Franchise/series reboots can be a tricky thing, but MachineGames proved their skill at crafting a modern AAA FPS with Wolfenstein: The New Order (TNO) which I reviewed nearly a year ago. I really enjoyed it, and in the last month I actually replayed through the campaign on hard mode and I can comfortably say it’s one of the best FPS games I have ever played.
Why is that, you might ask, and does the same quality make its way into the $20 standalone prequel, The Old Blood (TOB)? I’m pleased to say it absolutely does, and for anyone that enjoyed TNO they should not miss out on TOB. Crafted by the same crew at MachineGames, TOB takes place over the course of a day or two in 1946, very shortly before the start of TNO, which as you may recall saw hero William “B.J.” Blazkowicz and a last ditch Allied assault heading toward General Deathshead’s secret compound. In fact, the primary goal in TOB is to retrieve information that has the whereabouts of this secret compound. As you’re told as much within seconds of starting a new campaign, I don’t think (hope) that isn’t seen as too much of a spoiler.
The information you seek is said to be held by a high ranking officer in the Nazi army, one, Helga Von Schabbs. The location? Upon the highest mountain in the Alps, and more specifically, within the gigantic walls of Castle Wolfenstein. From looking at one of the trailers a few weeks ago, I was under the impression that the entire game takes place within the Castle, but only about 30-40% of it does. My total play time was around seven and a half hours, by the way. Anyway, you’ll explore the depths and secrets of the Castle and encounter new enemies, weapons, collectibles, and other cool things along the way, but, I think MachineGames made a wise choice in not keeping players cooped up in the Castle too long.
Part one of TOB contains the first four chapters (of eight) which are centered on the castle and tough-ass new character Rudi Jager, lover of dogs and Helga’s go to strong arm for interrogations and torture. He’s a brute, and from the moment you encounter him you know fate will bring you back to him at some point. The second part is more about Helga and her obsession with finding the dark, buried secrets underneath the town of Wolfsburg. Centuries before, her ancestor, King Otto, wrote about occult/supernatural like ‘things’ in the area. She believes it’s her calling to discover these and to help the Nazi war machine use whatever knowledge and tech is gathered. There are plenty of letters, notes, newspaper articles, and so forth to discover that give the player more information to chew on (no audio recordings like in TNO however, but that makes sense given the difference in when the games take place). And just as with TNO, TOB is conscious of putting ‘too much gun’ into the gameplay. There are lots of exploration scenes that flesh out the characters and story, stealth sequences in which you are completely out-gunned and have to rely on killing from the shadows (or not at all), and oh yes, some premium firefights that are intense and very satisfying.
For most of the game, BJ carries with him a pipe that he can dual wield or thread together to make a baseball bat like weapon. You actually won’t use this a whole lot as a weapon, but instead it offers a lot of utility purposes such as for scaling walls, sliding down wires, wedging open small doors, and so on. The new Kampfpistole is handy, too — no dual-wield for this bad boy, it’s a single shot grenade launcher but you can only carry seven rounds for it. The Bombenschuss is a great new bolt action sniper rifle that does wonders against the new orange shotgun toting dudes, too. The Schockhammer automatic shotgun is very similar to the one in TNO, but there are no alternate ammo types, yet it’s just as loud and effective as the more modern version BJ carries in TNO.
Clearly the weapons are not vastly different than what you use in TNO, and similarly the new enemies are also not remarkably different — or at least the ones I will mention here… New super soldiers offer a challenging foe, there are the ones that patrol a certain path due to cabling (ole Deathshead has not quite made the battery version just yet) and then others that are able to move about untethered (slow, but untethered). The new heavy enemies are orange and have a backpack that you can snipe to explode, best to keep your distance from these shotgun wielding bruts. There are a few drones, oh and those awesome looking planes you see in the screenshot and trailer? Other than a super brief fly-by (seriously you could actually look the wrong way and miss them entirely), those are never seen or mentioned in the story.
Wanted to mention level design as well — for the most part it’s great, but there are some of those curious moments in which you walk through a door and suddenly it’s locked behind you. Speaking of locked, as with TNO, there are lots of doors but 95% of them have that ‘no entry’ icon pop-up when you get close. Anyway, other iffy level design elements include things like the enemies not “spawning in” (although this is always hidden of course) until you reach a certain physical threshold. The standoff on the bridge is one of these kind of awkward situations in which the game waits for you to walk up so far before triggering a scripted event. Also, in the Castle, there is too much of the ‘crawl through an air vent’ type of design there. By the way, this bridge encounter is one of ten or so Challenges that gets unlocked as you play. These Challenges pit you against wave of enemies in key battle scenes from the story and can be played separately from the main menu.
Finding Collectibles as was done in TNO is also naturally here in TOB. There are sixty-plus pieces of gold to find, but instead of the pieces being interesting, unique gold pieces, you’re just finding gold bars. Notes, Diaries, Characters, Challenges, Concept Art, all of these get unlocked as you play as long as you are thorough. Thorough players are also likely to find Secret Areas (new to TOB) and other more obvious nods to TNO. It’s not required at all that you have played TNO to really enjoy TOB, but if you have as I did again recently, there are some great tie-ins that make TNO just that much better. I’d love to elaborate on three or four things but it would be giving away too much, and, gasp!, the story of Wolfenstein TNO and TOB are actually good and robust enough that you should avoid spoilers (can’t say that about too many FPS titles).
With that, let’s head to the summary…
