Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a collaboration between Wolfenstein developers Machine Games and Dishonored and Prey developers Arkane. The idea is that Machine Games supply the excellent (most of the time) Wolfenstein shooting gameplay, and Arkane supply the excellent (most of the time) Dishonored level design. What’s not to like?

Well, quite a lot, as it turns out.

I should say up front that I don’t actively dislike Wolfenstein: Youngblood the way a lot of the internet seems to right now. It’s sitting on a  47% “Mixed” rating on Steam as of the time of writing, which I feel is very unfair for a game that is a lot of fun to play. (Most of the time.) Unfortunately Youngblood has chosen to actually experiment a bit with the Wolfenstein formula, and that experiment doesn’t really work, and the botched nature of these new systems appears to be pissing a lot of people off. I get that. It pissed me off at a couple of points during my trip through Youngblood. The thing is, though, I can also recognise that the moment-to-moment gameplay of Youngblood — leaping around in a suit of magic power armour shooting Nazis with a selection of around nine improbably-sized weapons — is as fun as it has ever been, and is certainly a damn sight better than the comparatively tepid stuff to be found in New Colossus. It’s just a bit baffling that this excellent shooter gameplay is now sharing a bed with… permanent co-op and RPG-style levelling mechanics?

Hmmm.

I’m guessing this sudden desire to innovate and experiment has been driven in part by the 2016 Doom reboot. Like the original Doom and the original Wolfenstein, the 2016 Doom did everything that the 2014 Wolfenstein did in terms of tearing around at light speed slaughtering enemies, and it did it better. 2017’s New Colossus hadn’t really had time to react to the existence of Doom, which is why it was so underwhelming. Youngblood has, though, and it’s notable that the basic movement and shooting in Youngblood is now almost a direct replica of the stuff in Doom. Just like Doom, you start the game in a suit of power armour giving you super speed and double jump and mantling abilities from the get-go. On the flipside the signature Wolfenstein mechanic of being able to dual-wield most weapons is much less noticeable, as you can only do it with pistols and submachine guns. The shooting in Youngblood is mostly a case of you holding one very large gun which you use to blast Nazis into tiny chunks — again, just like Doom. The weapons are a bit unimaginative (shotgun, assault rifle, grenade launcher etc.) but most of them have their niche and you’re switching constantly during combat, which is usually a sign that a game is doing something right.

The problem here is that Wolfenstein can’t just copy Doom because publishers Bethesda already have a franchise that does the Doom mechanics. It’s called Doom. Wolfenstein therefore has to find some other way to justify its existence in a post-Doom world; with Old Blood it also set a precedent of following up a big mainline Wolfenstein title with a smaller expandalone one that reused many of the assets and was consequently cheaper to develop, and so Youngblood is arguably an ideal opportunity for them to try something new. I’m never going to begrudge a game developer trying something new when it’s driven by a genuine desire for change instead of chasing market trends, which is probably why I’m a little more sanguine about it than all those people leaving angry Steam reviews. But Youngblood does, unfortunately, feel rather experimental, like I’m dealing with a jury-rigged prototype instead of a revolutionary new design. The best of its ideas are hampered by the technical restrictions of the Wolfenstein engine and the reduced budget available for this smaller interim release, while the worst of them are exacerbated a hundredfold by those same limitations.

So. Wolfenstein: Youngblood is the tale of BJ Blazkowicz’s twin daughters Jess and Soph, who have been trained from birth in the fine arts of Nazi-killing by both BJ and his wife Anya and are fairly proficient at it despite their teenage years. BJ goes missing at the start of the game and the twins find evidence pointing towards Nazi-occupied Paris as his likely location, so they get together with their tech-guru friend Abby – who rather conveniently has a pair of power suits for them to use — and fly over to Paris to help out the Resistance there as a means to finding their father. This is very quickly boiled down to “break into these three heavily guarded locations and hack into the computers there”, but with a catch: all of the Nazis guarding the computer compounds are much higher level than you are at the start of the game, making them practically impossible to kill. Before making your assault on the computers you first have to spend a bit of time wandering around the various Paris environments killing Nazis and doing side quests; this will let you upgrade your weapons and suit abilities to the point where you can take the plot missions on.

This is where Arkane’s influence is most heavily felt in Youngblood: it’s gone from a traditionally linear first-person shooter to a more free-roaming experience with most of Paris accessible from the start of the game. Or it would be free-roaming, at least, if a) the game wasn’t still restricted by the necessity of packaging things up into discrete levels (you’ll see a lot of loading screens in Youngblood), b) there were more than four of those levels, and c) there was literally anything at all in those levels that was memorable. Seriously, I’ve spent three or four hours wandering around the Paris streets shooting Nazis and I couldn’t describe a single distinguishing feature about them, they’re so generically Paris. The thing is there are very few actual locations in these levels; they’re about the size of a typical Dishonored level and are further compartmentalised by the necessity of each of them having to support multiple unconnected mission objectives and side quests, so the best you get is the hospital which is three corridors and a couple of rooms, or the interrogation “complex” which is two corridors and a big open gantry, because to have them be larger than that would eat up too much of the level.

