I had to double check the 1001 list before playing this one. We did play Wolfenstein 3D, didn't we? No? Really? That's not a must-play title, but its 2001 reboot, Return to Castle Wolfenstein is? How does it compare? Should it be compared at all? I have no idea.
I've never been too interested in the Wolfenstein series, mostly because I was a console gamer, but even in recent times because I've not been too keen on the mix of Nazi's and the occult. Alternate histories are all well and good, but there's something about this one that just doesn't do it for me.
Can we shove that to the side and enjoy Return to Castle Wolfenstein regardless?
Frustrations
After some brief fiddling with config files to ensure Return to Castle Wolfenstein actually ran with my chosen settings, I sat back to watch the cinematic intro set the scene. It's 943 AD. I'm expecting a shooter set in the Second World War, but here we observe a robed figure battle with a hardened warrior. Too weak to defeat him through braun, the robed man uses his brain to trap his foe in some kind of magical prison, burying away. Out of sight, out of mind.
Until the Nazi's come along, precisely 1000 years later, and dig him up. Not accidentally, either. With purpose. Thanks.
Fun Times
While I'm not on board with the plot, I am behind the graphics. These are some polished visuals, no? A product of their time, yes, but what a product. These guys are talking about Nazi's and the occult, as expected, and I zoned out until something more familiar hit the screen.
We are William 'BJ' Blazkowicz, prisoner of Castle Wolfenstein, and no the sole survivor of Nazi torture for information. I don't know why we were here, though I'm sure it was revealed in that last cutscene. No matter. Where there are Nazi's, there will be problems to deal with. Problem number one: escape.
The controls are familiar to anyone who has played a first-person shooter, and we're armed with whatever we can pick up on our travels. Favouring the stealthy approach for as long as I can manage, the knife will serve me well, offing this crazed doctor while his back is turned.
Luckily for me, he managed to type up some plot stuff and hang it on the wall while I was skulking through the corridors.
I suppose these have been replaced with audio-logs in today's games because audio-logs allow you to keep moving through the level while listening, whereas clipboards generally don't. As I don't care for the plot, I don't read these. I wonder what I'm missing?
Things inevitably got loud quicker than I wanted them to, but it allowed me to see what the weaponry can do, and how the enemy moves around in response. Fluking my way into the corner of the room where the machine guns were kept, I was able to gun down a couple of Nazi's but had lost two-thirds of my health in what felt like two or three hits.
I was playing on the easiest mode, and enemies would often stand still and shoot, before running away around a corner, then running back when they realised they couldn't shoot from behind corners. It wasn't terrible, they had some semblance of life, but it felt a bit gamey.
Heading through the castle soon took me outside, allowing me to view the snow-peaked mountains of wherever we are, ducking out the way of gunfire whenever necessary. Wherever you look, Return to Castle Wolfenstein seems to look great. The lighting stands out the most, but your bullet casings getting ejected out of your weapon are another visual treat that catches your eye from time to time.
What perhaps impresses most is that the enemies you have are all unique, or seem to be. Each model is different enough from any other that they appear to be the opposite of nameless grunts. They're not quite distinct enough to make me think they're soldiers with families and goals and whatnot - they still move around like robots, after all - but they help to make Return to Castle Wolfenstein look special.
Don't run at them with a grenade equipped, though.
Further Frustrations
That failure was all on me. Enemies, if they hear gunfire or the alarm is blaring somewhere, will navigate their way towards you, investigating the threat and trying to deal with it. That is, seeing you and killing you before you kill them. If you run around the place looking for the way out, and not paying attention to enemies roaming about behind you, then you're going to get caught out by enemies you didn't expect.
Enemies aren't simple killing machines, but their accuracy at long range seems better than yours, and the damage they deal up close can be devastating, obviously. While there are health pickups scattered all over the levels, at least on this difficulty, you may still end up just a bullet or two away from death, which could, of course, come from an enemy you had no idea was even there.
Death wasn't my problem with Return to Castle Wolfenstein, though. The levels are designed in such a way that they are relatively linear, but with plenty of open spaces and ways to loop back to where you've been, once you open doors from the right direction or flip switches elsewhere on the map. Even been subtly funnelled through from one place to another, I was always getting the feeling of being lost.
There are no markers for where to head, no map that I could find, and objectives with 'Escape' or 'Get to such-and-such' being of little help. On the first two levels, I found the exit by literally stumbling down a featureless corridor and having some stats pop up.
After an hour, while I was enjoying how it looked, I wasn't enjoying how it felt. I was picking off enemies from such long ranges that I couldn't appreciate their different looks. When fights broke out in close quarters, it was a little campy, waiting for someone to walk through a door before spraying in their direction. Spraying doesn't help, really, but there isn't a lot of feedback for when an enemy is finally dead, so far as I could tell, and I wanted to make sure more often than not.
Stuffed into the last paragraph of the 1001 write up is mention of the multiplayer mode, and talk of it being the real draw to Return to Castle Wolfenstein. If it's so good, why isn't it the main focus of the write-up? What makes it so good?
After fumbling around with more mods and config files, I was able to find out.
Further Fun Times
Accompanied by a server full of bots, I was surprised to find that the multiplayer offering for Return to Castle Wolfenstein feels more like the Battlefield series than it does, say, Quake. The two teams, the Axis and the Allies, are each made up of four classes, from generic soldiers to engineers and medics, and are tasked with completing particular objectives on the map, as though we're playing out an actual story mission.
Here, I was to stop the Allies from destroying a V-2 rocket, if memory serves, with four objectives before that, such as finding keys and opening up tunnels. Truth be told, it was so chaotic and the map made no sense to me that I was just following bots until I saw enemy-uniformed bots to shoot at. And even then I probably shot more friendly bots than not.
I really like these types of multiplayer modes. Deathmatches and Capture the Flag certainly have their place, with some games doing them far better than others, but a story-driven multiplayer map, no matter how generic the story, gives players a bit of purpose, and some decision to their roles and choices.
Further Frustrations
Well, ideally. I just spawned in as anything and shot at anything that moved and simply hoped to be in the right place at the right time, which I never was. It was ridiculous. The map was even covered in signposts, but they did nothing for me. All that promise and the result was everything happening off-screen.
That was the closest I got to feeling useful.
Final Word
Return to Castle Wolfenstein is smooth, polished, on the hard side, with a multiplayer mode that most probably made a lot of developers take notice/steal it for themselves. As a reboot to one of the most iconic shooters in video game history, it does pretty damn well. And yet...
I've already uninstalled it. I don't want to go through any more of it because of all the little niggles I had setting it up, and all the frustrations I had trying to navigate the levels, and all the ways it turned into a game of Nazi wack-a-mole instead of being a story-driven campaign with characters I can get behind. I haven't even seen any occult stuff yet, and yet it's putting a sour note on the title. I just don't care about it, and because I care about stories in games quite a bit, that matters to me.
It is a competent game otherwise. It's got its technical highlights and runs remarkably well all these years later, but I just can't get through my grumbles with it to see where it goes. Wolfenstein continues to be a series of games that I walk away from, no matter how soundly made they are.
Does it nevertheless earn a recommendation? Yeah, go ahead, play away. It was easy enough to get into, and there are plenty of positives. It's just that I found enough personal negatives to get in the way. Maybe you'll fare better.
Fun Facts
Some sound effects heard in the game come from 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein, developed by Gray Matter Interactive, Nerve Software, first released in 2001.
Version played: Steam release, PC, 2007.