Wolfenstein: The Old Blood review

Nazis, castles, some ancient magic and then a few zombies. That’s the Wolfenstein staple. It’s been established, it’s been done and it’s not likely to change much in the coming years. You’d think that formula was so stringent that it’d keep you in check, that it’d be hard to actually weave an interesting, sensitive, different experience around those four age-old bedposts. Well, as it turns out, you can.

The Old Blood reneges on a little of what made The New Order (MachineGames’ first stab at this series) so special – the writing of the central story takes a dip (more on that later) and the nascent self-awareness that made the reboot so fresh has waned, too. That’s not to say The Old Blood takes itself seriously, though; it just lacks the broader sense of futility and frustration that was mimicked by the main characters so well in The New Order.

So let’s backtrack a little – for anyone that didn’t play the 2014 FPS by MachineGames, it was a treat of a game: wrapping some meaty shooting mechanics with Wolfenstein mainstays pushed to the very end of their absurd limits, The New Blood was a deconstruction of WWII shooters we had seen in the years since the original Wolfenstein titles back in the day. You, Captain B.J. Blazkowicz, screw up a mission straight away and become incarcerated in a Nazi-run mental asylum, slowly regaining your motor functions as those around you are taken away to be brutally executed. It invests you straight away – not just in yourself (read: B.J.), but in the world, in this peculiar new Nazi-run super-state, full of injustice and persecution, as you might expect.

The Old Blood has two major flaws – firstly, that you know the outcome of the game from the second you boot it up. As a direct prequel to The New Order (The Old Blood ends exactly where The New Blood picks up), you sort-of know the route you’re taking to the end. Which would be fine, if all you were doing was taking down eldritch Nazi super-men. Alas, The Old Blood justifies its carnage with an over-arching mission: take down a top Nazi archaeologist, and destroy the mysterious occult relics she’s been digging up. Now, this occult superweapon is supposed to be a point of tension, a potentially world-ending device so powerful it could win the war outright… except you never heard anything about it in The New Blood, so…

The second flaw is something we had to think a little bit more carefully about – and depending on your FPS outlook, you could consider it a positive or a negative. Some of the levels (particularly towards the end of a chapter) devolve from the traditionally labyrinthine Wolfenstein layouts into simple arenas: played on Easy/Medium, you can saunter around, dual shotguns cocked, laughing like a maniac and dismembering everything with a pulse. On Hard/Ultra Hard, these arenas become much less fun – it’s not a puzzle (like Hard modes in Halo, Call Of Duty, Destiny…) but rather a simple endurance test. Find the safe zone (there always is one: a bar, an elevator, a vantage point) and take cover, potshotting distant foes or shotgunning ones that come close. This is one FPS fan’s idea of bliss and another’s idea of hell on Earth.

We appreciate that hardcore shooter fans want a challenge, and usually we’re up for that. But at times, the level design became grindy, un-fun, and repetitive. Where The New Order let you stealth through sections with some amazingly tight stealth mechanics and stealth routes, The Old Blood seems to do away with that, instead forcing you to engage in these supposedly climactic battles. There are still some stealth sections in there, and they’re still done impeccably well, but we can’t help but feel these shootouts could have been reserved for Bethesda (and id Software’s) Doom reboot next year.

Aside from that, MachineGames and Bethesda prove once again that as a publisher/developer duo, they know how to ship a product: glitchless and bugless in our playthrough, the audio mix is superb, with each weapon personified with its own sonic presence. Each enemy is identifiable through their silhouette and colour scheme, too. That might sound like an obvious comment, but in a game all about choosing the right weapon (or weapons, if you’re into dual-wielding) at the right time, the presentation of the enemies in The Old Blood is flawless. It makes those chapter-ending breaks in the rhythm more bearable, at any rate. This is a developer proving that it knows a thing or two about getting the foundations right on its shooter releases.

It’s not as if The Old Blood is a bad experience – we actually enjoyed it so much we mopped up our first playthrough in one sitting – it’s just got a difficult history to live up to. Still, Bethesda fans will have plenty to look out for – easter eggs and collectibles abound throughout the game’s nine chapters, with bonus Nightmare levels (see boxout) for extra meat on the bones.

As a standalone DLC add-on, though, it’s a great use of the engine. It’s the inverted version of Far Cry 3’s Blood Dragon – where the DLC stood head and shoulders above the main game. The Old Blood itself is a wonderful example of what the engine could do, but the deeper experience inevitably lies in the parent game. It certainly doesn’t disprove that MachineGames is a studio to be watched however and may even be further proof that more can be asked of this team.