The Wolfenstien series, specifically the Alternate Timeline Saga which Bethesda and Machine Games dubbed it, hasn’t been doing so hot lately. Last entry was a VR game that everyone forgot existed and wasn’t very good in general. Last mainline entry was a co-op shooter with terrible design, and poorly written story and humor that made fans want to blow their brains out. Sequel before, The New Colossus, is one of the most divisive sequels I’ve ever seen and this leads us all the way back to the first game in the Alternate Timeline Saga. That being Wolfenstien: The New Order, considered by a good chunk of first person shooter fans as a modern cult classic. A blend of mature storytelling, ultra violent set pieces, and a couple of classic shooter design elements that created what should be a revitalization of the genre. To most people at least, because I’m gonna be honest with you I was not a huge fan of The New Order. Not to say that it’s a bad game by any means. I reviewed it earlier last year and my opinions on it overall was that the game was just fine.
It had exactly what fans hyped me up for. Fun gunplay, frenetic combat loop, set pieces that kept me excited, and a story not afraid to go into some dark territories. What it also had though were issues that conflicted with what made the game great. Why do I have to loot ammo manually off the ground when I’m trying to outmaneuver enemy fire and keep track of where they are. Why does this boss fight have me patiently wait to reveal its weak points, leading to something that goes on longer than it should. Why does the game just throw in cringey teenager humor into a story and setting that should honestly be dark and depressing? Also why do a good chunk of the jokes have to be exaggerated violence and sex, because it kind of goes to show you there weren’t any other clever jokes to tell. Wolfenstien: The New Order, in my opinion, is a good game with tone issues. It’s a game that seems to be all over the place in what it wants to do and be. Again, it is not a bad game. If I were to recommend this game to a casual shooter player I probably would. As it stands it’s fine. It’s not terrible, but I wouldn’t hold it up alongside my genre favorites.
This leads us to Wolfenstien: The Old Blood. An expansion that was sold as a standalone game, and serves as a pre-sequel to the event of the entire Alternate Timeline Saga. Why would I buy an entry to a series I don’t like? When my feelings on the last one are very conflicted? Well I’ve been on a DLC/expansion binge after the announcement of Shadow of The Erdtree for Elden Rin, and this game went on sale recently for PS4. Normally when I finish a game I don’t check out the DLC and move onto another one unless it’s for something I really love. Expect more on this in the future. Anyways, I’m kind of glad I did check out The Old Blood. I had low expectations, but it managed to surprise me in a couple of ways. The Old Blood is not only a Wolfenstien game I liked, but my favorite one in the series. This is an exciting thrillride from beginning to end, and it manages to pay respect to the series past while managing to move forward. Is it one of the best shooters I’ve ever played? The answer to that is obviously no and it still has a few problems I had with the other Wolfenstien entries. Yet, this is a great game and I’m really excited to talk to you all about it today. Here’s why I believe Wolfenstien: The Old Blood is fantastic and why it deserves your attention. Get your blood pumping and prepare for more Nazi killing action.
Story
The plot of The Old Blood is very much similar to that of Wolfenstein 3D. An OSA agent by the name of William BJ Blaskowitz is infiltrating a high security castle located in Germany to find a folder that may help the Allies win World War II. He is aided by another agent, Richard Wesley, and together they manage to make it through the front gate and towards the office that contains the folder. However, upon searching they discover the folder is not there and they’ll have to go further into the castle to find it. They sneak into an air duct, but are then captured by the leader of the castle, Rudi Jager. Bj and Richard are thrown into prison cells where they are to be tortured and executed days later. Instead of letting that happen BJ escapes. He takes a lead pipe mounted to the wall and uses it to climb out of the put he was dumped into. From there he slowly ventures through the castle. Killing Nazis and trying to figure out where the file is. Along the way he’ll discover what the Nazis are planning, what experiments they have concocted, and other strange mysteries lying deep beneath the surface. Nothing but a good old return to Castle Wolfenstien.