Mostly the Paris streets are just that: streets, designed to get from point A to point B with a minimum of fuss (well, aside from all of the Nazi barricades and robots), and with almost none of the architectural flair displayed in Dishonored and Prey. Oh, the game does try, with minor secrets and collectibles scattered throughout the game, but it’s always on the order of a locked door leading to a room with some stuff in it rather than the far more elaborate mechanisms concealing Dishonored 2’s secrets. The running battles with the Nazis are always fun, but they’re fun because of the Doom-style combat and (later in the game) the obscene overpoweredness of your characters, not because the levels are in any way a decent backdrop for them. You’re mostly stuck in the middle of a street, after all, so all they can really add in terms of combat geometry are the standard collection of waist-high barricades and the occasional raised platform. It’s not really possible to play stealthily the way it is in Dishonored — you have a cloak ability and can run around shanking Nazis for a little bit, but once the alarm is raised all enemies will be able to spot you regardless of whether you’ve got the cloak on or not — so while it was occasionally entertaining to deal with big boss enemies by simply running past them and into the next area transition, that was the sum total of additional combat tactics afforded by the level design.

(Youngblood makes matters even worse by relegating many of its side missions into generic sewer levels that are put together out of obviously prefab chunks and which must have been fairly cheap to create. My hatred of sewer levels is well-documented, and Youngblood is a good poster child for why I hate them; no game developer is ever going to intentionally add a sewer level if they have the time and resources to do something, anything else, and so having to resort to adding one anyway is a sign that all is not well with the development of your game.)

Youngblood’s free-roaming doesn’t really land, then. The level design does get better once you start storming the three computer compounds, as these are put together much more like a traditional Wolfenstein level with a smattering of Arkane-flavoured alternate routing through vents and on top of light fittings, but the streets and sewers in which you spend the majority of your time are as generic as they come despite the alternate ‘80s Nazi chic. It does rather feel like they’re only there to support the levelling mechanics: killing Nazis and completing missions levels you up and gives you ability points, which can then be spent on a variety of hilarious Nazi-murdering skills. Scattered throughout the various environments are chests full of — sigh — silver coins, which are somehow a currency in this game that is used to upgrade your weapons to fire faster and do more damage. In order to level both your abilities and your weapons up enough to finish the game you’ll have to criss-cross Youngblood’s levels many times — although, contrary to some reviews you might have read, dedicated grinding is not necessary in order to beat the higher level enemies, since I didn’t have to do any. All that was required was to do most of the side missions and — and this is really important — not tackle any of the computer locations until we had completely cleaned out every other activity available.

Now, if you don’t do this, you’re in for a world of pain thanks to the way Youngblood handles those levels and abilities and  weapon upgrades, which are partially level-locked anyway. The increase in power that they offer relative to the baddies isn’t linear but rather geometric; you go from chipping away at giant Nazi death robots with an assault rifle to one-shotting them with an upgraded Laserkraftwerk while laughing as they fail to make any impression on your vast pool of health and armour that you can fully regenerate every 20 seconds. Most enemies in Youngblood appear to be calibrated towards the shallow end of this power curve; they will be challenging to handle with basic weapons and abilities, but not impossible unless they outlevel you by five or more. However, the various boss enemies are a completely different story, as the weakest of them are targeted at midgame characters who have bought all of the first tier of upgrades for all of their guns and who have invested in the first half of the health and armour skill trees. If you have not done this you simply won’t be able to put out enough damage to kill them before dying yourself. I wouldn’t have too much of an objection to this if they didn’t represent such an obvious difficulty spike; you’ll be happily slaughtering your way through one of those three computer compound missions and there’ll be nothing about the standard mook enemies to indicate that you might be in over your head. Then you get to the end of the level — this takes around 30 minutes — and you run into a brick wall of a boss who, it turns out, you are simply not equipped to handle.

And when the boss inevitably kills you, the icing on the cake is that when you respawn, you’ll discover there is no checkpointing and that you’ve been dumped back at the start of the level, presumably because this was too difficult to implement for a co-op game on a budget. All of the enemies have respawned, and you have to do the entire thing all over again. At the end of the game, when you have actual, literal superpowers to help you on your way, this can be done very quickly and trivially. But if you try to do those missions before you’ve got enough upgrades and abilities unlocked you’re going to end up very frustrated and annoyed — and as it turns out, the amount of upgrades and ability points that you need are almost exactly the same as the amount granted by doing all of the available side missions. Youngblood is one of those “open world” games where it’s nowhere near as open as it would like to appear; you have to do all of the content at some point, and all you as a player really get to decide is what order you do it in. And since it turns out that all of the side missions are actually compulsory, you end up going back and forth across Paris through the same areas fighting the same enemy groups over and over again.  There’s only so many times you can kill them before the experience inevitably starts to pall.

Honestly, Youngblood does come dangerously close to being another Rage 2: it’s got a good core combat loop and the powers are fun once you’ve unlocked them, but the surrounding game fabric is stretched dangerously thin through banal repetition and does an incredibly poor job of providing any meaning or context for why you’re shotgunning your thousandth Nazi in the face. What little story there is is there to support the standard uninspired RPG structure of doing three levels and then doing the Big Level and then fighting the end boss to complete the game, and there’s basically zero effort expended to hide that nakedly artificial setup. However, Youngblood has three things on its side that Rage 2 didn’t.

First is that, as with most things, shooting Nazis is much more fun when you do it with a friend, and Youngblood is a co-op game first and foremost with many mechanics and concepts that are based around there being two players present in the game. If you don’t have a Player Two to bring along then you’ll end up being accompanied by an annoying and not particularly effective AI player, but even with an autonomous chum I don’t think it’s a viable game to play solo. With an actual human friend playing along with you, though, it’s worth playing Youngblood just for the sheer hell of it, especially if you pick different ability builds. I went for super throwing knives and a fully upgraded pistol while my regular co-op partner Kenti went for the ability to pick up and retain heavy weapons along with the Nazi equivalent of Uzis, and these builds complemented each other quite well; I’d run around knifing people to death while Kenti repeatedly fell over because it turns out heavy weapons aren’t that great, but he made a wonderful target that drew a lot of fire while I got the job done.

