#636: Unsung
Wolfenstein 0? Sure, why not…
Initial release: April 25, 2011
Platform: PC, Dreamcast (standalone Wolf4SDL game)
Developer: Nembo
Wolfenstein 3D by modern standards is primitive, very primitive. Hell, let’s be real here: it was rendered obsolete before it was even two years old. The engine, sometimes retroactively referred to by fans as idTech 0, didn’t really allow for much; later games utilizing the engine would expand its capabilities but it was never going to reach the heights of it successors. And yet that hasn’t stopped people from trying, especially with the small cottage industry of source ports like Wolf4SDL. Which brings us to Unsung, a little-known but quite impressive piece of work.
The first thing you need to know about Nembo’s Unsung is that rather than the cartoony World War II theme of Wolfenstein 3D, it winds the clock back to late 1917 and drops us in the middle of World War I. Moving away from pulp Nazi superscience, we’re treated to a much more straightforward story: a small squad of British troopers are tasked with infiltrating a German position and disabling their guns before a major offensive. While they successfully reach the German lines, their leader and eleven of the twelve troopers are killed, leaving a single trooper to finish the job. Over the course of nine or ten maps (I counted nine, but if there was a secret level I never saw it) you’ll fight your way through trenches, fortifications, sewers, forests, catacombs and the bunker proper. Quite the far cry from the more abstracted nature of Wolfenstein 3D, eh?
The gameplay is mostly as simple as you’d expect. You’ll obviously have a knife, but your primary weapon is going to be a bolt-action rifle. It fires relatively slow but does decent damage, often taking out enemy troopers in one or two shots. It needs to be reloaded every five rounds, but features a manual reload as well. You’ll also get a pistol (I only ever found one, and I got it through committing a war crime — I reloaded my save) and the MP 18, an early submachine gun. The MP18 is best saved for boss fights, but the rifle does a pretty good job as a workhorse.
Your enemies are nowhere near as varied as Wolf 3D. Most of them will be simple riflemen, easily killed in one or two shots; submachine gunners have body armor but don’t take much more to bring them down. Machine gun emplacements are tough and dish out a lot of damage but are immobile. Flamethrower guys have high health and explode on death, so keep your distance! There were a couple other random enemies, from the medic who shoots at you if you kill his patient to motor pool guys to gas masked troopers in the penultimate level, and finally the commander himself, who does tremendous damage and takes quite a beating. All in all, not the most illustrious roster, but Unsung is after all trying to be at least a little serious.
Design-wise Unsung is surprisingly fun. Though the endless trenches and bunker tunnels can be a bit maze-like, and you don’t have a map, the levels are pretty varied, and some maps are extremely short: one actually ends abruptly, only to place you in a slightly different version of the same map, but with new enemies in the nearby camp you just cleared and the door to the nearby bunker now able to be opened. All in all, it’s a decent hour or two’s worth of gameplay. The only part I’d consider a real drag is the forest you have to find your way through towards the end; despite there being a ton of space between tree sprites, the way the game treats the tree props means they may as well be wall blocks, and finding your way around is tedious.
Despite being made for Wolf4SDL, Unsung does not require a copy of Wolfenstein 3D to play. It instead comes with a custom copy of Wolf4SDL, packed with some additional features like textured floors and ceilings, fog (used for the penultimate level as you escape the bunker you just filled with gas) and some simple props. On the downside, it seems to be using an older version of Wolf4SDL; as such, it doesn’t have the same QOL features as more recent source ports. It took me a while to figure out how to run it in a resolution that didn’t just completely fuck up my two-monitor setup, and controlling it was a little difficult as there was no way to turn off the mouse moving your character around. Wolf4SDL is a pretty straightforward port that plays pretty much the way the original game did, just without any DOSBox shenanigans. I’d love to see Unsung ported to ECWolf someday.
I had a good time with Unsung, for the short time it had me. By the standards of, oh I don’t know, Battlefield 1, it’s not going to wow anyone visually, but it’s a fun l’il jaunt with a bittersweet tone.
