*sound of paper rustling* sorry I’m just reminding myself of what I said in my previous Wolfenstein review… great blend of action and stealth, interesting concept… boob appendage… OK, I’ve got it, *ahem*

Well don’t I look foolish. To quote myself, Wolfenstein: The New Order ‘signals an end of the World War Two-themed shooter’ and ‘any future game involving Nazis on any level will have The New Ordersomewhere in its DNA.’ It seems I was wrong about the first, but prophetic about the second, because Wolfenstein: The Old Blood certainly returns to the bottom of what has turned out to be an extremely commodious barrel when searching for subject matter, and if Humans and Bananas share 97% of their DNA, then The New Order is the human and The Old Blood is a giant walking banana waving an assault rifle in your face.

I returned briefly to The New Order while writing this review because I needed to remind myself exactly what it was that I didn’t like about that game, which might seem like the wrong way to go about reviewing a completely different game, but The Old Blood isn’t completely different; it shares really quite a lot indeed with the first game, including the setting, main character, sense of humour, knowing winks toward the player, mechanics and satisfactory shooting, but at the same time it manages to be more than just a map pack or an origins story.

If The New Order is a summer blockbuster, The Old Blood is a low-budget B-Movie, and is all the better for it. You are William ‘Billy Boy’ Blaskowicz, tasked with securing documents containing the location of General Deathshead’s compound. BAM! There’s your story, and The Old Blood delivers it with all the straight-forward no-nonsense story-telling one would expect from a plot that you can describe in one sentence. Where The New Order establishes character by making you play a creepy card game, The Old Blood does the same by having a character laugh in a slightly un-hinged way, in the best of B-movie traditions.

Speaking of B-movies, there is definitely the wiff of Indiana Jones about The Old Blood, and that’s not just because of the Nazi soldiers. The suggestion of the supernatural bubbles underneath The Old Blood during the first two-thirds if you bother to read the newspaper cuttings littered throughout the game (hint to game developers: establishing your world in-game is a great way to immerse your player; interrupting game play so that they can read some vaguely amusing newspaper article about Hitler isn’t) before literally bursting through the surface in the last third.

But story-schmory right? What about the shooting? The shooting is certainly satisfying; you point at things until the things fall down, the gore is pleasingly splashy and overblown, and my issues with the floaty shotguns in The New Order seem to have been addressed. But it’s not as if the shooting in The New Order was bad and needed fixing; exactly the same system is in place in The Old Blood, so the game doesn’t score any points for having good shooting. Half Life 2 had good shooting and that came out ten years ago, while also managing to have relatable characters, a complex plot and, perhaps most crucially, crossbows.

The Old Blood effectively blends stealth and action in much the same way as The New Order (and still doesn’t score points for it) but I found myself reloading every time I alerted one of the Lieutenant enemies because a) I find stealthing my way through games introducing Mr Serrated blade to Mr Jugular Vein much more satisfying than introducing Mr Buckshot to Mr Chest Cavity, and b) I felt like I had in some way failed when I did. Alerting one of the Lieutenants brings the entire Nazi army down upon the conveniently-sized air-duct where you happen to be hiding, and they will keep coming until you manage to kill him, at which point the German Empire assumes that he must have just lost signal and will call back if it is important. The enemies after the next checkpoint, however, seem to assume that the gunfire and screams from the neighbouring room are just someone playing Wagner’s Ring Cycle a little bit too loud.

I guess what I am trying to say is that The Old Blood just isn’t as dynamic (if I may use the vocabulary of a tosspot) as it needs to be. It isn’t enough to be a good shooter any more. I completed the game twice on two different difficulty settings and for the life of me couldn’t tell the difference apart from the amount of damage enemies dealt. Castle Wolfenstein seems to have been host to the annual Med Pack and Body Armour expo the weekend before BJ turns up and its occupants absolutely haemorrhage ammunition regardless of the difficulty you play at. The level design does make a gesture toward offering different paths for you to choose that allow you to approach situations in different ways which is good but these options are scarce. Perhaps most damningly, Hatoful Boyfriend offers the player more choice than The Old Blood, whose sole contribution to interactive storytelling results in a different Steam achievement, and a slightly different cut-scene.