Second is that that the two protagonists of Youngblood, Jess and Soph, are fantastically well-realised and basically what Rage 2’s artificially edgy player character was trying way too hard to be. They’re teenagers, and they act like it: constantly goofing around and treating the wholesale slaughter of Nazis like a big game. They’re utterly convinced of their own immortality in the way that teenagers often are — they’re certainly far too naive to know what they’re getting into when they jet off to Paris — and their youthful energy makes for a welcome and refreshing contrast to BJ’s increasingly morose and increasingly wearing internal monologues in New Colossus. It also made some of the more weirdly unnecessary game elements like the armour and weapon cosmetics a lot more natural, because of course a teenager is going to daub war paint all over their power armour. They’ve even got a boost ability called a Pep Signal that essentially amounts to throwing up gang signs or doing dance moves to give both players a temporary buff, and I kind of loved that I could restore myself and Kenti to full armour by stopping for a couple of seconds in the middle of a furious firefight to do the robot. Jess and Soph don’t have a huge amount of depth to them as characters, but I liked them nevertheless and enjoyed spending the eight hours it took to finish Youngblood in their company.

And third is, well, it’s £25. That’s a bit pricier than my typical budget purchase, but also substantially cheaper than what I spent on New Colossus or Rage 2 and so I’m commensurately a little more forgiving of Youngblood’s shortcomings and limitations than I might be otherwise. The relatively short length and the experimental nature of the game are effectively factored in to the RRP, and the good thing about these shorter Wolfenstein games is that while they do tend to get as much wrong as they do right, they don’t stick around long enough to get on your nerves. That being said, I think it’s something of a failed experiment, as I’m not sure there’s much in Youngblood that could be taken forward into a mainline Wolfenstein game — not unless Machine Games are going to make it an inherently co-op series from this point onwards and are willing to do some significant technical work to shore up the engine so that it can actually properly accommodate co-op gameplay. The power armour abilities work quite well, the weapon upgrades less so because very few of them change the actual functioning of the gun and most of them seem focused on making damage numbers bigger; however, neither the abilities nor the upgrades require the absurdly gamey levelling structure to be in the game, and so I don’t think any of that stuff is going to make it through to Wolfenstein 3. And so while Youngblood is more or less adequate as a short once-through and done co-op shooter, it’s not anywhere close to being an answer to the question of what Wolfenstein should be in a post-Doom world, and is itself doomed to remain nothing more than an interesting curio.

The post Thoughts: Wolfenstein – Youngblood appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Not really played anything worth writing about in the last two weeks. I’d like to keep up some sort of momentum, though, and so went back and finished off this review of Wolfenstein 2, which was mostly written at the end of October last year but which I never got around to putting up on the blog.

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Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus strikes me as an exceedingly confused game.

I say this because it seems to have lost its way after the rip-roaring reboot that was 2014’s The New Order. After over a decade of Call of Duty and other assorted military shooter knockoffs, TNO successfully resurrected the older, arcade style of FPS and updated it for the modern era. Other games had previously tried to do the same thing — most notably Bulletstorm and RAGE — but neither of them were as effective as Wolfenstein at bottling the spirit of the old first-person classics and infusing it into something that felt fast, fluid, and modern. The fact that it also had a surprisingly well thought-out take on a Man In The High Castle-esque alternate history where the Nazis won the Second World War was simply the icing on the cake, and any flaws could be excused on the basis that Machine Games naturally weren’t going to get everything right the first time around.

Which is why New Colossus comes across as both baffling and baffled itself, in almost equal measure; it has arguably regressed in some aspects from New Order, with level design that’s nowhere near as tight and encounter design that seems tailored to engender frustration rather than fun. At best it hasn’t progressed at all from what New Order accomplished, and it appears to have focused its efforts on doubling down on all of the wrong stuff. And at its heart it can’t appear to decide what it really wants to be, which is the most puzzling thing. New Order had a relatively focused mission statement, and where it departed from this into the realms of the truly absurd (the Moon base segment, for example) it always did so in service of the gameplay. New Colossus by contrast feels like a Nazi Dystopia Tourism Simulator at times, throwing ridiculous settings at you that it can’t figure out how to turn into interesting gameplay, so instead it gives you an almost entirely non-interactive tour of a Nazi-occupied US town and then stuffs you into a tiny tunnel to blast some Nazis in some restrictive, boring corridor shooter gameplay.

The fact that I am even mentioning the words “corridor shooter” in a Wolfenstein review is a pretty solid indicator of just how badly things have gone wrong here. Wolfenstein is at its best when the player is sprinting around with an assault rifle in one hand and an automatic shotgun in the other, running and diving to do slide-by executions of Nazis that can’t pivot quickly enough to track you. Of course you need somewhat open level design to facilitate this sort of gameplay, and it’s something that the Doom reboot absolutely nailed with its wave-based combat arenas. And to be fair, there are plenty of bits in New Colossus that satisfy this requirement, and when they game actually gives you the space to move around properly it’s a hell of a lot of fun to play. The big problem New Colossus has, unfortunately, is that these fun bits are mostly located towards the end of the game, when you’ve unlocked special abilities called Contraptions and Machine Games have had to put together levels that let you use them. For the first half of the game the levels consist of the following:

• A submarine, which is all narrow corridors with no room to maneuver,
• An airship, which is all narrow corridors with no room to maneuver.
• The submarine again, which is all narrow corridors with no room to maneuver.
• The bombed-out ruins of New York, which is… well no, I can’t really complain about this one aside from it looking exactly like Fallout 3.
• A train, which is all narrow corridors with no room to maneuver.

