Game EXP: Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (PC)

Before starting Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, I wanted to play Wolfenstein (2009) because the character of Caroline Becker and a couple of other references were from that game and I wanted to have as much of a complete story as possible before jumping into Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.  So while I did try to find Wolfenstein (2009) I came to the conclusion that it was only available if you had already purchased and downloaded the game on Steam, or if you had a physical copy; although it could be pirated I did not want to dive down that route and potentially mess up my computer.  I then decided to download and play Return to Castle Wolfenstein just to get some back story on B.J. Blazkowicz that was more in keeping with this iteration (kind of), and after only 10 minutes into that game I found out that The New Order was created to essentially replace and modify some of the events in Return to Castle Wolfenstein, so I only made it as far as BJ escaping from his cell after finding his partner who had been electrocuted to death.

I also briefly wanted to mention that as was the case with Wolfenstein: The New Order, I did experience screen tearing ranging from the top half of the screen, but only if a few instances, to just the top third to quarter being the rest of the game.  Otherwise, the game ran fine, usually averaging out at 60 fps even when on a combination of low and medium settings.  The audio played fine and again, the game was perfectly playable and even looking back, my memories of playing do not include all of the screen tearing that had happened.

With Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, the game was broken up into three acts told in two parts with the first act taking place in Castle Wolfenstein, the second act in a small nearby city, and the third act seemed to take a hard left turn which I will get to at the end of the article.  Part of the game ended up being what I was originally expecting from this series, being a run-and-gun (stealth and non-stealth) inside an alternate reality Nazi-run castle, hence the name of the series.  Captured by Nazi's while attempting to infiltrate Castle Wolfenstein, B.J. Blazkowicz must escape his cell, rescue his partner that also captured when their spy-like infiltration failed, and make to his safehouse in the nearby village of Paderborn.  The game gets a lot of flack for not being different enough from The New Order and from what I have read, The Old Blood was originally going to be part of a DLC pack for the first game, but grew in size and scope and ended up becoming its own fully-fledged game.

Once I started the game, I was not expecting so much of the first act to be nothing but involved stealth.  Sneaking behind hulking Nazi proto-bio-robots to essentially backstab them to death and sneaking up on prot0-Panzerhunds (referred to as  Kampfhunds here) ended up being most of the first quarter of the game.  Once you escape from your cell, you are only armed with a section of pipe that you use to campus walls, and stealthy dispatch early prototypes of the Power Armor soldiers you fight in The New Order.  There were times when the stealth sections would get rather tiresome in that the actions were feeling repetitive even though I felt like I was making some progress as far as making my way through the prison area of the castle, it probably could have used either some retooling to trimming.

Once you do pick up guns, you quickly notice that these are not the semi-high tech weapons found in most of The New Order, which makes sense as this is decades before BJ wakes up from his 14-year stupor in the asylum in Poland.  The weapons alone were different enough from The New Order that it did not feel like I was playing the same game and I had to recognize the limitations of the older weapons I was now using.  So aside from that, the gameplay in each area, as it really felt like the game was broken up into areas sectioned off by heavy impenetrable steel doors, began again to feel repetitive, but for a completely different reason.  In The New Order, in some of the levels, there would be Nazi officers who would be near radio equipment who could trigger an alarm if you were spotted.  Here in The Old Blood, a similar tactic was implemented, but it was overused in that there would always be two officers in somewhat close proximity to each other and it became almost more like a puzzle to figure out how to take them both out without being spotted; most of the time in meant sniping them with your silenced pistol (which seemed to have a stupidly long range for a pistol).  This level designed continued through most of the rest of the game and I quickly got tired of having to worry about triggering an officer only to be flooded with a never-ending sea of Nazis, often forcing me to either restart by choice or because I was killed; although sometimes I could survive the onslaught if the alarm was triggered by the second officer right before I killed them.

Jumping ahead quite a bit (after the escape from the castle and fighting a super-soldier closer to those in The New Order), the next section of the game was BJ trying to make his way through the village of Paderborn, so that he could retrieve information from a Nazi officer who was residing in the village while seeking help from a couple of local agents.  Parts of this area felt like it was trying to get BJ close to other characters as the majority of the other characters he interacted with were dead Nazis and there were some interactions that felt halfway genuine, but others felt forced, but maybe that was also because this was a prequel.  Maybe?  But after the stone walls and tight hallways of Castle Wolfenstein, it was actually a nice change of scenery.  

