Wolfenstein Review

Combat

Combat is as simple as pointing and shooting. Your accuracy decreases with movement and firing from the hip, but increases by standing still, crouching, and by aiming down the sight. You can also use your veil powers to augment your combat abilities. There are also numerous explosive barrels littering the levels that will inflict area damage to nearby enemies. Additionally, exploding veil barrels will suspend opponents in mid-air, making them helpless for a brief duration. Enemy grenades can also be tossed back if you get close enough to grab them.

BJ’s health automatically regenerates when he stops taking damage, so there are no med-kits to be found anywhere. You’ll also sometimes have members of the resistance fighting alongside you.

There’s also a good amount of gore too, which is hardly surprising since developer Raven Software is famous for the Soldier of Fortune games. The gore isn’t as blatant as in those games, but a headshot can still blow a head clean off while blood spurts from the neck. Also explosions will dismember limbs and separate blasted body parts, while fire clearly roasts enemies to a charred blackened state. Also if you shoot an enemy’s arm, it’ll sometimes go visibly limp and you’ll clearly see the victim having trouble raising their weapon.

Enemies

The game has a decent selection of enemies to fight, ranging from traditional German “grunt” soldiers to supernatural enemies, to armored sci-fi enemies. Their implementations range from good to very good, but there’s nothing I’d call excellent like the Paratroopers, Lopers or Elite Guard from the previous title. Some enemies use traditional guns while others have sci-fi weapons, and others still can use veil powers like Shield against you.

Most enemies can be shot anywhere, but some enemies and bosses require specific locational damage to be killed, which distracts from the feel of combat somewhat. Most of the bosses are reasonably trivial too and don’t require much effort to beat.

Gameplay tip: activating the veil can reveal the weak spots of certain enemies and bosses.

The missions have a fixed pre-placed allotment of enemies, while the town areas have infinite respawning with varying group sizes and configurations. If you clear a section of the city you can explore it indefinitely without any respawning, but if you leave the section (such as going on a mission, moving to another section of town, or entering a safe house) some or all areas will respawn. The respawning is generally not a problem as it makes for some furious gun battles.

This is the farm, another of the game’s missions. Note the two enemies on patrol, the large and varied vegetation content, and the nice looking water.

Enemy placement in missions is generally quite good and logical, but some of the placement of later town enemies is questionable. Sometimes you’ll see a random assortment of supernatural enemies wandering through the street like some kind of motley crew on patrol, which doesn’t make sense, even if it’s still fun to gun them down.

The enemy AI is also good and they’re quite capable of taking cover, kicking over props to use as cover, and peeking around corners to take shots and then hiding. Sometimes they’ll stand still out in the open, though. The game has location based damage, so headshots do more damage than hits to limbs.