#280: Wolfenstein (2009)
Woof — this could’ve been better
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 25, 2020.
Initial release: August 18, 2009
Platform: PC, XBox 360, PlayStation 3
Developer: Raven Software
Some games are a victim of circumstance. It’s not always predictable how a title would be received. What’s successful one year might be an abject failure the next. Development is always going to be influenced by the current trends. And while Wolfenstein, perpetual id Software understudy Raven Software’s contribution to the iconic Wolfenstein franchise is decent on a surface level, it’s also a late 2000s AAA game in the worst way.
The fate of Wolfenstein (just called that, no subtitles or anything, so we’ll just be calling it Wolfenstein 2009 from now on) is a curious one, and somewhat tragic. After the success of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Doom 3, another Wolfenstein seemed like a sure bet, but it was viewed by many as something of a misstep, at a time when the FPS genre was in transition. At the time, it was considered to be mediocre at best, a World War II title when everyone was sick of war games, and it didn’t really seem to know what it wanted to be. Even the title — just Wolfenstein — suggested little. in short, it’s the black sheep of the Wolfenstein family, especially after MachineGames’ quasi-reboots.
It’s not really comparable to its predecessors, or its successors. Story-wise it’s excruciatingly dull — BJ Blazkowicz gets sent into the German city of Isenstadt to investigate heightened Nazi activity, and gets embroiled in a strange case involving occultism and mad science. But that’s what we come to Wolfenstein for, isn’t it? The weird stuff. but what it boils down to is that BJ — who doesn’t look like any BJ I’ve ever known — gets a fancy mystical medallion that gives him super powers via its connection to a dark alternate reality called the Veil, and then he blows up a bunch of Nazis and that’s it. There’s some stuff involving betrayals, a token female character (who fans of Wolfenstein: the New Order will recognize, though she has far less personality or presence in this game and quite frankly there’s a weird disconnect between the 2009 games and the followups) and, curiously, a semi-open world setting that is both intriguing and infuriating.
If I were being charitable, Iwould say that the game is basically an extremely stripped down, Wolfenstein-flavored version of Deus Ex. You’ve got the quests, you’ve got the powers to unlock, you’ve got the semi-open world to explore… but there’s just not much to it. Don’t expect any real RPG elements here — no decisions to make, there’s not much to see when you explore, and there’s no dialogue options either — you just click on a person and they speak lines at you and that’s it. Like I said — stripped down.
There’s no sense of time progressing either. Everything is cast in this dreary kind of late afternoon daytime, the shadows never move, but it’s implied that several days pass over the course of the game, which results in people knowing what you did far too soon after you did it.
The worst part is that exploring Isenstadt has no real utility other than an endless search for collectibles. There’s a way of doing collectibles that’s fun. Grand Theft Auto does it. Assassin’s Creed does it (sometimes.) Wolfenstein 2009 — like far too many other FPS games of the era — does not. Aside from the hub maps, there’s more collectibles in the missions themselves, and some are permanently missable. Which would be fine, except… if you collect all the intel collectibles you get all the weapon upgrades for free. And if you collect all the tomes (cutely designed after the Tomes of Power from Raven’s iconic dark fantasy-flavored Doom clone Heretic) you get all the Veil upgrades for free too.
Are you ready for the absolute worst part though?
All the money you get in this game? Collectibles, in the form of gold. You can’t earn it just by kicking the shit out of a Nazi and getting four Reichsmarks, you have to find it in a limited set of gold items. There’s a lot of it to be found, but there’s absolutely a limit. You can’t actually afford to buy all the upgrades; it’s obvious they were trying to force you to be judicious about what upgrades you buy, but then they reward you with all the upgrades anyway if you find all the intel and tomes, and they also let you waste money on buying ammo. It’s a terrible idea in a game that’s already got an air of dullness to it.
If absolutely nothing else, the most important part of an FPS — the combat — is decent here. you get a small collection of standard small arms, including the MP43, but also the requisite wonderwaffens. A Tesla gun does tremendous damage to multiple enemies at once, cooking Nazis alive as electricity arcs from one enemy to the next. The flamethrower returns from Return and it actually doesn’t suck this time, and can clear a room in two seconds. It’s great fun, and helps redeem the game a bit. And Wolfenstein 2009 needs it; aside from everything else it’s ugly as sin. The Doom 3 engine (also known as idTech 4) was a decent engine for its time, but it’s best suited for sleek sci-fi settings like Mars, or Stroggos. A gritty World War II theme looks just awful.
Perhaps in a sign of the game’s lack of any real impact, the game disappeared from digital stores entirely after just a few years in the wake of the IP moving from Activision to Bethesda. Much like what happened to the 2006 version of Prey, it’s basically abandonware, especially since Activision laid off most of the staff who worked on the game immediately after release. So your only options are piracy, a console version, or, if you’re lucky and rich, a rare copy of the PC version. This seeming disappearance from the internet saw no outcry; very few people seem to be bothered that this game doesn’t exist on Steam, or at least GOG. Despite its semi-canon status in the reboot’s lore, it may as well never have existed.
Like I said: a victim of circumstance.
All that being said: okay, yes, it hasn’t aged well, but there’s some good ideas in here that, if a better studio with a bigger budget had done it, might actually have been a contender with the likes of Deus Ex. sadly, it was not to be.
