Chapter two, however, is where things get really wild. A jaunt through a quaint Bavarian mountain village goes resolutely south when The Old Blood revisits some of the supernatural elements from the Wolfenstein series. “Not more Nazi zombies”, I hear you cry, but show some respect – these are THE Nazi zombies. An accident at an excavation site quite literally unleashes hell across the village, turning it into a burning shooting range packed with shambling undead. It’s a nice change of pace from the usual Wolfenstein steeze, with opportunities for some interesting tactics in causing in-fighting between the living and dead SS soldiers.
It isn’t all killing, believe it or not. There’s an awful forced stealth section right at the beginning, where you have to sneak past killer mechanised super soldiers to disable their power supply. If they spot you, you can flee, but their miniguns rip you to shreds in seconds, so it may as well be insta-death. Mercifully, this segment is short and the game doesn’t try anything else like it throughout its duration. In fact, by the time that these super soldiers show up again, you’ve got a full arsenal of weaponry and subsequently more than one way of dealing with them.
Both the strongest and weakest aspect of The Old Blood is its brevity. You can smash your way through the campaign in four to six hours and the only misstep is that aforementioned stealth segment. The firefights quickly ramp up in intensity to match those found towards the end of the original game, and there’s always some new area, weapon or enemy to deal with, keeping things interesting for the duration. It is a far more focused and to-the-point game, at least when it comes to the actual shooting of things.
Sadly, the characterisation has been given very much a back seat. There are some excellent moments, such as Helga Von Schabbs’ tragic backstory, but most lack real emotional weight. In The New Order, characters have time to blossom into real ‘people’, whereas The Old Blood is in a rush to get you to care about their motivations and history. Obviously, that doesn’t detract one bit from how much fun all of the killing is, but by comparison the original game has something really quite special going on in the quality of its writing. Its characters frequent pass both the Bechdel and Plinkett tests (ie. you can satisfactorily describe a character without mentioning their job or appearance), something very few video games achieve. It is a bit of a shame for that quality to be here.
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is another sterling effort from MachineGames, fast proving to be real players in the FPS genre. This add-on clearly has smaller scope than was found in The New Order, keeping things much more ‘down to Earth’, but the core shooting experience that makes the reborn Wolfenstein such a pleasure to play remains perfectly intact. If you like shooting zombies and Nazis with extravagantly powerful weapons (and lets be honest here, who doesn’t?) this is well worth checking out.
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Wolfenstein: The Old Blood review - App Review 4u
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