Return to Castle Wolfenstein

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Box art.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a first-person shooter developed by Gray Matter Interactive with oversight from id Software and published by Activision for Windows on 2001-11-19. The game uses the id Tech 3 engine and served to reboot the Wolfenstein series after a seven-year lull.

I remember seeing this game on store shelves shortly after it came out. Having been a big fan of Wolfenstein 3-D, I was certainly interested in the new game, but I was confident my computer wouldn't be able to run it, and I probably didn't want to pay full price anyway. I didn't end up playing the game until about 17 years later when I got it in a Steam bundle with Wolfenstein 3-D and Spear of Destiny. Having played the earlier two games, but never bought them, I felt obligated to finally give some money to the developers.

Status

I own this game on Steam.

Review

Good

  • The various period weapons are fun to use.
  • The cut-scenes and voice acting are pretty good.
  • I love the ability to peek around corners. Very helpful in stealth missions.
  • I like how enemies often give themselves away by making noise or talking, and how listening in give you ideas about what to do next.
  • There is a nice variety of stealth missions and combat missions.

Bad

  • Like with many FPSs, later in the game you're bogged down with lots of weapons and ammo that you rarely use. Some levels thankfully limit your guns, but, most of the time, it's a chore to cycle through them all, especially when most of them are terrible.
  • Occasionally, the game would get super bogged down and run very slowly, for no noticeable reason, and need to be closed and restarted.
  • The elite female guards have good AI and are quite formidable enemies, but their high-heeled tight black leather-clad outfits are just juvenile.
  • They weren't common at the time, so this is a bit forgivable, but the game doesn't have very good support for widescreen displays, even the updated version.

Ugly

  • The menu system is poorly coded. The cursor hot-spot isn't at the tip of the arrow, you can't save over the current game until you first click off it and back on it, the mouse-click doesn't always take, and the save files are sorted by name rather than date, which requires you to have to resort every time you enter the menu. All of these problems are minor annoyances at first, but, over the several hours of playing the game, they become extremely frustrating.
  • There is an annoying bug that I encountered which prevented me from being able to load while in a mission. Even when I died, the game rarely reloaded from the last auto-save, it would just fade to black and stay that way. The only way I could load a game was to quit to the main menu and then load from there. And, when I did this, it seemed like some dead enemies came to life, while some alive enemies died. This bug started somewhere in the second episode, and continued until the end of the game.

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