So that’s four out of five levels which stick you inside a dreary, constricted interior environment filled with pipes and metal and exactly one way to run. For the opening level you can’t even run; you’re stuck wheeling yourself around in a wheelchair, which I would have accepted as a way to contrast the power fantasy of picking up the magic power armour in the next level if they actually let you do anything interesting with that power armour that wasn’t running straight into enemy gunfire and dying.

This makes the opening four hours of New Colossus a curiously miserable experience, and one which teaches you to play the game in precisely the wrong kind of way. It turns out that standing in one place in New Colossus is an excellent way to get yourself killed, but thanks to the level layout that’s all you really can do. Because there’s so many corridors, and because the weight of incoming gunfire is so overwhelming, and because you have precisely no chance of dodging it because you don’t have any freedom of movement, the only way you can make any kind of progress is by playing the fucking thing exactly like Call Of Duty: hiding behind cover, peeking out for a few seconds to fire off half a magazine and kill one Nazi, and then ducking back in to reload while approximately five thousand bullets whizz past. To add insult to injury the lean command is a weird toggle (in that you hold down another button to turn your left/right strafe commands into lean ones) which is a bad port of a control scheme designed for control pads and not at all usable in the heat of the moment.

Speaking of terrible control schemes, let’s take a not-so-short paragraph to talk about the weapon wheels. New Colossus has made the decision to expand the original game’s dual-wielding capabilities so that you can now dual-wield any pair of weapons that you desire. This is great! Being able to have both an assault rifle and autoshotgun equipped at the same time means you don’t have to switch between them for short/long range enemies and makes the combat flow far more effectively — when it’s given room to flow, that is. God help you if you ever want to switch away from this combo, though, because you’ll have to interact with not one but two weapon wheels. Pushing the weapon wheel button brings up both, but with the wheel for your right weapon active. To change the left weapon you have to wheel left to switch over to the left weapon wheel and make your selection. This probably makes a bit more sense on a controller’s analogue sticks as you can just hold left, but the PC substitute of using the mouse to rotate through the wheel is hugely clumsy at the best of times and not at all practical in the middle of a massive gunfight. Of course if you’re playing an FPS on the PC you’re probably wondering why you’re using the weapon wheels at all when the standard 1-9 keys are sitting right above WSAD, but these only work with the right hand weapon. To get the left hand weapon changed you have to go through the wheels, and likely get yourself shot into the bargain¹.

This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if New Colossus had actually done what literally every single FPS has been doing for the last decade and activated slow-time when you had the weapon wheel open. This is the developers acknowledging that the player is having to interface with an imprecise control system in a high-risk environment, and so they take the risk away and give you the time to pick the right gun. Not New Colossus, though; its gunfights keep right on truckin’ at full speed while you have this doubly-complicated atrocity of a control scheme open, and so if you ever have to change weapons you can kiss goodbye to any combat flow you’ve actually managed to achieve because you’ll have to find somewhere safe to hide first. The final insult here is that weapon switching in and of itself is painfully slow as protagonist BJ deploys stocks and yanks back on charging handles every single time he brings up a new gun, costing you precious seconds in a firefight where every second is supposed to count. Contrast that to the Doom reboot, where they recognise that anything that gets in the way of shooting demons is a waste of your time and so made weapon switching practically instantaneous, and it’s easy to see why this is such a misstep.

All of this UI and control jankiness absolutely pales in comparison to the number one sin New Colossus commits, however: its player damage feedback mechanics are practically non-existent. In most FPSes when you get hit by an incoming round the game will do something appropriate to surface the fact you are being riddled with gunfire, usually by making the screen flash red. Modern games usually have more directional indicators like a red arrow indicating the general direction you’re being shot from, and in most of them the sound design is usually good enough that you can trace incoming fire back to its source from the sound of the shots and bullet whine alone. Some FPSes have the player character grunting and growling as bullets tear through their flesh, alerting the player to the fact that painful things are happening to them. You don’t need to have all of these systems, but having something in place to tell you that you’re being shot is kind of necessary given that this is a video game and we (thankfully) cannot experience the protagonist’s gunshot trauma first-hand.

New Colossus disagrees with this genre standard, however. New Colossus has extremely weak visual feedback for getting shot (the screen goes a little blurry) and enemy gunshots always sound like they’re coming from far end of a very long tunnel even if they’re right next to you in the same room pouring the bullets directly into your earhole. Your best indicator that something is awry in New Colossus will likely be the actual health and armour totals at the bottom of the screen; if you wander into an ambush the first you’ll know of it will be one or both of these numbers decreasing precipitously, with no other feedback worth the name to indicate you’re about to die. It is absolutely ridiculous that one of the top-tier FPS titles released in 2017 forces you to keep an eye on a pair of tiny readouts to see if you’re being shot instead of actively surfacing that fact to you in some way — especially so given that there’s no recharging health in this game and enemy gunfire can easily reduce you from full health to half health in less than a second.

