Wolfenstein Review - Xbox 360

6.5

Gameplay: 7
Graphics: 8
Audio: 6
Multiplayer: 4
Innovation: 7

The Wolfenstein series, though just three games small, has come a long way since WOLF3D.exe. We saw the 2001 title Return to Castle Wolfenstein which was well received by the PC and Xbox fan base, but the franchise is definitely not one where we would use the phrase ‘milked’. With Halo 3: ODST released just afew weeks later, did Activision given the new Wolfenstein enough time to shine on the Xbox 360?

Gameplay

Wolfenstein fans will be shocked to find the new way that the singleplayer campaign works. No longer do you just complete level upon level. Now, much like so many games these days, there is a free-roaming aspect to the game. Once you complete the introduction to the game, you are tossed into the town of Isenstadt, a fictional Nazi-controlled town in the heart of the Reich. You soon learn that you have to navigate your way around this huge town, meet up with adversaries, get new missions, and upgrade your weapons and abilities. Yes that’s right, you have abilities (for those that haven’t looked in to this game at all). Using Veil magic, BJ can use powers such as a magic shield, slow down time, empower bullets, and even travel to a parallel universe to gain access to hidden areas and escape the Nazi onslaught.

The gameplay gets quite complex as you unlock more weapons and Veil powers throughout the game, but Wolfenstein will have you using every trick in the book to complete all the different missions, so you’ll soon learn how to use everything. Without spoiling too much of the storyline, we can say that there are a stack of bosses throughout the game, with a final boss very similar to the final boss in WOLF3D. You’re even greeted with a “Guten Tag” by a couple of bosses, which brings back memories of the old 486 with a whopping 16 megs of RAM.

Fighting through a town full of Nazis sounds like fun and is fun at first, but as you backtrack and get frustrated as you go the wrong way, the reality soon sets in that the Nazis are very annoying. There is also the fact that ammo is quite limited, so wasting it in a free-roam world when you have to then enter a mission and kill bosses is wearisome to say the least. Fortunately, there are lots of nooks and crannies to weave your way through, and you can usually avoid most of the roaming soldiers, but if you engage them in one area, others come running and you end up wasting a lot of ammo and time on pointless kills that really have nothing to do with the story and very quickly becomes more repetitive than entertaining.

As you find new guns throughout the game, you have to also get cash to purchase upgrades for them. The only place you can buy these upgrades is from a black market, and there are a few of them scattered around the town. This is another reason to have ...