Shootember: Let's be negativestein

I can't take screenshots of Wolfenstein for reasons I am uncertain of. It does not allow steam overlay because bananas, and capture attempts do not seem to work. How nice! It's not really the best looking FPS. This is going to be pretty dry without pictures, ugh.

There's several elements in modern FPS games I do not know whether or not are related to the "modern shooter" that I think people hate or are unique to the game I'm playing. I have played the first Halo, but not the later ones, have not played Call of Duty or Battlefield anything. Crysis is largely my favorite shooter, even going back to the Doom era. I'm not really shooter inclined; I'm not really too great with a mouse and to be super honest my aim could be described as "awful". I never got into multiplayer shooters past Tribes, since like I said, terrible shot.

So I'm going to try to avoid talking about the elements I think are modern shooter related and talk about the elements I surmise are core to the issues I have with Wolfenstein, other than the title, which is just weird. Can we please go back to having subtitles or prefixes or what have you? Especially since this is, in fact, supposed to be a sequel and not a remake?

First, good note: I love the dorky, american as apple pie protagonist with his ridiculous name. BJ Blastovitz? Oh, it's Blazkowicz! Seriously, this name sounds like - and I apologize if this bristles any racism feathers in you - the marriage of a large cannon and a polish jew. The BJ at the start announced he's been anglicized, but no one on Ellis island was willing to fight that last name. That last name will shell your house, don't fuck with it. I like him like I like Captain America, cocksure but not really too over the top. Just a little over the top. Some dude told him not to punch a nazi for the good of the mission and he did it. The not punching I mean.

I like the setting too; I hate world war 2 as a setting since it has been so eroded by history (and some pet peeves of mine that might come off as both racist and hating racism so I'll keep quiet after that last one) but I do delight in the occult ww2 stuff. There's just something about magic nazis that I can put a bullet into cheerfully.

The supernatural elements of the game are surprisingly well done and detailed. Which is to say, your 'powers' put you between "worlds" if you will, and the imagery of the other world is pretty slick. There's also nice little details, like a mountain becoming a volcano in the other world. This does highlight one of the game's grating issues, though I feel like this is a FPS "thing".

Basically, you are supposed to be on a pretty set track as you progress through levels. While not always the case, the punishment for being "off track" - and I mean this in a very tight, literal usage of the word - is not so much "you die" as enemy visibility being basically zero. Oh they can still shoot you, of course, but you can't really see them. It kicked in after an hour of running into this that this is either intentional design or just a weirdness of the designer. It's extremely frustrating though, as it is very easy to be off track. The game compensates for this by granting you a form of super vision via your supernatural amulet doodad. Most of the time this allows you to see the enemy.

Humorously the enemy continues to fire, often enough, while you are very clearly behind full cover. I don't mean behind like, a barrel or a cart full of apples. I mean multiple stone walls a floor down, they just keep firing and firing. I think there might be tactical advantage from this, or maybe there isn't, though the enemy do claim to be 'out of ammo' from time to time.

Bullet and gun sounds are good, though weapons in the game have that odd feeling of weightlessness that most mediocre shooters have issues with. Voice acting is excellent, by far and away the stand out presence in the game. The actual like, report and support npc stuff is nothing impressive - but that's innately rare - but the enemies have a good range. What's jarring is while the audio itself is a mix of good to great, the music is atrocious, really shamefully generic stuff that makes me feel kinda sleepy. Music is of course a pretty subjective set of tastes, but I think it is hard to argue even if you like the music that there's enough to the tracks.

The audio does do "that thing" which many games do. An open letter:

Dear Game developers;

If a noise is annoying, don't fucking repeat it over and over again you goddamn belligerent morons. Loud alarms, klaxons, drum sounds,enemy taunts,  poop sounds and other thrashing loud noises are to be used in moderation, not repeated 3 times every 10 seconds. Yes, it creates an atmosphere of tension and irritation: the fucking tension of not ripping off my headset from irritation as I then turn off your shitty fucking game.

Go fuck your speakers,
Lark

Combat is a weirdly mixed bag. Each level is different in this regard, but some of them play well with a reasonable curve and difficulty. Others are terrible, in a jarring manner. The game's two largest problems are entwined. The first is that, full stop, there are two many enemies in the game of the basic sort - Grunts do look different, but if they are or play differently, I've never noticed. They feel the exact same and there's hundreds of them. Up until the late game, that's about all you ever get to fight, with a few limited encounters with the other enemy types. The other problem is the game uses a checkpoint system and the allocation of checkpoints is not well thought out, with checkpoints sometimes stretching through a spat of boring monotony combat, then a real fight or puzzle, then more combat, then you get a checkpoint again. So - assuming you're playing it on an alright difficulty setting - You die, and then have to repeat the same boring encounter repeatedly. I found myself struggling to finish the game simply because I'd hit spots like this and it would exhaust my desire to game.

Boss fights - for almost all of the game - are creative and fun, and most of the other enemies are pretty amusing. One of the boss fights is painfully awful, with a large amount of 'smash my face into reloading' style of learning. Trial and error isn't fun when you can't really set where you reload and I shouldn't feel completely stumped as to what I'm even supposed to be doing.

So in summary - Music is bad, audio is good. Graphics are boilerplate, enemy designs are good. Combat is good, then bad, then good. There is essentially no story or plot of any interest - in basic summary, the game is fundamentally not very good. Mediocre is a good word for it, though it's more that it is jarring in presentation. It dips between "great" and "gut wretchingly awful", with the checkpoint system the real stinker of the lot. I think if someone had played through it and ironed out many of the kinks, it would have been a quality title, but on the most part even on sale for a fiver I wouldn't pick this up again. It also makes me really reluctant to pick up Singularity which was also made by Raven less than 12 months after.

You know you don't much care for a game when it makes you want to avoid a studio.