Finally there are technical issues with the game; where The New Order seemed rushed in terms of storytelling, The Old Blood seems rushed in terms of the writing of the game’s code itself. There are at least two points in the game where it is a legitimate option to just run past hordes of enemies to the next checkpoint, whereupon they promptly give up the chase. The game kicked me to desktop a number of times (with one occurring within the first fifteen seconds of me booting the game for the first time), all of which combined gave me the impression that The Old Blood wasn’t keen for me to feast on its juicy innards if that isn’t an odd expression.

I am aware that I have drawn some comparisons between The Old Blood and its predecessor (or is it successor if The Old Blood is a prequel? Answers in the comments) which may seem like poor critical practice because they are different games and, some might argue, should be considered independently of each other. I even cited Half Life 2 which is never a fair comparison, even if the game in question is Bioshock. It is just impossible to talk about The New Blood, a prequel shooter with Nazis, without in some way referring to other Nazi games with shooting. The Old Blood has a lineage which cannot be ignored in any real criticism of the game.

The Old Blood is ultimately a great shooter but that isn’t really enough anymore. Its story is much better told and crucially shorter than The New Order, but it nevertheless fails to harness the strengths of the medium to tell it; you could tell the same story in a film and the experience would remain largely unchanged, which is one of the principle problems with computer games in the twenty-first century. We rely too much on other media to both criticise and develop our games. But I now realise I am veering dangerously close to my PhD territory, so I’ll shut up now.

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The apocalypse in the world of computer games is good news for bread and sausage manufacturers but bad news for pretty much everyone else, and it seems odd at first glance that the setting is so popular in modern entertainment as the colour palette is relentlessly monochrome and the occupants either want you to do something for them or want to feast on your organs/sweet swag you’ve gained from looting hapless travellers.

Stalker, or should I say S.T.A.L.K.E.R, subscribes to all of the above unreservedly, but instead of resulting in the definitive apocalyptic experience, the world is bland and rather empty. It certainly feels big, divided into three maps between which you can travel, and the sense of size is enhanced by a complete lack of fast-travel option which is tedious because NPCs and quest targets are invariably on opposite sides of the map and after traversing the same irradiated swamp for the fifth time you pick up quite a conga-line of mutants believe me. Lack of loading screens does keep you immersed in the world, however, and immersion is one of S.T.A.L.K.E.R’s stronger suits. Gameplay does not pause while you are checking your map or playing inventory-Tetris which should become standard in action-RPGs in my opinion, and there are mechanics in place that give the game a survival element, though the implementation seems cursory and rather throwaway: your character will get hungry if you do not eat regularly, but food is so plentiful that I had more baguettes than a Parisian boulangerie by the end of the game.

I mention Action-RPG because I think that this is how the game was pitched, what with its expansive world and factions and upgrade system, but neither is done particularly well and everything ends up as a kind of brown mush, which I suppose is fitting. I couldn’t tell whether the guns were supposed to be rubbish or if it was just the shooting, but have now decided that it’s the former. When I was dumped unceremoniously from the introduction cut-scene into gameplay I couldn’t hit a barn door with my shoddy AK-47u, but by the game’s climactic levels I could snipe a gnat off of a shambling zombie’s shoulder from half a mile away, which is great if that’s what the developers intended and makes dumping all of your in-game money into upgrading your weapons worthwhile and gives money an actual purpose. The shooting is less satisfying when you face down the mutant enemies though, who fall into two broad camps; those who rush you, and those who attack from afar with their Jedi mind powers. The former are best dealt with by some buckshot to the mush, the latter with the ever-elegant sniper round to the forehead but these encounters are just less satisfying than an intense fire-fight with old-fashioned humans.

The RPG elements are similarly mishandled; there is a choice element to the narrative and S.T.A.L.K.E.R doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of making the binary nature of its choice system obvious. You can choose to side with one faction, or the other, let a character live, or die, but I think this fact is less down to the developer’s design than to the rather clunky way it organises your objectives. Some have waypoints marked on your map automatically, while some don’t, and not being able to place your own markers means you will spend a lot of time making sure you are walking in the right direction. The objectives tab itself obscures a third of the screen, so you will have to turn it off in order to see whereabouts your objectives actually are, which is obtuse and means more time clicking and less time playing.

