Return to Castle Wolfenstein

All these years later, Return to Castle Wolfenstein offers a very fun single-player experience.

The level design is generally intuitive, and grows stronger as the game progresses. The areas you occupy in-game are made more immersive through immaculate attention to detail and period-appropriate decoration.

Certain aspects of the game's visual presentation have aged particularly well, for instance characters' faces and the weapons.

There's good feedback in firefights - you'll usually be able to tell whether you've hit your enemy. However, hitboxes aren't very accurate. Spend enough time using a sniper and you'll realise that many of the shots you clearly miss in fact hit the intended target. It's better to wrongly register misses than not recognise hits, I suppose!

The stealth can be frustrating. It's almost as if AI detection works using RNG instead of a coherent pattern. Sometimes you'll be spotted half a mile away through a dark mist; sometimes the soldier you're sneaking up on will have no peripheral vision whatsoever.

It took me a while to adjust to the absence of an aim-down-sight ability for most weapons in the game, but as your arsenal expands you'll find something that works for your play-style.

A slightly frustrating component of the game is its tendency to use a start-of-level save instead of your latest quicksave for its automatic reload.

There are probably fixes for all of the issues I've raised in this review, but nothing in Return to Castle Wolfenstein agitated me to the point of caring to seek out mods or patches. Take the game as you find it and you'll still be having fun most of the time.

Most people seem to like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but they qualify their praise with criticisms and reservations.

Well, I have almost no criticisms. This game is simply the bomb. For me, it's a near-perfect blend of horror, wartime action and - very occasionally - gritty realism. The graphics are lovely, and the game simply has a cool aesthetic. I've always found Wolfenstein games to be much more attractive and engaging than, say, Doom, which usually takes place entirely in a dark corridor.

This version of Wolfenstein has a nice variety of missions, too. You fight Nazis in castles and chateaus, undead in gloomy catacombs, and robotic supersoldiers in a top-secret lab. Some missions are reminiscent of the ultra-tough WWII game Hidden and Dangerous, which involved lots of sneaking around and careful gameplay, whereas other missions are all-out slugfests. For me, the game's fairly frequent shifts in tone, pacing and emphasis aren't a weakness, but a strong selling point.

I also love the far-out villains. The armored undead are creepy, and thankfully not nearly as revolting as zombies from other games. But I particularly love the leather-clad babes with machine guns - they're a little sexist, I'm sure, and somewhat tacky, but they're also entirely appropriate for a game like this.

Sure, Return to Castle Wolfenstein has some flaws. The cutscenes are boring, and the dialogue is a little corny. But hey, I didn't expect a good script from Wolfenstein. I expected fun (and carnage), and I got it. It's prime stuff, and very hard to stop playing.

It's still a class game I absolutely love it The best shooting game I played

Whoever created this game was a genius... It had a good story plot and had some cool graphics and some action and adventure and some great elements that has added onto this game...

Also... The enemies are hard but it was still fun after all... And some power guns that you can also use them to shoot...

This game is like a Shoot, Think and Run genre... 1st level was so hard that everyone would took time to play it but it was still fun though....

So save your money for the other wolfenstein[Enemy territory is fun]or this if you want to....

10/10

This game has picked up loads of awards for it's graphics recently, and it's not hard to see why. Even on a medium-spec PC, it looks pretty amazing, with excellent lighting effects, decent character animation and impressive level design (my favourite being the secret Nazi airbase). But where id have pulled out all the stops for the visuals, it seems that they gave the writing team a day off for this game. I gave up caring about the plot after first running into the zombies (which were v.cool), as it wandered between Indiana Jones-esque fantasy, with eerie pagan rituals and undead hi-jinx, and more realistic Hidden & Dangerous style missions, such as capturing the experimental plane and picking your way through the rubble of a bombed out factory. In fact, I wish they'd have put more thought into the overall plot, as the fantasy elements of the game are rather weak and let the side down a little. Sure, the first time you bump into the Uber-Soldat's, you can't help jump in shock, and the excellent 'Lopers' add a real horror feeling to one of the missions, but they aren't used enough, and the level designers seem content to pop them in as mid-level bosses after their initial appearance. Then we go back to running around mansions, shooting plain old Nazi's. Why? Why not more freaky creatures? Why not a more involving plot? Castle Wolfenstein itself is little more than a bit part in this game. It's a shame to see such a well known license squandered on what is little more than an exercise in programming. The end of the game seems to tail off, with more and more empty levels dotted with the occasional enemy. And as for the final boss? Well, it's like id are stuck feet-first in 1994. I'm hoping some decent mission packs surface for RTCW, as the one-player game provides little sustenance for the likes of me. To be fair, I'm just disappointed that they didn't have Cyber-Hitler make a return! Oh, and the multiplayer game is fantastic. Simple as that. Taking part in a 32-a-side war with airstrikes, artillery barrages and flamethrowers. This IS war. Get it right next time id, and stop employing 6th formers to write your plots...