In this area, the big boss fight was the first time I ended up turning down the difficulty because, after my fifth-plus attempt, I just could not manage to kill the bastard while dancing through a medium-sized room and trying to expertly grab the occasional health pack that was thrown towards me.  Maybe it was that my shooting and strafing skills were still not up to par with where they should be (playing mouse/keyboard) or I was just approaching the fight all wrong, but it definitely reached the point to where either I gave in to the shame of taking the game from "Bring 'em on! (normal)" down to "Don't hurt me" (easy), but not so low to "Can I play Daddy?" (very easy?) or I just would have stopped playing altogether.  I still feel a little guilty about that, but if I had not, then I might have been stuck at that fight and never finished.  So there!

After some more running through city corners, the game took an odd paranormal left turn in the third act after certain events happened (which I will not get into here) when zombies (referred to as Shamblers) started showing up, but at least the story lead the game there even though the Shamblers did kind of show up out of the blue.  I knew that parts of the 2001 release of Return to Castle Wolfenstein dealt a lot with paranormal activities and mysticism but that MachineGames wanted to steer clear of that aspect of the two previous Wolfenstein titles, but apparently, this game decided that a mysterious gas under the city has the properties to turn corpses into the sprinting dead was fine.  The rest of this act was pretty fun because while shooting Nazis was fun, killing zombie Nazis that would sometimes explode was even more entertaining.  I did feel a little bad about killing the civilians who also turned into Shamblers because they were just minding their own business before the gas explosion uprooted Paderborn.  There were a couple of encounters that allowed you to pit Shamblers against living Nazis and if in close enough proximity, you could wait while the two enemies fought amongst themselves as it was often easier to kill Shambers than Nazis who would shoot back.  There was even the Decide Who You Help and Who Ends Up Dead which was somewhat hidden within the level design and kind of made me regret my choice, but that is just the way the cookie crumbles in 1946 Nazi Germany apparently.

And then there was this giant-ass beast of a What the Hell!?

The game ended not at all as I was expecting in that it continued with the zombie state of things and unlike The New Order where you fought a human inside an early form of mech, but here you fought the upper half of a giant monster that I am still a little foggy on where it came from and why.  In this boss fight I again ended up turning down the difficulty after five or six attempts because the challenge, at this point in the game, felt a bit much for me.  I did this mainly to finish, but also because I was not 100% certain that I was actually affecting the monster with my attacks, and in two instances, I ran out of ammunition and could only be replenished by the random Nazi zombie that came stumbling into the area just to make matters worse.  But I did defeat the monster, recovered the documents from a Nazi corpse, got them to where they needed to be, then rode off into the sunset (only to arrive at an airbase right before the flight out to assault Deathshead's island... well shit).

Love that Schockhammer!  But not as much as the Assault rife apparently.

You know, yeah, I did really enjoy Wolfenstein: The Old Blood even with what criticisms I mentioned above, and that there were not as many moments in the game where you could just talk to other characters, but that was the story that was being told here.  BJ needed to escape from prison to find sensitive information and fought Nazis and zombie-like creatures along the way.  I have read some criticism that there is not the variety of guns here that there were in The New Order, but I personally did not mind that.  The guns here acted like guns, they killed Nazis and that was all I was asking for her.  Now it will be time to take a jump forward in time to see what happened to BJ after the events in The New Order with Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus which I have for the Switch so it will be interesting to see how the game compares (with a controller) to the low/medium settings on my previous laptop played with keyboard/mouse.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
L'Infer a Doucement Touché Notre Sol

P.S.

And here is an extra screenshot that I did not manage to fit into the body of the article.

This was during a mini-boss fight inside Castle Wolfenstein (or was it a church in Paderborn?)  against another steam-powered and untethered Supersoldaten and I decided that running up to and firing point-blank range while dual-wielding assault rifles was going to be the best tactic.  I just really liked the lighting here and the ballsiness of Blazowicz of facing down a Nazi Super Soldier.