(Here’s the absolutely crazy thing about the damage feedback systems in New Colossus. In the Resistance’s submarine hub area that you go back to after every mission there is an arcade cabinet that you can use to play a full, in-universe version of the original Wolfenstein 3D. This has been altered somewhat to play to the world’s alternate-history in that the Nazis are now all Soviets who scream “Mother Russia!” instead of “Mein leben!” when you gun them down, but it’s in all other respects identical to the version of Wolfenstein 3D that was released back in 1992. This 25 year-old game —  which, let us remember, had to invent most of the standard FPS concepts because there wasn’t really any such thing as an FPS before Wolfenstein 3D – has better damage feedback than New Colossus. The screen flashes red when BJ gets hit and you can see the little animated portrait of his face grimace. If that’s not a damning indictment of New Colossus’s UI I don’t know what is.)

Combine all this with the startlingly unimaginative level design of the first half of New Colossus and you have a recipe for an intensely frustrating FPS experience. A corridor shooter is not what I bought Wolfenstein for! Especially not a sub-par one that doesn’t even have the standard cover shooter features defined by Call Of Duty; when you can’t even out-design a series that’s famous for being the most creatively bankrupt out there you have a serious problem. Time and again I exchanged shots with Nazis skulking at the other end of a corridor, and time and again I was gunned down because the whole point of Wolfenstein is that you’re supposed to be constantly moving and it wasn’t letting me move. I played on the middle difficulty setting, and while frequent player death is more of an assumption in the Wolfensteins and Dooms of this world I feel like dying 10-20 times per setpiece fight — mostly because of the terrible UI and sound design — really shouldn’t be part of the plan.

Now, as I mentioned a little earlier, it does get better once you get the Contraptions. You get to pick one out of three as part of the story, with the others being picked up in optional missions later on, and they consist of a charging-at-people-and-through-walls ability that kicks in when you sprint, a weird sort of snake ability where BJ contorts his body like Eugene Tooms from the X-Files to fit through tiny ventilation ducts, and a jump-really-high ability. They’re not particularly imaginative in terms of their mechanical effects, but they’re a set of additional mobility abilities that provide an absolutely critical balm for a game that’s been so restrictive up until that point — because as soon as you get that choice to pick one of three, the level designers suddenly have to put together levels that can accommodate all three, and which are consequently a little roomier and actually allow for the run ‘n gun gameplay that a  Wolfenstein game should have been doing from the start.

There was definitely a marked shift in my perception of New Colossus pre- and post-Contraption. Pre-Contraption I was more annoyed with the game than anything else, having ragequit on three separate occasions from encounters where I was repeatedly being undone by the level design and the godawful UI issues. Post-Contraption was a much more positive experience, since it turns out that enemy accuracy markedly decreases if you’re sprinting around and you don’t end up losing all of your armour to a single volley of bullets that you didn’t hear coming. It was more or less on-par with the gameplay of New Order, although I was disappointed that it didn’t show that it had learned any lessons from Doom; I felt that Doom benefited greatly from New Order’s existence, and it’s a shame that the converse isn’t true for New Colossus.

This is why I say New Colossus is confused; when it plays to its strengths, as it does in the latter half of the game, it’s just as good as its predecessor. However, to get there you need to slog through 4-5 hours of a very different game; one that seems very content to funnel you down corridors and watch you die over and over and again. The plot and world-building that I quite enjoyed from New Order also seem markedly more disjointed this time around – yes, to a point every single game is built together out of a series of “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” ideas from the designers that are stitched together into a coherent whole, but that’s New Colossus’s entire problem. It isn’t coherent. I use the Frankenstein’s monster metaphor a little too often on this blog, but only because there’s rather too many games that end up fitting it perfectly; much like a Call Of Duty game, New Colossus is a collection of disconnected, isolated level ideas that have been bolted together with no regard as to mechanical or narrative flow. BJ is in occupied America! Now he’s on an underground rocket train! Now he’s on Venus! Why is he there? Do these locations introduce any particularly interesting gameplay ideas outside of their CoD-esque minigame segments? The New Colossus designers don’t appear to know, but these locations certainly looked striking in the concept art so I guess they’re going into the game now and we’ll figure out what order to put them in later on.

New Colossus is far from the worst game I played in 2017. Despite all of its missteps, and despite my frequent comparisons, it certainly isn’t anywhere near as creatively bankrupt as so-called genre leaders Call Of Duty and Battlefield, and when it’s firing on all cylinders it’s still a quite literal blast to play. It’s as if Doom tearing back onto the scene gave Wolfenstein a severe case of existential angst, though; just like the original Doom it did a lot of what Wolfenstein did, but better, and now Wolfenstein can’t figure out what its unique selling point is supposed to be. I suppose that in that context New Colossus can be seen as something of an experiment as the series attempts to identify a new reason for existing, and it is not without its successes, but the overwhelming impression I’ve come away with at the end of it is of wandering through a grotesque gallery of its failed specimens while a thousand Nazis shoot at me. I wonder what New Colossus would have looked like if it had had the confidence to acknowledge that it was sufficiently different from Doom to co-exist comfortably alongside it, and had instead doubled down on strengths like its subtle world-building and the dual-wielding while learning from Doom just like the reboot learned from New Order. But that, alas, is one alternate history that we’ll never get to see.

The post Thoughts: Wolfenstein 2 – The New Colossus appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

It’s been a little difficult to find the time and motivation to write recently so posts may be somewhat more infrequent over the next couple of months. 

