A second return to castle Wolfenstein which in my opinion falls short of what it could've been.
The Good:
-Shooting is fun
-Graphics are not top drawer but they meet today's standards in gaming. The Unreal Engine does a pretty good job in rendering high res textures, small particles blowing everywhere, dust in the air with a ray of light passing through and so on. The game looks good.
-Tons of gore. You don't see that in many shooters these days. Body dismemberment is also present!
-The Medallion offers some cool powers. There are 4 powers in total. "Veil" makes you go into the Black Sun dimension (a parallel universe if you will) and find hidden doors, "Mire" let's you slow the time, "Empower" strengthens your bullets making them pass through obstacles and also increases your accuracy and the "Shield", shields you from your enemies' bullets.
-Upgrading your weapons is fun and effective.
-Hunting for gold throughout the levels is fun.
-The game has its moments where it surprises you and that adds to the experience. A good example is escaping from an exploding underground base while being haunted by some zombie monsters!
-The sound of the guns is satisfying.
-Fun multiplayer while it lasts…
The Bad:
-The protagonist's name is BJ!!
-Horrific AI!! Your enemies would be so happy to put their face in front of your bullets!! There was this incident at Midtown East where I was holding an MG. While I was dropping the stupid soldiers one by one because of their lack of ability in finding good cover, a soldier came from behind. Did he shoot me? No instead he came to the front to meet my MG bullets and join his comrades!! I mean COME ON!! Your partners are also so stupid, getting themselves killed at the first chance they get!!
-Not many character models. You can bump into the same guy twice in a corridor and each time he's a different person with the same face!! "I could swear I saw you being shot to death two alleys back!"
-The same case with the models applies to their voice. Throughout the levels there are some Intel pieces that you'll find. Most of them are letters or reports and are read by some guys who have German-English accents. These people have only 2 or 3 distinctive voices. Can you imagine more than 30 people with the same voice?? Maybe I'm being harsh, but this game isn't that big (like an RPG game) to use it as an excuse for these kinds of shortcomings.
-Gameplay was built based on the standards from 10 years ago!! Get the guy tons of ammo so that he can shoot literally stupid Nazi's to death. Follow the map and blow that place up. Free those two people and get out of there. The objectives are shallow, and all you do is shooting your way through them or fighting lame bosses, nothing special. The medallion powers don't help much neither. I also hate it when you need to follow a guy and he keeps repeating a phrase over and over again. Take this classic experience of mine while playing the game: "The guy: "come BJ!!" Me: "would you shut the hell up? I'm coming!! I just need to look around for some gold here…There you go!! Found some …GOD this guy just doesn't shut up!!!""
-You can finish the game with only two types of weapons, your two automatic rifles. The other manual one is practically useless. I didn't even bother upgrading it. Nor did I upgrade any of the other guns. I had tons of money, but didn't feel the need for upgrading my flame thrower for example, since I didn't use it much. The guns are shiny and cool, but there is no need for using them! If you're still confused, remember a game like Serious Sam where you need to utilize the best combination of your weapons to get through each level.
-The story is shallow and the characters are cliché. The same case of one badass guy fighting an army all by himself. Why does that remind me of the 60s?
Final Impressions:
I had some fun playing this game, but still it's just a mediocre one. It could have been better but surely the developers weren't trying much. Don't know why all the famous websites gave this game a good review because if it was from an unknown company with an unknown IP name, it would've gotten an average of 5 from them all!!My final thought about this game was that I'm playing a very old game under the coat of some shiny graphics. I'm giving it a 6.5 only because I had some fun with it. Now if only those frustrations didn't exist….
My System's Specifications:
CPU: Intel Core 2 E6420 at 2.17 Ghz OC
VGA: nVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512 MB DDR3
RAM: 3 GB DDR2
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit
Monitor: LG W2261V 21.5" Widescreen Full HD