Wolfenstein - Review - Why Must You Prepare For The Journey Into the Heart of Evil?

In the new release Wolfenstein, it truly seems the Nazis have found The Veil, a dark, parallel dimension to our own. In their attempts to create a weapon of mass destruction that can end the war, they have started harnessing the powers of the Black Sun. You, the highly-decorated member of the OSA, B.J. Blazkowicz, have discovered their despicable plans while you were behind enemy lines. Now it falls to you to stop them!

Time to load up a stockpile of Allied and Axis weapons - including both supernatural and experimental firepower. You are even able to earn gold and then purchase upgrades for your personal arsenal. Know that enemies will be coming at you from every angle and you'll never know what the next threat is going to be. You will explore Nazi strongholds as well as The Veil, in a world of indescribable, supernatural ferocity!

Available: Xbox 360, PS3

Let's face it - there's something that's just comfortably retro about Wolfenstein, the newest first-person shooter. The original Wolfenstein 3D was shipped out over 17 years ago, and it popularized the first-person shooter, as you are probably already aware of.

Before Half-Life came along and made scripted shooters all the rage, Wolfenstein 3D basked in the purest simplicity of just roaming around the big levels, and blowing away Nazis with an always escalating choice of weapons. You might call it the Inglorious Bastards of its day. This new Wolfenstein definitely has borrowed from the spirit of the original, but it brings along some new baggage as well.

You will play as Allied agent B.J. Blazkowicz, basically considered the worst nightmare of every German. In Wolfenstein, you will discover a mysterious artifact that uses something called Black Sun energy, and your job is to stop the Third Reich from developing it into a weapon of mass destruction.

And just like that, you are sent to Isenstadt, a city deep in the heart of Germany. Once there you'll be working together with a local resistance group, as well as another faction, to stop the villainous Nazi plot.

Obviously this is not a totally linear, scripted game. Instead, more like Halo 3: ODST, the main idea is to use a city level as your kind of hub that launches you off into various missions. A lot like you might have explored the various levels in the original Wolfenstein 3D, this game allows you to explore the city a lot. It's when you find the German patrols that you start to have some fun!

You will be meeting up with contacts to get your missions, then you head for a variety of jumping off points which send you into different levels. When you've finished your missions, you will return to the city levels.

In Wolfenstein, Isenstadt's city levels are very compact, so when you are navigating them it ends up taking you seconds rather than minutes. Be aware you'll be running the same streets and alleyways a ridiculous number of times during the game, as you are going between contacts such as the local resistance group as well as other factions.

Before too long, exploration gets dropped quickly, as there's a constant marker on your compass always telling you exactly where to go next, so there's not a lot of need to deal with your in-game map.

Your mission structure is basically linear - after you complete a mission for one of the groups, they will tell you which faction to see next and give you another mission, and so it goes. You'll find there's not much of a sense that you have any choice or freedom in any of it.

There's no sucking up to any one faction or pissing off another one, either. All they do is tell you where you're suppose to go and what you should blow up. And the good news is that there's a whole lot for you to blow up!

When you view the combat in Wolfenstein you may be surprised by the amount of environmental destruction at work. While you can't blow up walls or buildings, there's a lot things flying when the grenades denotate, as well as plenty of cover that is shredded by gunfire.

The basic core idea for killing is in great effects, so while you can blast away with lots of conventional weapons, if that becomes boring, or you find yourself running low on ammo you can always pull out more exotic gear - such as the particle beam - and that will basically vaporize your enemies.

You can always upgrade your weapons as you need to, using the gold you find and recover from the various levels. You may not be able to afford to upgrade all the weapons, but if you have a personal favorite you will be able to boost its range, recoil dampening, accuracy and a lot more.

Of course, this wouldn't really be Wolfenstein without a supernatural element. In this situation, it's a mystical amulet that will give you special powers. Veil Sight will act like night vision, but it also will highlight the enemy weak spots and, even more importantly, it will let you travel to other dimensions where you'll deal with obstacles in the real world that may not exist.

If you happen to find a solid brick wall in front of you, you can turn on Veil Sight and you could discover a gaping hole that you'll be able to walk through. This will expedite exploration and can also be used when you want to flank any dangerous enemy positions. You'll find the rest of the powers will be familiar to shooter fans; there's a bullet-time like ability, a shield ability, and a shield-penetrating ability that's very useful in puzzle situations as well as against specific enemies.

And speaking of enemies, they run the gamut from Wehrmact infantry to SS troopers to Veil-enhanced foes like the armored Heavy Trooper and the Assassin. Of course the more exotic enemies will be the most dangerous, but they also have specific weaknesses that can be that can be used to your advantage if you use your Veil powers. You might as well plan on using them, too, because there's not a lot use rationing your Veil powers since there's no shortage of the special Black Sun recharge points throughout the entire game.

Wolfenstein has a total solid, graphical look, but it really begins to rock when you get into the missions that will take you out of the city. The variety of environments are very well administered - from an outlying farm to a huge monstrous zeppelin to an incredibly vast underground facility. After all that, you'll find the city of Isenstadt may feel pretty bland in comparison.

You'll find the character models are done quite well, but you will notice the graphics engine isn't exactly as "state-of-the-art" as it used to be. You'll find the audio is excellent; you can just close your eyes and listen to the richness of the sounds of each weapon as it fires.

You'll find the single-player campaign will run as long as most of them; you're looking at getting six to eight hours out of it. Then you're on to the multi-player, and it's really interesting in that it goes for an absolute retro look and feel; it definitely ditches the glossier graphics of the single-player game and instead gives character models and animation that will remind you of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the 2001 game.

However, you'll find the multiplayer modes themselves will feel relatively basic, and they are not as deep as the ever popular Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, which is rather puzzling. Another thing to be aware of is Wolfenstein is competing against another World War II shooter, the wildly popular and deep Call of Duty: World at War.

It's kind of hard to imagine Wolfenstein peeling away players from those games, especially while offering just three modes, but who knows. There's Team Deathmatch, Stopwatch, and Objective. Objective requires one team to complete a task and the other team is suppose to try and stop them, while the Stopwatch is where both teams take turns in a more objective-style level while trying to beat each other's times.

What this basically translates into is a lot of running-gunning, and with the quick respawn times there's not much of a penalty in dying. Besides all that, Wolfenstein will support 12 players, and some feel the matches lack the scale of the some other games that have 16 players.

If you crave a fascinating, action packed, first-person shooter game, Wolfenstein will make a great addition to your collection.

I'd like to know your thoughts, so after you check it out, stop by and leave me a comment.

Enjoy!