Gameplay
The Old Blood plays very much similarly to The New Order seeing how it’s expansion. You will venture through a variety of levels picking up equipment, blasting and stabbing Nazis, and trying to get closer to your goal. Before an encounter begins you have the opportunity to stealth kill a few enemies. Main ones you want to be targeting are the commanders. If your presence is alerted before the commanders are killed they’ll continue summoning more troops unless defeated. This creates some strategy towards fights as the terrain you fight in differs from each other and there is often verticality to arenas. You create distractions, use throwing knives that always instantly kill foes when a direct hit is made, use a silenced pistol, and pick off other weaker foes so they don’t alert others or to make the path to the commanders safer. If you are spotted then prepare for combat. It’s a mad lad dash to kill the commanders and whatever enemies are in the room with you. You have a nice selection of firearms to wield, and some weapons can be dual wielded for extra power with the tradeoffs being ammo is consumed faster and it takes longer to reload.
You have a pistol which is easy to use, has decent range, and can be equipped with a silencer for stealth. There’s an assault rifle which you’ll be using a lot of the time and it has 2 firing modes. The first firing mode is what you expect from an assault rifle. Rapid firing bullets, but accuracy and handling is mid. Then there’s a burst fire mode which fires three bullets everytime you pull the trigger, and is good for when you want to make more precise shots. There’s the automatic shotgun which deals massive amounts of damage at short range, but finding ammo for it is quite rare and reloading it takes a bit. The lever action rifle which is great for long range, and has a lil scope you can use to snipe foes from long range. There’s a flare gun which is basically a grenade launcher. Can blow up groups of foes, make dealing with heavy armored foes easier, and unlike the usual grenade launcher it’s easy to reload. Downside is that it’s probably the hardest one to find ammo for. Eventually you get the double barrel shotgun which has only two shots and takes a much longer time to reload, but is even deadlier.
There’s a variety of enemies to blast your way through in The Old Blood with some requiring the player to strategize and prioritize who to kill first. You have your basic baddies with assault rifles and the commanders, but then you have the shotgunners who have more armor and can kill the player easily if not careful. Snipers who try to gun you down from afar, dogs which run up at you and try to bite your neck out, drones that fly around, and then you have what are heavies. These heavily experimented on super soldiers who wear layers upon layers of metal armor and wield two turrets for guns. Killing these bastards is hard as they have tons of health and a good chunk of the time their armor will absorb your bullets. Best to take care of the other enemies first and heal up before taking these guys head on, which is still difficult to mind if you don’t play a tad bit carefully. Unlike most shooters Wolfenstien has the traditional shooter design of giving the player health and armor. Health is what’s mainly keeping you alive. If it drops down to zero then game over. Armor is sort of like a secondary health bar in that it can absorb a certain percentage of damage for you and prevent your health bar from dropping to zero as quickly.
If you want to heal you find medkits and bandages. If you want more armor than loot helmets, chest pieces, and even the metal plating off of heavies. Sometimes you want to stop and explore the environment before moving forward as arenas will contain the supplies you need to survive longer. You may even find collectibles in the form of gold bars. These give you concept art to look at, which is nice. So you’ll shoot, kill, shoot some more, and keep doing the same thing till you reach the end of a level. However, during all of this you’ll occasionally unlock perks. These upgrade certain stats and traits, and can be quite useful as you get further into the campaign. This includes an increase to max health and overcharging. By the way, overcharging is when you heal above max health and it provides temporary extra hit points that drain with time. Great for if you want to soak in some extra damage or run in guns blazing without dying in five seconds. You can unlock perks to carry more ammo, knives, grenades, have more armor, or even overcharge with armor. It basically rewards the player for doing specific things enough times and I like it. Besides that there’s nothing else to say. Game is pretty straightforward, but has a good combat loop and pacing. Hopefully you can kill every Nazi that stands in your way and escape this damn castle.
