Wolfenstein (Xbox 360)

How to sap the fun out of melting Nazi faces
8/26/2009 5:08 PM | 1 Comments | Page 2 of 2

Stop me if you've heard this one

Occasionally the corridors split off into missions -- corridors, really -- stuffed with all the usual tropes. A factory, a train station, a sort of castle. Invisible monsters that insta-kill you. Painfully obvious "puzzles." Switches. Lots of switches, all alike. Force fields (lowered by switches, naturally). Battles down long narrow halls. Corridors, really. Shutting down your abilities to make areas more challenging. Having to scrounge for collectibles so you don't fall behind the power curve. Lots of dying and reloading at check points. Lots. Near the end of the game, exasperated and eager to get this tedious thing behind me, I dropped the difficulty level to casual. There was still lots of dying and reloading. Which further stretches a 10-hour game into 12 hours. The ratio of content to filler in Wolfenstein is pretty much 1:1.

The weapon upgrades would actually be pretty good in a better game. You buy bits and bobs that improve individual weapons. None of the weapons is really bad, and a couple are really good. But Wolfenstein is curiously stingy with ammo for the good weapons, as if it only wants you to use them sparingly so they'll stay special. In fact, I'm almost tempted to begrudgingly recommend Wolfenstein for the fact that you can unlock cheats once you've finished the game. These let you replay the levels using the three nifty magic guns with abandon. Here you can see what Wolfenstein would have been like if it hadn't played so consistently like an outdated Call of Duty. If it had really let itself go crazy with the crazy guns, it would have been a better game.

There are glimpses of this better game as you play with the spell powers, which also make an appearance in the multiplayer game (the multiplayer is disappointing compared to the previous Wolfenstein, where it turned out to be the main draw). Throughout the levels, you can freely recharge your spell powers thanks to mana fountains everywhere. When you can't find a mana fountain, you can probably find a keg of mana the Nazis left scattered among all the crates and exploding barrels. Why is the game so generous with mana but stingy with special ammo?

Unfortunately, these spell powers are awfully late in coming. You also have to buy upgrades to make them truly useful. Normally, hard choices about upgrades would make for good gameplay. But in Wolfenstein, these hard choices are really bits and pieces of a potentially better game doled out far too slowly and far too infrequently. By the time you've got a good head of wacky magic steam going, you're already barreling down the interminable corridors of the dullest zeppelin ever devised, having passed through a one-way door. Soon you get to a terribly tedious boss fight in a tacky alternate dimension. And then the game ends. So that's all Raven has for us, huh? Hopefully it's saving up all its best ideas for Singularity.

This review is based on a retail copy of the Xbox 360 game provided by the publisher.