While bringing in the new year and having a short break I decided to hop on the Wolfenstein train, Wolfenstein II came out quite recently and was talked about a lot in Game Of The Year lists, so I grabbed my digital copy of The Old Blood that I'd been hanging on to for a while and took a punt at it.
I decided to play The Old Blood over The New Order for two reasons, 1. This was the game I already owned. 2. I was told that it was a prequel to The New Order. The opening mission of the game is probably one of the best opening missions in any game. A really fun stealth orientated level that sees you traverse through pipes, vents etc, trying to take down as many Nazis as possible with only some broken drain pipe. Most of the enemies you encounter are huge Fallout Power Armour styled guys with mini guns. It's an empowering level and feels so fun to play in, problems start to show for me at the end of the level. At the end of a big shoot out with a lot of Nazis, you get on a boat and ride off, for me though this was the most infuriating part, after my shoot out I had a low health, I got on the boat thinking this was the ending of the level and instead was met with more enemies shooting at me, I soon ran out of bullets and I would continuously die, it got to the point that I thought that maybe I had got on the boat prematurely and I should've looked for some more health or some more armour, but when I went to load up a previous save that was before the boat, I realised that the game didn't have any auto saves. I'd basically trapped myself into a situation where I was too low health to progress even after switching the difficulty all the way down. This whole situation ended when I took the chance of hitting the menu button of starting from the beginning of the chapter, which then took me back to the beginning of the game.
Needless to say that whole experience meant I didn't pick up the game for a while. But I wasn't gonna give up on the game especially when I had 50 minutes of really fun game play, so I decided I would start again after the New Year and play it in a more casual setting. SO I didn't pay much attention to the story even though the game didn't have too much complicated plot points anyway, and I also decided to play the game on the lowest difficulty setting, maybe to some fans that is a bit of a cop out but I don't really mind. The game is structured almost like a book, into chapters that are roughly an hour each, allowing the game to be picked up and played for just a short period of time and then left if wanted to, which is truly one of the best aspects of the game, it allows the game to feel interesting every time you start the next chapter as each level doesn't feel the same as the others. It also means that a lot of each level is quite memorable. although sometimes difficult to identify where to go.
Level design isn't the only thing here that is made very well, the boss fights are all classic bosses in the sense that they all have their own gimmick and will change in different stages of the fight that you're in.
At the end of the day I think Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is very much a fun, short and memorable FPS, it doesn't have any outstanding features that other FPSs have, just an interesting setting plus exciting combat. Also the chapter structure really allows the game to shine.
I can't say I had an amazing time with the game but the game had enough enjoyment in there for me to be interested playing the other two games in the series.
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