There is also the limpest of gestures to offering the player different ways of approaching situations, whether that be the trusty gun in the face or the sneaky knife to the back. Almost all of the missions require redecorating the surrounding environments with someone’s vital organs, and if you do fancy sneaking up on your enemies you’d better put the kettle on because moving while crouched is slower and more ponderous than the dialogue (which is saying something for a game that includes the line ‘get to the chopper!’ with no sense of irony whatsoever.) There is a visibility/sound meter (which is never explained or tutorialised) and while I’m not saying that I need every single mechanic explained to me, I am going to be confused by a bar in my HUD that lights up occasionally, but seemingly has no impact on gameplay. My theory is that it was implemented to augment the stealth mechanics but at some point in the development got forgotten.

It might seem that so far I have done nothing but criticise S.T.A.L.K.E.R and that analysis is largely correct, but allow me to provide some balance; the sound design is well done and goes a long way in immersing the player in the world.

Balance now provided, the narrative is if anything more slapdash than the stealth mechanics. You are Major… someone who arrives from… somewhere investigating helicopters that have been crashed by… something. I do know that they are in some way connected to the plot of Clear Sky (the preceding S.T.A.L.K.E.R game) thanks to Wikipedia, not competent story-telling, but beyond that I didn’t care, nor was I given a reason to care, for either my character nor any of the other characters in the game. A key character from Shadow of Chernobyl shows up, (thanks again, Wikipedia) but unless you are a big fan of the series (innocent) or a big fan of slightly wonky Rusky accents (guilty), their appearance will leave you non-plussed.

My powers of clairvoyance beam me the sounds of echoing keyboards from the future: “it’s not the game’s fault you are too lazy to have played the two preceeding games! S.TA.L.K.E.R has always been about atmosphere and shooting anyway, this is only a computer game, accept it for what it is!”

If I may, I shall respond to your hypothetical fan rage in two statements. To the first, I don’t expect a ‘previously on S.T.A.L.K.E.R’ cut-scene a la Alan Wake, but at the same time I expect the game to stand up as a stand-alone story, and the only way Call of Pripyat is standing up is if it is being worn as a suit by a Bloodsucker. To the second, I haven’t accepted the ‘it’s only a computer game’ argument since Bioshock, and if that story can be told with a few audio logs and some wall-scribbles then I think it is reasonable to apply the same to every game I review.

What Call of Pripyat does best is atmosphere; trudging through the wasteland has a feel which is an incredibly vague term and an incredibly subjective one. I suppose after my rather more objective criticisms I have saved these till last because despite its problems I enjoyed Call of Pripyat and recommend it to fans the apocalypse, who really ought to turn off their computers and go outside because there is bread to bake and standing around waiting to give out fetch-quests to player-characters to do.

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Looking back on cultural artefacts from past decades one must always remember that people back then genuinely believed that mini-disc players were the future. Perms, double-denim, Showaddywaddy; we can’t blame the past for these abominations, but what we can do is learn from their mistakes and vow never to make them again. Since this review will be all about looking to the past, let’s skip briefly four minutes into the future: System Shock 2 was a great game in 1999 and it is still a great game in 2015; it’s problems are mostly indicative of the era in which it was made, and so the caveat ‘made in the 90s’ is one that should be mentally appended to almost everything I have to say about System Shock 2.

Set in a late-90s imagining of a near future in which everything has been designed with a ruler, you play as a nameless, voiceless polygon awoken from cryo-sleep aboard the Von Braun, a faster-than-light spaceship which has been overrun by mutants. As you bludgeon your way through the ship, you pick up audio logs and slowly learn what happened to turn everyone into monstrosities.

The observant among you will note a hint of sarcasm regarding the visual aspects of System Shock 2, so let’s address the issue right from the top: to our spoilt 2015 minds with our sophisticated physics and rendering systems, games from the 90s look primitive at best, but there is a certain irony in the modern obsession with increasing levels of graphical quality when you consider that the true pinnacle of video game achievement seems to be the moment where you see past the visuals and forget that you are playing a game. I understand the importance of visuals in drawing a player into the world but developers need to understanding that there is a law of diminishing returns when it comes to the graphical quality of their games: the more you spend achieving near photo-realistic quality in your graphics the more players will stop noticing them.