When you say the words “expansion pack” to me, the things that immediately spring to mind are the classic expansion packs in the RPG and strategy genres. Yuri’s Revenge, Throne of Bhaal, Lord of Destruction — it’s a list that stretches on and on. Given the great success of the idea here it’s easy to forget there was once a time when the FPS expansion pack was just as popular, starting with basic Doom WADs and continuing on through the Quake and Half-Life expansion packs to Call of Duty: United Offensive, which was the last really high-profile one. FPSes have since experimented with episodic content and smaller bite-size chunks sold as DLC, but while the RPG/strategy expansion pack concept lives on thanks to the sterling efforts of developers such as Firaxis and Blizzard, first-person shooters have pretty much discarded full-on expansion packs as a decidedly old-school idea.

This is why I think it’s particularly fitting that Wolfenstein: The Old Blood has been released as an expansion pa- I mean, an expandalone, because TOB is as old-school as they come. It follows up last year’s surprisingly thoughtful Wolfenstein: The New Order with a standalone prequel set in an alternate 1946, but where TNO augmented its excellent shooter credentials with an intriguing alternate history and well-measured writing, The Old Blood prefers to dedicate itself solely to the business of Nazi-killing. Nearly everything about it is a deliberate callback to the original Wolfenstein 3D, from the premise – you kick off the game by literally infiltrating Castle Wolfenstein, again — to the main menu, which is a modern homage to the classic Wolfenstein 3D box art. Even the particular flavour of Nazis that you kill can be thought of as much more traditional; New Order already threw the spotlight on their mad scientist technology, so Old Blood returns to the RTCW theme of their meddling with the occult.

This conscious focus on Wolfenstein’s roots is refreshing, in a way. It’s nice to play a shooter as unpretentious as The Old Blood, whose major concern is showing the player a good time with precious little in the vein of quicktime events or scripted plot sequences to get in the way of the shooting. Series protagonist BJ does the odd bit of soul-searching internal monologue but it falls somewhat flat without the poignancy of New Order’s temporal disjointment to back it up, and so I think it was wise to jettison most of the story in favour of the action. It ultimately boils down to a very simple premise: there is a head Nazi who is trying to acquire supernatural powers for the Reich, and your job is to stop them while getting entangled in some spectacular action sequences along the way. That’s not to say that Old Blood doesn’t have some neat thematic and visual tricks up its sleeve, but it’s almost 100% reliant on the shooting to carry it forward as a game.

It’s good news, then, that the quality of Old Blood’s combat is on par with that found in New Order. Most of what’s good about it is imported wholesale from that game – the visceral impact of the guns, the pleasing variety of enemy encounters (there’s only 4-5 primary types of baddie in the game, but Old Blood keeps mixing them up in different ways and locations) occasionally broken up by faux-stealth sections where you sneak about and try to kill off officers before all hell breaks loose, and the neat cover system where BJ will intelligently lean out to shoot round corners if you bring up your iron sights. One of the things I particularly liked about the combat in New Order was that you found yourself constantly switching between weapons in a firefight to take on different kinds of enemies, and that’s true of the Old Blood too. There are a few new weapons such as a bolt-action rifle for popping heads and a pistol-sized rocket launcher for taking out bosses; mostly, though, Old Blood sticks to what worked so well in the original game, just with a fresh coat of paint.

It’s a hell of a paintjob, though. New Order had some fantastic locations, but there’s something indefinably timeless about sneaking through a dusty old castle chock full of secret areas and knifing unsuspecting Nazis in the back. The level design is excellent as ever, providing a largely linear series of action set-pieces (there’s a great cablecar segment) but also rewarding exploration with bonus goodies including the opportunity to take on secret “Nightmare” levels that reconstruct the original Wolfenstein’s pixelated environment and 2D baddies. The Old Blood is mostly pretty good at keeping control in the hands of the player while they’re scrambling through these environments, too; there’s the occasional scripted cutscene where BJ does something incredibly stupid, but these are all the more jarring for how out of place they are when put in context with the rest of the game.

Broadly speaking, then, The Old Blood is just as good as its predecessor when it comes to the actual nitty-gritty of shooting Nazis, and that’s pleasant news when you consider that mechanically speaking New Order is probably the best FPS that’s been released in the last couple of years – the combat is entertaining enough that it’s actually rewarding to play on a higher difficulty setting, while the unlockable perks and secrets give you some nicely-structured short-term goals beyond just getting to the end of the level.  It’s far more shallow in terms of its themes and doesn’t hit the narrative highs New Order did, but then it’s not trying to – this is a love letter to the original Wolfenstein games almost from start to finish, and if you’ve played and enjoyed any of those at all it’s likely you’ll have a lot of fun with it.

I do have some complaints, however. These largely have to do with the game’s pacing; for example, the first half-hour of the game is pretty badly laid out. It whets your appetite by opening with two minutes of dual-wielding mayhem, which is exactly what I bought Old Blood for, and then makes the inexplicable decision to then throw you into a prison and make you do an enforced stealth section for the next thirty. The prison is patrolled by super-soldiers who can’t be killed except by sneaking past them and deactivating the power generators they’re hooked up to, and getting spotted by one is pretty much instant death. It makes very little sense to kick off a game that’s supposed to be such a direct homage to Wolfenstein 3D in this way; unlike the stealth-lite sections where you’re hunting officers this is slow-paced, awkward and repetitive (you have to take out six or seven super-soldiers before you can get out of the prison), and was just not a good way to kick off the game. At all.

