Wolfenstein The Old Blood:
Back in 2020 I played through The New Order and was severely disappointed. The game is also a bit of a space hog so I have not replayed it because I excised it from my computer after finishing it to make room. Now I have a different fresh computer that I felt the need to play the Old Blood on since I ran through Doom 3 and felt like playing a similar-ish id property and to kind of revisit the new Wolf games to see if I was maybe a bit harsh. TLDR on this is that the Old Blood is a sizzle reel of a game for something that would have made for a decent Wolf game perhaps at one time but with modern Wolf gameplay I just don't really feel it that much. It's not bad and I would just be willing to call it good, but nothing more. This is a true 3 stars or 7/10 sort of experience when you bear in mind it was just an ex pack or DLC. I would not really recommend getting it by itself or paying more than a few bucks for it (or whatever your equivalent is). Even for all of its faults, if you like TNO I feel like it offers decent value but at the same time TOB's value is partially derived from shutting up before it talked too much. That said I am going to prattle on in a different paragraph now.
And I am back. So, to start, I only thought that about half of this game was good and the rest was either everything I hated about TNO or was just a bit meh. The opening level where you sneak out of Wolfenstein at least until you get some guns was tedious, gimmicky, and formulaic. It is not even close to an Old School Cool feeling to turn the power off the big lumbering dudes who are literally on rails (well, connected to a rail on the ceiling) and then run up and do a button prompt and then watch BJ do a mini cutscene take down of them. Anyone who likes this should probably not talk badly about QTEs, I am asking nicely. Skulking around the castle was okay and there was a small sense of satisfaction I derived from successfully stealth killing the dogs. That said, this game is of appreciably diminished conceptual visualization. The dogs don't seem in anyway to be able to smell a man who is the size of a Cadillac, running around without his shirt, sweating up a storm and covered in at least an amount of blood and probably human bodily waste for some reason. That was one of the earlier moments where I just wondered how unthinking the game would be. My first was wondering why BJ was working with the OSS (I think it was) on a mission like this when he had a very limited command of the German language. The hot dog joke was funny but it just makes no sense. On a mission that was based around subterfuge and stealth for some reason they sent the all brawn no brains guy. It's just not very bright.
Anyway, things get better when you acquire some guns, in particular the only gun I truly liked in this entire game was the DMR/Scoped rifle. It was a truly useful and satisfying gun to use and was much better than the similar guns in TNO by a lot. The Lugers were Lugers for me, I don't care for them in almost any game, and the not-a-Sturmgewehr 44 is just the average medium range, medium damage assault rifle just like the M4 in any Call of Duty game from the time period. Some dude on YouTube was showing what was awesome about TNO by showing footage of using the assault rifle in that game and I have to wonder what was supposed to be impressive about it. I mean this sincerely, there is very little that's all that old school about these games. There is nothing wrong with that but when people talk about the things they like about these games they mention the old school stuff enough that aside from the lack of regenerative health and the presence of armor I have to wonder what they mean. There is a clearly present cover system in this game and many firefights would be much harder if you did not take advantage of that cover like a sane person would. On that note, the stealth in this game is also very much of its time like in Ghost Recon Wildlands or Metro 2033 where it's no big deal if you get caught, just shoot your way out. That said, in this game and TNO I felt often times like you were more being punished with the firefights rather than just given a different way to do things.
I guess that segues into the commander gimmick as well as anything. The commanders kinda bite for a few reasons. One, it's a little silly that we have to sneak around and try and get these two dudes or you just get bum rushed by reinforcements. The stealth is also a little finicky with me wondering if the enemies were maybe a little too inobservant (firing like three shots of silenced ammo not remotely alerting a commander in spite of the squibs going off around his face) and then at other times being too observant (I shoot one guy on one side of the map and don't quite get a head shot, staggering him, so that naturally means a commander from the other side of the arena gets to call reinforcements down on my bottom with precision). This gimmick was pretty much always tiresome.
That said, there were fun times in this game. After getting the sniper rifle and getting into town the game feels appreciably better since you have pretty much all of your guns. I cannot recall too specifically any particular firefights but there were enough that I recalled having fun.