With this in mind, commenting on System Shock 2’s graphics seems to be doing it a disservice, but they are worth commenting upon precisely because they didn’t interfere with my investment in the world. Shamefully, I am the sort of person for whom the graphical qualities of a game are quite important and I went into System Shock 2 expecting to be alienated by the murky textures and wooden animations but the gameplay is so rewarding that after a while you don’t notice the utter inability of the software to render curved lines and find yourself fully immersed within the game.

Heightened immersion in the world of System Shock 2 is enabled by tightly structured gameplay which is not without the quirks that are to be expected with a game from 1999. Hacking is unfathomable, the map is obtusely small, and the game does a frankly appalling job of identifying what exactly you should be doing at any given moment; the idiot arrow was but a twinkle in the eye of an EA executive in 1999, but System Shock 2 goes in the opposite direction, hiding your objectives ten mouse clicks away in a sub-menus. I have no shame in admitting that I consulted a walkthrough at one point, because while the game was asking me to go to Point A, what I actually had to do to was kill an enemy at Point B first. The inventory system is somewhat fiddly as well and gameplay doesn’t pause when you open it up, so switching and reloading weapons when you are being pursued by monstrosities becomes vexing to say the least. This does make sense in the logic of the world, however, as enemies slavering for your juicy organs do not wait patiently for you to finish selecting what type of ammunition you are going to be shortly applying to their frontal cortex.

System Shock 2, for all that we’ve said about having to criticise the game on it’s own terms, is not without problems that are relevant regardless of the era you are playing in; enemies spawn in areas that have already been cleared, and while I understand that the developers did this in order to provide constant challenge for the player, it doesn’t make sense in the context of an abandoned spaceship in the middle of space, and makes back-tracking (which you will do a lot of, by the way) frustrating and tedious, two emotions that you do not want to experience while playing something that is ultimately there for your entertainment.

While we are speaking of emotions, if we can learn something about the era by playing a game, then by playing System Shock 2 we can deduce that in the late 90s developers hated gamers almost as much as gamers hated themselves. This game is hard. Ammunition is scarce to the point that you need to make every shot count, weapons will break if you use them too often, and when that moment comes you better hope you’ve upgraded your repair skill enough or you’ll be facing down a pair of Cyborg Midwives (perhaps the most sinister enemy I’ve come across in a game) with nothing more than a solid wrench and your hopes and dreams. And don’t go thinking you can change the difficulty level to get past a particularly tricky section, you coward, because if you do you’ll have to restart the game. From the beginning.

As a result, if I have one tip for playing System Shock 2, it would be save early, and save often. You may as well map quick save and quick load to the ‘q’ and ‘e’ keys or you’ll spend more time looking at the in-game menu rather than actually playing, which leads me to the controls. You’ll want to re-map those as well, because by default ‘a’ and ‘d’ are ‘look left’ and ‘look right’, and, weirder, ‘s’ is ‘crouch’. ‘Invisi-lean’ is present as well, and you have to manually change over different types of ammunition for the same weapon in the inventory screen, so, purely in terms of controls, System Shock 2 is very much a game of its time.

If I may adopt the vocabulary of a pretentious tosspot for a moment, System Shock 2 is very much a genre piece, and should be played accordingly to enjoy it as it was intended. This is not an action FPS, and if you choose to play it as such by storming into rooms guns blazing you will quickly find that a) your childhood memories being devoured by deranged hybrids and b) you have no idea why they are being devoured in the first place. System Shock 2 favours the more considered, thoughtful approach, and players who are prepared to take their time to listen to all the audio logs and explore the world of the Von Braun will be rewarded with an intriguing story. If you aren’t interested in narrative and exploration then you’ve come to the wrong place I’m afraid as the game cannot offer you very much in the way of rewarding gunplay – if you want that, and you are somehow reading this from the past, play Half-Life.

System Shock 2 is an interesting artefact in the history of videogames because you can see so much of it in the games we play today, both in terms of narrative and gameplay. The use of audio logs as a storytelling technique was continued in the Bioshock games and is present in modern shooters such as The New Order, for instance. It isn’t just a dusty curio though – for all of its flaws it is still a coherent gameplay experience that deserves a look for fans of the latter day Bioshock games or RPG fans in general.