Fortunately the Old Blood picks up significantly after this, veritably throwing weapons and enemies at you like it’s actively apologising for making you sit through such a terrible opening level, and for the next few hours everything is great. The game is split into two halves, however, with only the first half involving BJ’s rampage through Castle Wolfenstein; once he makes it out of the castle and into a nearby German town the quality of the game dips noticeably, mostly because some bad voodoo goes down and replaces most of the interesting and fun Nazi baddies with undead Nazi zombies. Thematically this makes sense, and there’s a great bit where flaming zombies are literally raining from the sky as they fall out of burning airships above you. Mechanically, though, it’s just about as ill-judged as replacing the Covenant with the Flood was in the Halo games, as the zombies don’t require a huge amount of thought to kill beyond shooting them in the head. And if there’s one thing that this new strain of Wolfenstein makes very, very easy, it’s shooting bad guys in the head.

Still, while it wasn’t quite as good as the first half of the game, the second half didn’t start to actively nosedive until the last hour or so, confronting you with the most boring giant robot segment I’ve experienced since Space Marine. It doesn’t even have any guns! It just does a terrible sort of swipe move that instagibs any zombies that happen to be nearby, which once again moves the game away from the shooting elements that are so fun. I would have ditched it immediately except you need to tow it around for twenty-odd minutes to smash down various walls and doors. Then almost immediately after that you’re confronted with the end boss, which is kind of awful because it does almost no damage on its own and instead functions as this big HP pinata you have to slowly chip away at while soldiers and zombies – the real threats – constantly spawn from monster closets around the boss arena. It’s a very poor way to cap off what was otherwise an extremely enjoyable experience.

Given that the Old Blood is around 5-6 hours long, and approximately one hour of that is actually not that good, all things considered, I think I would be making a lot more out of these flaws were it not for the price tag: clocking in at a mere £15 on Steam it almost seems like a bargain in this modern age of hour-long DLC content. For that much money it turns out I’m willing to overlook quite a lot as long as the overall package has some positive qualities to balance it out, and the Old Blood has those by the bucketload. Yes, from a certain point of view it isn’t really expanding on what New Order did and instead just provides more of the same. From my point of view, though, that’s no bad thing at all.

The post Thoughts: Wolfenstein – The Old Blood appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

If you asked me to pick words to describe the latest entry in the Wolfenstein series, the chances are you could probably predict most of them before I’d even said anything. They’d be words like:

• Fast.
• Violent.
• Gory.
• Gruesome.
• Silly.
• Over-the-top.

Historically this little collection of verbs has been all the series has ever reached for; it’s been content not to take itself too seriously in its Nazi-slaughtering exploits, and focuses instead on providing simple, low-brainpower fun. What you might not be expecting, however, is for New Order to add an additional word onto the end of that list, and that word is:

• Intelligent.

Perhaps it’s the contrast with the traditional comic-book nature of the series (and New Order is no exception to this) but I think this newest Wolfenstein game has turned out to be one of the smartest, most expertly assembled shooters I’ve played in a good long while.  It has all the violent things you’d expect from a Wolfenstein — killing Nazis with knives, killing Nazis with guns, killing Nazis with lasers, blowing up Nazis etc. etc. – and it supplies them in a familiar and well-polished form. At the same time, though, it makes excellent use of its setting through a thousand little world-building touches and some hugely above-average characters and writing to get you invested in the bits that happen in between the Nazi killing, i.e. the plot.

One thing that surprised me about New Order is how much it embraces its setting. I knew it took place in an alternate 1960s where the Nazis won World War 2 and conquered the world, but I’ve been conditioned by a hundred substandard sci-fi series to expect alternate universes to not be treated as the “real” timeline; to have the writers get their kicks killing off all of the established characters (which they could never do in a proper episode) and then hammer a technobabble reset button at the end of the episode to switch everything back to normal. This is a lazy approach to a really interesting concept, and Wolfenstein rightly spurns it; when you start the game you’re already in an alternate 1946 where the Allies are losing the war thanks to Nazi wonder-weapons. The 1946 prologue segment takes about an hour and has three functions: as a tutorial, as a scene-setter (much of the advanced technology you later encounter is shown off here in prototype form), and as a love-letter to the original Wolfenstein titles, since much of it involves stalking Nazis through a dusty, decrepit castle that’s full of hidden passages and secret rooms. Then Shit Gets Real and series protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz finds himself catapulted into the North Sea with a hefty chunk of shrapnel lodged in his brain, sending him into a fourteen-year coma. When he wakes up, it’s 1960 and the Nazis have crushed almost all opposition to establish a global empire.

Now, the interesting thing about this setup is that in the context of the Wolfenstein universe there’s no “alternate” about it. There’s no time travel shennanigans, no do-overs and no reset buttons; what’s happened has happened and all B.J. can do is take up the fight where he left off. This lends everything that takes place in 1960 a sense of permanence that New Order uses to great effect in the subsequent missions, especially when coupled with the extra little touches scattered throughout the game that gradually build up a picture of what happened while B.J. was taking a nap. Some of these are the now-standard snippets of written text, usually in the form of newspaper cuttings, but New Order also chooses to communicate a lot through visual subtext – for example, the Nazi buildings are all made out of concrete and have a brutalist look similar to Prora, while their fortifications are very reminiscent of the flak towers that were built to defend major German cities from air attack. Mixed in the with fantastic elements of Wolfenstein’s DNA is a deep awareness of classic sci-fi like The Man In The High Castle; the Nazis haven’t just used their technology to build weapons of war, they’ve also achieved great feats of engineering like a bridge linking Gibraltar with Africa and a colony on the moon. This is why I say that New Order is an intelligent game — it’s very well-read and confident enough in its own intelligence to build a coherent world that would almost be believable if not for the giant death robots.