And then back to the tedium. The two characters who are tacked on to you for like a collective ten lines of dialogue collectively feel very, very artificially... well, tacked on. There really was nothing interesting or dynamic about them, or really any character in this game. The closest we get is Rudi but even as a villain I thought he was kind of lame. Oh, that reminds me of the pipe BJ gets... that was only partially an accident. Anyway, BJ gets stabbed with a pipe in his leg at one point and you assume that would devastate him but not really, he basically shrugs it off. This created a similar dissonance in me as the body horror scenes from Resident Evil 7 and 8 do where you're like "yeah, people don't just get over that," especially when the game is selective on which grievous injuries are actually harmful.
Anyway, the pipe is a lame weapon in practice too, not really being effective and making no real sense as a stabbing weapon, blunt weapon, or as a climbing tool. I mean, it is effective in the game as a climbing tool but it really should not be.
Anyway, the game becomes simultaneously its best and worst when you move on to the last town and interact with Helga. Back to taking your guns away and putting you through tedious story sections in a balls to the wall ostensibly old school style shooting game. I guess it is kind of funny seeing BJ put all of his guns in that chest but then it makes me wonder why he carries so little ammo for the auto shotguns, the later double barrel shotgun, and the assault rifles. I mean, either give us ridiculous Hellsing style guns with seemingly unlimited ammo or admit it's only a half step behind Call of Duty. On a note about the humor: it's okay. There are a few moments that are kind of funny but nothing gets a real laugh out of you. It's preferable to the pretentious melodrama of BJ's monologues but not much more.
Last note on the game being not very intelligent: why is it when BJ is hanging like a stuffed goose by his heels he does not just, I dunno, break Helga's neck? I mean, there was no indication that I saw that his arms or hands were bound, just that he was suspended by his ankles. I mean, she's a Nazi nutso monologuing in his face. Aside from being her turn from the other Greek dramatist on the set (BJ), why does he just keep letting her talk and abuse him? Like, his arms are the size of tree trunks and we have seen him do plenty worse things to the Nazis than strangle someone. I dunno, this game made less sense the more time you spent with it.
Anyway, the best and worst of this game is the supernatural section which, spoiler alert, it's just a zombie apocalypse. That's it, it's a centralized zombie epidemic. It's okay, I guess. Give me resurrected Saxon skeleton warriors over brainless meat muppets any day but whatever, Call of Duty had them so I guess Wolf had to as well. This section was not especially fun to play, actually, as I felt there were too many zombies and too many German soldiers flooding you here as well (back to punishing you with playing more of the game) but the visuals finally became something other than just a little mundane.
The graphics are okay. The same weird off loading/ asset streaming issue permeated this game like TNO, except this time I was not using an especially fast HDD or SSD but just a standard Dell OEM HDD so I guess there really is no fixing this issue. It takes a little tweaking, but getting this game to Ultra on a GTX 1650 only really requires turning a few settings off and setting AA to 4x ( I forget what the settings that I turn off are called but there was only a couple of them and otherwise textures and and shadows were maxed out). The artistry is only okay for the most part for most of the game. Big castle, kind of gothic, and a little Central European snow capped village are fine and dandy but lack pizzazz. The game looks genuinely good when they bring out the fire and the flames engulfing the horizon while the cracked earth radiates with soft green ether in a graveyard. That was just really nice and felt like it took some actual talent to pull off.
Back to the rest of the game. The final boss fight is either lame or aggravating. No in between, nothing else. It's not fun and it feels morally wrong since the boss will literally not attack you if you do not shoot it. Let me repeat that. I stood around for about five minutes or so waiting for it to attack me first, but BJ is such a psychopath (he debatably always was, let's recall his idea of R&R at the end of RTCW) that he has to attack another living thing for seemingly no reason more than either: A) it's there; B) he thinks it's ugly; or C) it killed Helga and the wimp. I mean, take your pick. From what I could tell it was not hurting anything and the game made no attempt to establish it as dangerous aside from the previous cutscene to my recollection.
In the end, this game is better than TNO but if you were me that was not saying much. I neither think it really works as a kind of old school game and it more or less is resemblant of games that released around the same time. It's not a bad use of a few hours but recall it takes several to beat the game and not all of those hours are well spent.