Things start back in 1946, however. We join BJ in the middle of an airborne assault on main bad guy (and series regular) Deathshead's super-secret castle base. Our hero's plane crash-lands in the middle of a pitched beach attack, and along with a Scottish sidekick and a ragtag group of soldiers, he's tasked with taking out the Nazi defences and hunting down Deathshead once and for all.
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| Ah, the Nazis. Providing guilt-free cannon fodder since 1936 |
Once you get down on the ground, you notice that there's a little more flexibility on display than your typical shooter. Levels are large and reasonably open, offering a few different routes for you to take. In the beach level, for instance, you can choose to smash straight through the main doors of the defensive complex with a primed explosive. Look around however, and there's also a back route accessible by triggering scattered munitions to blow open a vent, an option that circles behind the enemy and gives you a chance to flank them. Later on, in a classic Wolfenstein moment, you can swing open a secret door hidden behind a creepy painting, allowing you to get the drop on an oblivious Nazi officer. Developers MachineGames assured me that there are plenty of similar surprises scattered throughout the game.
Most of the weapons are roughly analogous to the sort of gear you'll be familiar with if you've played any WWII games before; there's a Tommy gun, a MP46 assault rifle with semi-auto and full-auto modes, a Luger pistol, all the hits. Most of these weapons, with the exception of a wonderfully satisfying double-barrel shotgun, can be dual-wielded. I did notice that there's less ammo scattered around than you might expect, so although blazing away with two sub-machine guns is effective, (and let's face it, awesome) you'll need to keep an eye on the counter.
It's classic first-person shooting, well crafted. Enemies seemed reasonably smart, using available cover and attempting to flank when possible, the guns have that satisfying weight that a good shooter needs. There's also enough variety on display in the demo to hope that the full game will avoid the repetitive corridor shoot-outs that plagued the last game in the series. You can even play sections of it as a stealth game, thanks to your silenced pistol. Not a bad strategy, actually. Taking out officers quickly and quietly will prevent reinforcements being called when you do get discovered.
Favouring a particular play-style will unlock perks as you go, most of which give you passive bonuses. Flinging grenades about like a madman, for example, will eventually earn you a larger capacity to carry explosives. Constantly dual-wielding will net you a boost to your reloading speed. It's fairly minimal stuff, but should shake things up on a second play-through if you want to vary your approach.
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| Nazi- occupied London. On the one hand a brutal fascist dictatorship, on the other hand presumably a far more efficient public transport system |
After successfully infiltrating Deathshead's secret lab, things quickly go south for our plucky band of heroes. BJ and the gang are captured by the comically nasty villain, and he proceeds to perform involuntary eye surgery on one of your allies. It's not all bad news though, because you get to choose which one! Presumably this choice will impact events further in the storyline, though I didn't get to see that far. Then Deathshead does the whole Dr. Evil thing of leaving his captives alive while he wanders off to do some filing or something. BJ escapes by jumping out of a window into the sea, but not without a bout of convenient brain damage that causes him to fall into a coma. When he wakes some fourteen years later, it's 1960, and the Nazis have won.
I like the choice of an Iron Sky -style alternate future (only better obviously, because that movie was awful), and MachineGames have clearly had fun creating it. Impressive level design and excellent use of the id Tech-5 engine's power makes for varied and visually stunning environments. In my two hour session I saw fortified beach bunkers, gloomy castles, sunny countrysides and ornately designed train carriages, all packed with incidental detail. Plenty of visual variety to accompany the running and gunning is always a good thing. In addition, all your previous WWII era weapons now have a brand, spanking new 1960 version, and there's a new, even more ludicrous batch of futuristic bad guys to fight. It's pulpy sci-fi nonsense, and it's great. The new setting seems like just the pep up the franchise needed after spending so long in gloomy 1940s Europe.
On the negative side, there does seem to be a slightly awkward tonal mix between ludicrous B-movie hi-jinks and more serious moments. BJ's ponderous monologuing about the horrors of war is slightly undermined by the next scene where he has to blow up a robotic dog, for example. Then there's a fairly tasteless scene where Nazi troops abduct and eventually execute mental patients in an asylum, which crossed the line into pointlessly provocative territory. You can have the Nazis as cackling maniacal villains, but having them brutally re-enact crimes they committed in real life, and playing it straight, feels ill-judged.
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| The game starts off with you blowing up robot dogs, and gets steadily more ridiculous from there. Which is great! |
That said, I'm not sure the rest of the game is going to take itself so seriously. You do team up with an elderly Polish couple wielding shotguns to blow up some Nazi robots at one point after all. Let's hope the finished product avoids similar moments of obnoxious shock value and concentrates on just being big, dumb fun.
Because it is fun. The shooting is great, the levels are expansive, and the amount of care taken in building the game's alternate future is obvious. All the right ingredients for a great FPS are present and correct. If the full campaign can maintain the same momentum as the opening chapters, then Wolfenstein could be just the ticket for fans of old-school shooters when it launches later this year.
Most Anticipated Feature: The locations are the key here. I'm looking forward to discovering what MachineGames have done with the 'Nazis have won' premise, and seeing where the campaign takes you.
