Review

[Rutsah]

(posting this here due to the word limit, so I can link it off)

Good lord, and I thought Young Blood was garbage.

Evidently, I am not the biggest fan of the Wolfenstein franchise, but New Order had gotten my hopes up a bit. After finishing Old Blood on Uber (first playthrough, and definitely the last), I can say that any good will I had left after New Order has been dried up, and I'm not really sure why more people aren't talking about what a disaster this was.

Old Blood is a basically a railway shooter, with some half-assed stealth sections thrown in here and there. You sometimes have a bit of freedom at how you'll approach combat, but most of the time the game directs your actions way too much. Before I start crapping on it, the one compliment I have to give Old Blood is that almost every weapon feels satisfying to use, with the silenced handguns easily being your favourites.

Enemy Spawning.

Way too often, you'll see a wide open area ahead of you, take out your sniper rifle, and find no enemy soldiers. Then you'll take one step forward and suddenly an entire SS division will pop out of every hole imaginable, and suddenly the door that was right behind you will be closed. In other cases, especially towards the later levels, you will sneak past every enemy, reaching the next checkpoint, and then decide to take another look for collectibles in the area you just passed through, which is now completely void of enemy soldiers, even if you had not killed everyone.

The first time I noticed this was during a session when I had to climb up a tower's window, where a squad of SS were waiting in a forced combat section (in one of those cases where you're auto-detected no matter how well you can stealth). After dying a few times because there was virtually no cover to speak of, I decided not to climb and instead throw grenades through the window... To be followed by utter silence other than the explosion, because the enemies don't actually spawn until you have started climbing, it did not even trigger the alarm.

No-Scope Absurdity

For some ungodly reason, the developers have decided that if you're not aiming, your weapons will do about 5 times the damage (maybe more). In one of the most bizarre cases of this, at the start of the final level of the game, the graveyard, you can, immediately after the level starts, take out your handgun, and turn towards a tower about 1 km ahead of you (without actually "aiming" I mean), and wait for the crosshair to turn red. Congrats, you just killed one of the enemy commanders from across the map without really aiming.

Honestly, the game is insanely easier from the moment you realise that you should NOT be using the "right click" of your mouse if you're not dual wielding. The damage you do is boosted to oblivion and whatever aim assist the devs have included makes certain that your bullets will always find the enemy's head, even if they are half a country away, as long as the very-forgiving crosshair is painted red. Especially during a section where you're crossing a bridge, after you escape castle Wolfenstein, you'll be facepalming at these.

By the way your crosshair aim is NOT worsened by dual wielding, even a little bit. Dual wielding weapons merely prevents you from using ironsights, which is just cute. You literally get twice the firepower with ZERO drawbacks.

Retarded Stealth

Oh boy, where do I begin with this... The SS have no notion of causality. As long as you do not make noise and stay out of sight, they will show ZERO recognition of their comrades' bodies right in front of them. At one point I intentionally experimented with this, waiting for 2 soldiers to finish up their conversation, then immediately shot one of them. When the guy he had just had a long talk about wine-tasting returned and saw the corpse of his friend right in front of him, he had no reaction.

Moreover, the only noise you can make while crouched is from failed shots. Just to be clear, NONE of the following will draw the attention of soldiers 2 feet away from you: 1)Passing through while crouching, despite the game actually having different sound effects for the various surfaces you step on. 2)Breaking walls with your pipe. 3)Getting headshots on enemies with the silenced pistol. 4)Literally using your pipe as a climbing tool, digging it INTO the walls breaking small chunks of them and repeatedly thrusting it in and out of them as you mark your way higher.

The dumbest part though comes in the later levels, after the zombies (...) have showed up. Shooting certain enemies at that point, even with a headshot, can turn them into zombies. Said zombies are a faction of their own, and will attack the nearby SS. This can raise the alarm which also somef@cking how alerts every spawned enemy to your presence as well, since the devs didn't bother programming more than a single alarm AI.

Taking Away your Weapons

Every time the game wants to artificially raise the difficulty, this is the ONLY trick it can pull off, forcing you to recollect your gear from the start. The excuses to do this get more absurd overtime as well, especially since you just know you'll be shooting your way out of whatever supposed spy stuff you're gonna do.

Section Placement

This is more of a minor gripe, but the game decides which section will be stealth-based and which one shooter-based VERY randomly. Like, at one point I had gone full rambo against the SS, shooting grenades & dual wielding shotguns as I sprayed the walls red left and right, and then to proceed I simply opened a door. Not a particularly thick one either, the type you are certain you could demolish irl just by running into it. In literally the next room absolutely noone was alerted to any danger, having casual talks about some guy's dogs. At another point, after 2 consecutive stealth sections when I had managed not to alert everyone, I took a step and suddenly a whole armada was running at me. It feels very manipulative and peeks your suspension of disbelief.

Mr. BlowJob's One-Man Army

I get it, it's a game and you get to shoot bad guys, but the ENTIRE story is structured as a spy thriller, with "Where Eagles Dare" being the most obvious inspiration. It's dumb, but not in a fun way, and the game takes itself way too seriously for some reason. At one point, you escape castle Wolfenstain, having murdered your way through half the SS army, and head to a tavern secretely ran by the "resistance", sneaking your way towards it. The orders you get when the SS immediately discover the tavern is ran by a traitor are "Kill everyone!". I swear, you'll catch yourself looking away in shame on the writers' behalf.