Thoughts
Wolfenstien: The Old Blood is a fantastic first person shooter. It may fix all of the problems I had with The New Order, but it makes enough changes and improvements that I ended up liking it a hell of a lot more. The combat is much better despite it being the same. I think the reason why I liked it a lot more here is because the tools you are given fit the environments and arenas you fight in. A majority of the arenas are pretty closed off with some cinematic sections having you snipe foes from a distance. Being able to tell where enemies are and where you are being shot from is much easier mainly with how bright and colorful this game is. It uses the same engine as The New Order, but due to the lighting and less gray colored areas it allows you to distinguish what is what. That and the aim assist options let me kill Nazis much better and efficiently. The gunplay is still great and every weapon packs a bunch. The assault rifle feels heavy, the shotgun unleashes a big thump, the rifle nails foes, and the silenced pistol feels slick especially when you land a successful headshot without alerting any of the enemies around you. Stealth is still pretty good and I would say it’s much better here in The Old Blood. You don’t get spotted as easily and again the lighting and level design allows you to tell where things are much easier.
The game is just more fair overall. You can still die very easily if you’re not careful or you try to play it like Doom, but every death made me understand what killed me. Whether that be knowing who to prioritize, what weapons to use and when, or playing it like Doom and trying to rush it. I like the mission ideas in The Old Blood more and I would say it’s a better paced game. It’s a lot shorter with the average runtime being four to five hours. It took a little over three which sounds really short to a majority of people, but I think it wrapped up nicely. One of the first missions has you start off powerless stripped of all of your weaponry and armor. Then you sneak your way past enemies with nothing but just a lead pipe to stealth kill them. Then you get some firearms, then you make way using the canals, then you fight your way out of the castle, on tramways, in a cave, a village, a burning village full of nazi zombies, operate a mech, fight in a graveyard, and then a big bombastic conclusion with an actually good final boss compared to the other games. It is a game that knows when to kick things into full gear, when to show the spectacle of the world, and when to take things down to debrief with you and transition to the next action joyride. It did not waste my time unlike the other games, and you can just hop in seamlessly and have fun.
Now onto the story, which for a lot of people including me isn’t all that important when it comes to loving this game. The Old Blood is a retread of the past. Go into Castle Wolfenstin, shoot all the Nazis, fight mecha Nazis and Nazi zombies like in the weird 2009 reboot. It’s really simple and forgettable at most, but I like it. I appreciate a game that manages to tell straightforward tales well enough, and The Old Blood manages to avoid the problem I have with The New Order and The New Colossus. Tone issues. A game that tries to cram in adult humor and unnecessary times at the wrong moments. Any joke in The Old Blood feels more like surprises. Like when you try to stealth kill a Nazi when the village is burning down, but then you discover it’s a zombie and the entire town has become overrun with them. When you get a double barrel shotgun and start sawing off the barrel only for an enemy to enter the room and you start sawing it off faster. It’s not much, but it made me laugh and realize I was playing a game. That isn’t to say it’s humor all the time. Again, tone issues aren’t as much, and The Old Blood has a lot of moments designed to disturb the player or make them feel uncomfortable. However, these moments actually work and lead to something. Another aspect I also like more about The Old Blood is how the entire story is shown through a first person perspective up until the end. Nothing wrong about the cinematic cutscenes, but helps immerse you into the role of BJ more & at times connect to him.
My impressions with Wolfenstien: The Old Blood are positively strong, but that doesn’t mean I have gripes with the game. I still hate how you have to manually loot ammo and items off of the ground instead of just running by it and automatically picking it up. It disrupts the flow of fights and at times makes it harder. When you are low on ammo and quickly need refills, but realize it’s scattered around the battlefield. I can forgive The Old Blood as oftentimes there are convenient refills in side rooms. The intro section is quite lengthy with no way of skipping it, and the level that follows afterwards while fun is forced stealth which may kill replays for some players. There is a boss fight midway through the game I thought was hard, but turned out to be really easy once I figured it out and it feels gimmicky. There’s one level where you pilot a mech through zombie ruins and it’s not very good. Not that the level is hard, but controlling the mech feels clunky and zombies are the least intimidating enemies in the game. Besides that there’s nothing else I dislike about this game. Wolfenstien: The Old Blood is a Wolfenstien game I actually enjoyed! It’s short but fun. It doesn’t overstay its welcome and I can easily recommend it to anyone who wants a good first person shooter. In the end I give Wolfenstien: The Old Blood a 9/10 for excellence at best.
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