"I don't know Hans, I just feel zat ze room needs a little somezing more."
"Vhat about anuzzer huge Svastika on ze other vall over zhere?"
"Gott im Himmel, you've got it!" |
Environments are nicely varied and detailed. Your travels will take you from the gothic castle of Wolfenstein, through snowy German villages to zombie-infested crypts, alpine forest bases, mountaintop airbases, bombed-out towns, submarine pens, secret labs and back again. The secret labs section is, admittedly, a little long, and you seem to travel through about three of Deathshead's top-secret research facilities before you get to his X-Labs, presumably the top-top-secret research facility, but after the balls-to-the-wall blasting required to escape those alive, you are rewarded with a nicely relaxing nighttime stealth mission in a German village, where you are required to creep about the town overhearing officers' conversations, reading their correspondence, and assassinating all the high-ranking officers in Operation: Resurrection who are in residence for a meeting in the nearby chateau, as all of them supposedly have an important psychic part to play in the resurrection ritual (which ends up working perfectly well without them in order to provide a final boss fight, but oh well). This was a wonderfully-designed section, with multiple cellars, windows and gardens to choose as a method of navigating the town and infiltrating the officers' residences, though the surprising abundance of local prostitutes the officers have found for themselves can tend to make for difficult target selection in the heat of the moment (so, the target reticule for an enemy is red, and the target reticule for an innocent is red, with a faint line through it? Well played, Gray Matter Interactive, well played).
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It is a lip-less mouth of gritted teeth, but you don't have to lean too
far back from the monitor to make it an impressive porn 'stache. |
The game manages to get a strong edge over its shinier, more visually impressive sequels through its incredibly strong atmosphere and often genuinely fear-inducing horror elements. From the first notes BJ finds lying about the castle in his escape discussing the ongoing dig operations and the suspicious events attending it, to his arrival in the silent, occupied village of Paderborn and its zombie-ridden catacombs, there is a subtle sense of foreboding that something is very, very wrong with what the Nazis are doing, and even the basic German soldier enemies can be heard voicing their fears and misgivings about the dig site and its part in Operation: Resurrection. For my taste, the game springs the undead enemies on you too quickly, before you have a chance to be really unnerved by the intel you're getting (the Xbox version adds a prologue in Egypt featuring Blaszkowicz and British ally Agent One, and manages to drop the zombies in even more quickly! Pacing, people, pacing.), and once you get over their initial wrongness compared to the regular human enemies encountered thus far, the zombies are only slightly more resilient, and are hampered anyway by reliance on melee attacks. As with the surprisingly creepy Super Soldiers and the abandoned laboratory in Antarctica from No One Lives Forever 2, it is the once-human experiments of Deathshead that are truly frightening. Even the risen warlord, Heinrich himself, isn't especially terrifying, and makes for a disappointing final boss. The only real threat in the battle is that pumping hundreds of bullets into the poor, undead, slow-moving melee-range Teutonic king might distract you from the zombie Death Knights who occasionally spawn around the arena.
There is supposedly an excellent, popular and still-active multiplayer mode in Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but as a seasoned Nintendo 64 gamer before the advent of online play, I have always felt that a game should be able to stand up on the strength of its singleplayer alone, which is why you won't catch me reviewing the multiplayer for any other titles either.
A solid, polished and surprisingly deep shooter, with multitudes of weapons and tactics, hidden secrets and collectibles (the series' ever-present gold relics), readable intel, varied locations and many, many levels - seriously, it's a pretty long game by today's standards - Return to Castle Wolfenstein rightly claims a star on the Walk of Fame for the genre its predecessor helped create.
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