It is VERY unclear if mr. BlowJob is considered superhuman or not in the story. Sometimes you're supposed to be one of several nameless agents fighting guerilla warfare against vastly superior forces, quitely and exercising spycraft, and at others you get orders to march on your own against an entire armada and just kill everything that moves. It is incredibly incosistent, and you feel like there was no communication between the game's various directors.

The Undead Elephant in the Room

...Why f@cking zombies? I mean... Don't get me wrong, Wolfenstein was never a franchise you'd call realistic, what with the sisterly tickling and "Such a cool dame!", but you always got the feeling they were TRYING to give it a degree of realism. And then we got flaming red zombies. Needless to say, they feel really out of place. In one of the most unintentionally hilarious bits, an entire blip came crashing down, JUST so the devs had an excuse for zombies to be falling out of the sky. If the game had any self-awareness of how dumb this is maybe it could be fogiven, but the entire thing is played straight, with mr. BlowJob giving grim quotes about the nature of man and dramatic violins screeching at every step.

The worst part? The devs genuinely thought adding zombies was INCREASING the difficulty rather than making for some laughable sections. The forces of hell still die with a single non-aiming headshot, but unlike the regular soldiers, are incredibly slow, largely have no means of ranged attacks and basically mark their soft skulls with the bright red they emit. Frankly the only positive thing about them is that they give you a safe environment to get the perks you had missed while fighting their breathing&shooting versions.

Want a Health Kit?

Minor gripe, but the game has first-aid kits WAY too often for no reason. Their only use is unlocking certain max health perks early on, and are otherwise completely useless. Considering that you can be murdered within a second by concentrated fire if you have no armor (at least on Uber difficulty), there is zero reason for the HP resupplies to be so abundant. Easily half the health kits in the game should have been replaced by armor.

Blunt Vision

Another minor gripe, but right at the first cutscene of the game, I had to stop and check if I had indeed set the graphics at max. It is not "that" much of a hyperboly to say that games a decade older than this look much better. Even if you were to ignore the largely disappointing resolutions, the art direction is just dull and uninspired for the most part (overviews of castle Wolfenstein being the one exception I can think of).

Please Love this Character

Finally, the game never gives us time to connect with any of the characters before trying to emotionally manipulate us by killing them. While the player will shrug deaths off, mr. BlowJob will be having grim monologues about how much they meant to him, despite usually knowing them exactly as long as we have. It is laughable how much they try to overcompensate for that in the few cutscenes we do have with them, especially for the first ally we have, trying to cram as much character development as they can in a single line exchange, except, you know, with none of the subtlety that would be needed for that. You are just 100% AWARE that that's what they're trying to do.

PS: Also turns out the chick you save in the village was a lesbian. Why? Don't know. Does it matter in any way? Don't know. Maybe it's just a random bit of humanizing and not the single defining trait of the character? Perhaps, though the game was lingering the camera way too long on her reunion with her scissoring buddy, so I can only assume the devs intentionally wanted to show that off, as a sign of progressivism. You can practically tell they were pleading for games journalists to recognise this bravery, completely unaware that most journalists who would appreciate this diversity wouldn't make it past the first level of the game. Again, "maybe" I'm reading too much into this, but given the direction the franchise takes later with Young "ugh" Blood, I'd say I'm right on the money.

For the Love of God Let it End

Thankfully, it does end. It's barely been a day since I finished this (about 8 hours game length), and it's already started to get blurry in my head. Unfortunately, the only thing memorable about Old Blood is how amateurish the writing is. Also zombies and something about beer on boobs.

Edit

Months after I posted this review, I bought Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001 game) from Kinguin because it was dirt cheap, and I came to the bizarre realization that Old Blood is actually a remake of that game. And somehow, the remake by a triple A company 15 years after the original IS FAR WORSE than 2001 game. I had to use a sub-system so Steam did not record any hours on my Return to Castle Wolfenstein playthrough, but to sum it up, in the original:

• A)The AI is FAR SUPERIOR. Enemies will try to kick back your grenades, dodge your attacks, move to alarm bells and even slow down as they pass through doors, visibly checking their surroundings.
  
• B)The zombies are absolutely terrifying instead of a laughing stock.
  
• C)There are SS dominatrixes in full latex. Somehow they even have several different models with different body-types and amount of cleavage revealed. God I miss the good old days.
  
• D)The game plays way more like a mix of a WW2 movie with a thriller instead of an action movie, resulting in absurdly better atmosphere. Somehow regular nazi soldiers are way more terrifying than their uber mechanized counterparts from the remake. Moreover, when robotic enemies do appear, they actually have you sweating.
  
• E)Despite very clearly being separated into levels, unlike the remake which tries to make smooth transitions between them, said levels are absolutely gigantic, and offer a ton of exploration. You can go inside random buildings, uncover secrets, crawl through mountains around your objective area and snipe enemies (completely unscripted). The maps even include civilians.
  
• F)An enemy spotting you does not automatically mean that the whole map knows your exact location. If an enemy spots you, he will run towards the alarm bell, which will THEN alert the whole map to danger, but JUST that. The enemies being alert DOES NOT equate to them magically knowing your position, it just means they are more nervous/careful.
  
  Jesus Christ, once I realised Return to Castle Wolfenstein was the original to the Old Blood remake, I felt embarassed for Old Blood. How can a remake with millions of dollars as budget, made by a triple A company and affording 15 years of technological progress be STRICTLY WORSE than the thing it was immitating?