Having set up the world it then goes about populating it with characters that are, if not exactly masterpieces of writing, certainly far more well-rounded than the one-note supporting cast found in your typical Call of Duty title¹. There is still a group resisting the Nazi regime, and while it only consists of a half-dozen people you get to know each of them in between B.J’s missions to single-handedly slaughter every Nazi on the planet², which makes it all the more horrible when bad things start happening to them. New Order impressed me with its restraint in not going for any of the obvious emotional gut-punches, and yet nevertheless it manages to cram in some really understated, stark moments. It doesn’t shy away from showing how awful an uninhibited Nazi regime might be, and while it does get a bit over the top in trying to shock you with gore at times it’s the bloodless parts that are the most effective horror; the bleak reality of the Nazi prisons and concentration camps, and the casual way the Nazis dispensed with thousands of human lives. This is a really heavy topic for a videogame to tackle, especially one as traditionally superficial as Wolfenstein, and its very much to New Order’s credit that its treatment of it, while not perfect, didn’t come across as crass or cheap.

As a result New Order is an unexpectedly dark game in places, and at times I didn’t think this sat that well with some of the arcade environments the game sets you up in – one moment you’re watching a suicide bomber take out a Nazi installation in occupied London, and the next you’re shooting Nazis with lasers on the moon, or exploding them with rockets while listening to an account of one woman’s attempt to resist the Nazi regime by covertly killing as many as she can (despite being a spin on the hoary old audio log concept this is one of the best bits of the game because it’s so damn personal). It’s a tone thing, and one that’s bugged me before in shooters like Bulletstorm; it tries to tackle some really serious themes but is hobbled by its heritage as a series where most people expect to blast Nazis in the face with a minigun. Fortunately for New Order, though, I think it just about gets away with it because the part where you blast Nazis in the face with a minigun is really, really good.

When you get down to the actual act of killing Nazis, Wolfenstein is as arcade as they come. There’s quasi-regenerating health (it’ll regenerate up to 20 percent of your health bar) and iron sights, but these are practically the only mechanics it assimilates from modern shooters; otherwise we’re talking the classic setup of health pickups, armour pickups and as many weapons as you have number keys. New Order wisely lets you carry around all of them at once and while the pistol is fairly useless the others are all pleasingly situational and remain useful throughout the game; they’re the standard machine gun, shotgun, sniper rifle etc. but there is some imagination displayed in how you can use them. First, there’s a variety of alternate ammo and fire modes that drastically change how each weapon works – shrapnel ammo for the shotgun bounces around corners and can catch bad guys hiding behind cover, while the alternate fire for the assault rifle turns it into a rocket launcher. Second, any weapon in the game can be dual-wielded; you can’t wield two different types of guns at once and the tradeoff is no iron sights and a reduced movement speed, but it’s extremely useful when there’s a big tough enemy that you want dead quick.

Pride of place amongst the weapons has to go to the Laserkraftwerk, though. This is New Order’s equivalent of the gravity gun, except it fires lasers so it’s inherently better. When you first find it it’s just a tool, used to cut through chains and fences, but you periodically find upgrade parts (that B.J. physically sticks onto it) which give it new abilities such as bouncing shots, a tesla upgrade that instantly ices most of the smaller mechanical enemies in the game, and a scope that autotargets and fires off the entire battery to one-shot even the miniboss baddies. A nice touch is that while there’s a low-energy continuous cutting mode for chopping holes through metal panels that you want to get past, if your (or the bad guys’) laser bolts hit those metal panels or other background pieces of scenery during a firefight they’ll burn a hole in it just the same; this becomes important when you or they are trying to use it for cover and it gradually starts to resemble swiss cheese.

There’s a couple of awkward bits about the gunplay in New Order – I really didn’t get on with the contextual lean system where you automatically lean when you iron sight near a corner, although I did appreciate that a lean system of some kind had at least been included – but it’s mostly extremely pleasing. The large number of weapons you carry around both provides variety and gives you options; the large variety of enemies you face require you to think on your feet and employ the right weapon for the right bad guy. Basic mooks can be taken out with just about anything, but armoured baddies like robots and super-soldiers have armour plating that has to be shot off (or punctured with the Laserkraftwerk) before you can kill them. You can do this by hitting them with a very large quantity of standard ammo – one of the occasions when you’d dual wield assault rifles or shotguns to unload as many bullets/shells as fast as possible – or by using one of your high-power options like rockets or the Laserkraftwerk; being able to actually think about which weapon to use for which scenario is something that New Order exploits to its fullest extent, and something that the pathetic two-weapon restriction found in most modern shooters can’t hope to match.

And of course because this is Wolfenstein, New Order is a quite astonishingly violent game. There’s the standard selection of gibs and other dismemberment, but some of the knife takedowns are also quite the expression of B.J’s issue with Nazis. As previously mentioned the horror aspects of the series are played up to their fullest, to the point where it actually made me wince a couple of times during cutscenes. I’d almost accuse it of being unnecessarily gratuitous if the rest of the game wasn’t so well-judged. It’s not without its flaws – having to pick up ammo by pressing E instead of just running over it was a really stupid design choice, and some of the checkpointing was extremely suspect given that you can’t manually save in New Order – but ultimately Wolfenstein: New Order is that rarest of things: a triple-A title that isn’t content to simply meet expectations, or even exceed them, but instead tries a few things that are genuinely quite fresh and new and rewrites the series playbook in the process. The end result is a little uneven, but it it’s still one of the best single-player shooters I’ve played in the last couple of years.

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