Tales of Shaved Goats

This review is a little late, considering that Wolfenstein (2009) has been out for at least a few months now. I was still weighing in on the game, so I couldn’t really decide how to review it. The envelope has been pushed and I definitely have formed my opinion now.

Single player is mildly entertaining. I say that it’s mildly entertaining because it follows pretty much the same cookie-cutter form as all other recent FPS (first person shooter) games. The interesting additions were the concept of finding and buying upgrades to weapons and the veil device. Neither of these are original to FPS games, but it added a little twist to the Wolfenstein saga.

Now the multi-player mode is a completely different story altogether. Let’s start off with the idea of ranks and unlocks. There’s 50 ranks altogether, and you start off at 1 as you can probably guess. Now I’m not sure what the exact mechanism is to jumping ranks – whether it be time played, gold won, number of kills, or number of objectives attained (or some combination thereof) – but as you play you will start to increase in rank and be able to get upgrades to your powers and weapons. Now here’s the problem: You can randomly lose ranks without any rhyme or reason, though playing on a hacked server certainly does cause this (anybody who has played on the Testz public server has probably noticed this). So about a week and a half ago, I was rank 32. I am now down to rank 5. I have lost pretty much all of my gold and my upgrades. How stupid is it that playing on a hack server punishes you? It’s not like you can really tell who has a hacked server and who doesn’t until it’s too late. Now there’s also the issue of the statistics website, which to this date still has no DNS entry for it – stats.wolfenstein.com. Why does the game advertise a URL with this host in it if it never has existed? That’s beyond sloppy. Now the game play itself is just a little unpolished (usually minor sync issues), but the number of maps and the types of games are definitely lacking. You have team deathmatch, objective (build things, steal things, disable things), and stopwatch (objective where you switch sides, so there are two rounds to each match). There’s only a small handful of maps to play, such as Manor, Rooftops, Telsa, Hospital, Chemical Factory, and Rail Yard (might not be the name – it’s the one with the veil tank in it). Two of the reasons that people still play older games like Quake 4, Quake 3, Urban Terror, etc., is because a) there are many more maps, many of which were created by regular old community members, and b) more than 2 modes of play. So how did ID/Raven drop the ball on Wolfenstein then? It’s the game that basically started the FPS genre…

I feel as though I did not get my money’s worth out of this game. Single player mode is rarely sufficient for FPS games these days. There is an expectation of playing with other folks online, instead of just some AI. I do not plan to play this game again, and will return to playing other games.

Oh, one more thing – normally id software games have the option for a native linux launcher. Bring that back with future games, please. And x86_64 binaries (for all supported OS’s) would be doubly good.

Tags: drop-the-ball, fps, games, unsatisfied, want-my-money-back-or-serious-improvements-to-the-game, wolfenstein

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 21:43:48 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.