Wolfenstein Review

Technology

The game is powered by an enhanced version of the Doom 3 engine that powers Quake Wars, and it sports additional features such as deferred rendering, soft shadows, post-processing, soft HDR/Bloom, and wet surfaces. It also has an excellent water implementation that rivals Bioshock’s.

The graphics aren’t cutting edge but still range from good to very good, with some highlights including the outdoor town sections with the afternoon sun hitting the brick and stone surfaces. There’s also a farm that has a beautifully rendered countryside, complete with a sparkling lake. The game has a lot more vegetation content compared to other Doom 3 engine games, and there seems to be some form of anti-aliasing applied to tree leaves.

Here’s an example of the game’s HDR/bloom when the sun hits the cobblestones on the road.

The game also utilizes multiple cores and provides a software Havok implementation for physics. Physics are done very well with most boxes and crates being destructable, along with widespread flying debris from explosions. Some areas also have a large amount of objects being impacted by physics (e.g. floating mid-air from veil barrel explosions), but I noticed absolutely no framerate slowdowns on my stock E6850, even in the heaviest areas of physics utilization.

The game’s DRM is a CD-key for multiplayer, with a SecuROM disc check for single-player. There’s no need to ever connect online to use either game mode.

Conclusion

Wolfenstein combines elements from Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Prey, UberSoldier, Call of Duty 2, and Thief 3, and results in a very entertaining game. It’s very good but not excellent, because some of the magic of the previous installment seems to have been lost.

Despite this, if you carefully explore every area and complete every mission you’ll easily get 20-25 hours of engaging gameplay, so this is a solid title that is worthy to belong in any FPS collection.

Pros

• Sand-box mission design lets you explore at your own pace.
• Upgrades make game progression interesting and worthwhile.
• A solid arsenal of guns.
• Varied level design.
• Veil powers make combat and exploration more interesting.
• Hidden items make exploration worthwhile.
• Nice day-time outdoor graphics.
• Physics system doesn’t slow down the framerate.
• It’s a Wolfenstein game!

Cons

• Some weapon implementations could be better.
• Some levels could use a little more polish and atmosphere.
• Not enough supernatural elements (e.g. Zombies, crypts, dungeons, etc).
• Some enemy implementations (including bosses) could be improved, along with better placement.
• No quick-save/quick-load.

Final Score

8 / 10.

Please join us in our Forums

Follow us on Twitter

For the latest updates from ABT, please join our RSS News Feed