Wolfenstein

If you’re looking for a unique shooter experience let me tell you right off the bat that Wolfenstein’s not it. It has nothing innovative or outstanding about it, but somehow, its bag ‘o used goodies still comes together to offer an entertaining experience. It’s like a charming beast stitching together with age old ideas that have been used and abused by the genre over and over again.

The first mission is terribly designed and left quite a bad impression. The straightforward and relentlessly yawn-inducing level design, and horrendous AI made me want to uninstall the game, but I persevered, and was rewarded for doing so. If you do decide to play the game, let me tell you that the start’s the absolute low point, so be a little patient. The mission plays out in a train station, where you meet the dim-witted Nazis for the first time. The AI actually ends up flinging grenades and then rushing for you, blowing their dumb-selves up with their own nade. At other times they end up emptying entire clips into walls you were hiding behind 5 minutes ago!

Putting these brain-dead Nazi’s out of their misery is Agent B.J. Blazkowicz, who has to thwart their plans of developing weaponry strong enough to tip the Second World War in their favor. Just like any other Wolfenstein game, this one’s part Nazi part occult. The occult-obsessed swastika-adorned lunatics uncover ancient manuscripts in a fictional town called Isenstadt, that leads them to the discovery of the ‘Black Sun Dimension’ - a source of immense power called Black Sun Energy, with a multitude of terrible creatures inhabiting it. As usual, the Nazi decide to juice the place and use it as a limitless supply of energy, which they can mould into weapons. It’s your mission to stop them with help from the local resistance and an underground group of scholars named the ‘Golden Dawn’ that specialize in the occult.__STARTQUOTE__The AI actually ends up flinging grenades and then rushing for you, blowing their dumb-selves up with their own nade. At other times they end up emptying entire clips into walls you were hiding behind 5 minutes ago!__ENDQUOTE__The game appears to be free-roaming at first, but it become apparent quickly that the area to free-roam is basically a small cluster of streets that you have to revisit every few minutes. The setting can get terribly monotonous, since all you come across are the drab concrete walls, empty streets with sand-bag barricades and your usual civil structures lining the streets - the fact that the entire game uses the ‘downtown’ and ‘uptown’ area means that you’re pretty much confined to a handful of meandering streets that get old all too quickly. The only time the game breaks away from this is during a few missions that take you through an underground lab, a factory and a handful other generic areas.

The mission structure’s hub-based, and you have various factions like the Kreisau Circle and Golden Dawn that you can pick up missions from, each with its own story to tell. The story can be conveniently ignored after a while, since you realize that all you have to do to finish it is follow the objective marker hovering overhead, which pretty much makes the free-roaming redundant.

The saving grace of the game is its weapon unlock system. The weapons on a whole feel and sound good, and if you find enough ‘gold’ lying around the place, you can use it to pay for some pretty juicy weapon upgrades at your local Black Market. Keeping balance in mind, the game gives you only a limited amount of gold, so that you can upgrade only a few weapons; pick carefully. It kind of makes you wonder, who the hell would go around town leaving little bags of gold for Mr. Blazkowicz. May be its a sect of revolting Leprechauns that are tired of Nazi oppression and wish to help soup up your toys so that you can blast holes through their oppressors without even flinching.

Speaking of which, the game’s quite easy - a fact that can be attributed to the kinder-garten-fail AI, and overpowered ‘Veil’ powers Blazkowicz hones. As it goes, during the first half of the game Blazkowicz comes across an artifact that helps him see the world in the alternate Black Sun dimension. This power’s called ‘Veil Sight’ and works as his night-vision, his speed-booster and his primary means of solving puzzles. The puzzles here are basically walls with occult symbols on them, that dematerialize while Veil sight is on, allowing Blazkowicz to pass through them. Similarly, Blazkowicz finds three other power-ups - one that acts as a shield from bullets, one that grants him bullet time, and one that empowers his bullets. Each power has a very thetic way of being used to solve puzzles, giving the feeling that if developer Raven explored the idea a little further, they’d probably developed it into something more than just a fad.

As a whole, while Wolfenstein is your standard shooter with a few good ideas that are rather poorly implemented, it can still be surprisingly fun and engaging. Neither singleplayer, nor the multiplayer offering (which is not even as good as Enemy Territory: Wolfenstein) will ever match up to other AAA shooters in the recent past, but if you’re looking for a brainless shooter to help you de-stress, this one might just be it. The game’s available for Rs. 999 at local game retailers.