I have been a skint graduate student for a fair old while now, so when the demo for Wolfenstein was eventually available for us silver Xbox Liver’s I was pleased to actually get my hands on the thing.
For me the Wolfenstein franchise has been one of the classic FPS game series that will have a little place in my heart, probably due to the fact it is pretty much the grandaddy of all First Person Shooters. So what does the new outing offer us?
It’s a remake with a twist, Again you are B.J Blaskowitz from the original Wolfenstein 3D. But instead of being a man made of pixels escaping castle Wolfenstein, you are in fact an american spy, trying to foil the 3rd Reich’s plans, and just generally make a nuisance of yourself. A pon destroying a boat that was going to bomb London you come across a strange artifact, that gives you power to control something called the Vail, this is a dark realm of sorts which gives you a number of abilities, weather its to slow down time or to pass through some walls. All very cool indeed.
As with all demo’s this one gives you just a taster of what the full game has to offer. This is a classic style FPS with a modern twist, you are given an array of guns which you can cycle through with ease, the levels are run, shoot, run again and there varying degrees of enemies. From you normal Nazi guard,to your supped up Vail Powered demon machine. As for the modern twist? Well you get things like the Black Market, where you can upgrade any of your weapons, and when I say upgrade, I mean upgrade. You can enhance the rate of fire, the amount of ammo in one clip, the amount of damage the weapon does etc etc. What I do love is the option to add silencers, lets hope the full game you can add things like scopes, that would be cool. The great thing here is you don’t just get human weapons, you also can obtain Vale weapons, these beasts are powered by the dark realm. The only one I found was a beam cannon of sorts, that vaporised a whole flurry of Nazi soldiers, nice.
The level design in the demo was pretty liner, but it’s a classic FPS franchise so thats not really that surprising, what I did like though was the varying ways levels acted, for example, I stepped into one room, and some sort of Vail power turned off the gravity, next thing I know I was floating around shooting flailing Nazi’s which had no idea what the hell as going on.
Graphically, Id have done well here, the cut scenes are pretty much flawless, and the in game graphics are what you would expect from a HD compatible game.
Quite frankly this game does the old school FPS justice, liner game play, loads of weapons and just general run and gun. With the nice added extras it feel like this game could go along way. I must get me a copy.
Garv
