After playing the new ones I knew this one wouldn't hold up to them. I liked that it had a different enough play style. The inclusion of the superpowers that you get from the ancient mystical stones is a fun direction. The semi open world aspect felt ahead of it's time. I liked that this one dove head first into the supernatural and mystical elements of the Wolfenstein world whereas the new ones focus more on the sci fi steam punk aspects. I liked the aesthetics of the world and it's design. It was creepy and atmospheric at times. This game felt more rooted in horror than it's successors. It's also very colorful for 2009. Most games around this era were the brown yellow nightmares like Haze. However this game's shooting is very janky. The story and the characters are the epitome of meh. Everything other than the world and some of the enemies is completely boring. This version of BJ Blazkowicz is an absolute slap in the face of the new one. This one is so generic and forgettable. I want to give a higher ranking than 6 simply because of the name recognition of Wolfenstein as I've been a fan of the series since the ps2 days, but I think a 6 is perfectly appropriate. It's no better than a timeshift. Another first person shooter that's generic and has one gimmick mechanic that works well enough

id Software is famous for creating the FPS genre with Doom, Duke Nukem, and Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein is a little different from your typical WWII game. The game is wrapped around the paranormal, so you’re not going to get another Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. The game is entirely fictional, so it lets the Raven use fact and fiction and kind of mix them. You play as BJ Blazkowicz who is an American secret agent trying to stop the Third Reich from using the Black Sun as a weapon to rule the world. Sounds cliche? Well, it kind of is, but it’s interesting enough and has a very small plot twist at the end that makes the whole story worthwhile. You are working for resistance factions known as the Kraisau Circle and the Golden Dawn.

Wolfenstein isn’t just a linear run and gun shooter. In fact, the game is a bit sand boxy in the sense that you can choose your missions and get to them requires running around the city, fighting your way through Nazis, and getting the right sections. While I found this kind of pointless since there are only half a dozen side missions, but it makes it different from most shooters. The game has four different powers you can use as well as a whole new weapon upgrade system.


The four powers consist of slowing down time, shield, Empower, and the basic passive power that can let you go through certain marked walls, climb hidden ladders and see energy pools, as well as highlight enemies in the dark and reveal bigger enemy’s weak points. You will use all these weapons, but not as often as you’d like. You can upgrade your powers at the Black Market buildings, but finding gold is a pain since it’s all hidden and the only way t upgrade everything 100% is to find every sack of gold in the game and there are over 200. The same goes for intelligence files and Tomes that let you unlock more power upgrades. I just find hidden items in shooters pointless since you’re concentrating on not dying yet you’re also supposed to hunt for crap? I don’t like it. The powers must be used during boss fights and to get through some enemies.

Upgrading your weapons are really fun since we have never had a WWII game that uses real WWII weapons that can have silencers attached to them and scopes. Of course, there are fictional weapons such as particle cannons, tesla guns, and a flak cannon. All these are slowly acquired as you play the game and each weapon is fun to use and the way the weapon’s efficiency is solely up to how you upgrade.

The levels are pretty varied, but they all look the same. The graphics are very nice, but there’s not really an art style here. All the levels are pretty much laid out the same: Kill these Nazis, figure out how to get past this obstacle, kill more Nazis, blow this up, kill the boss. Rinse and repeat for about 8-10 hours. This doesn’t mean the game gets boring since all the is scrambled up quite often so you get the illusion that it’s not the same thing over and over again.


There is some enemy variety in the human form. Each is the same except some are wearing different uniforms, but it’s the supernatural enemies that you should worry about. There are assassins that will sneak up on you and slash you to death if you don’t use your powers to spot them quickly. There are powerful generals that shoot fireballs and pound the ground and they will kill you fast. You have sexy Nazi chicks that do extreme melee on you unless you’re fast. There are guys with flamethrowers and particle cannons that use must find the weak spots on to defeat. That’s about it though and you can throw creepy monkey dogs in there too. The enemy variety is a bit thin, but these guys work.


The boss fights are pretty amusing and some are just downright hard. You just figure out there weak spot and what weapon works best when it’s easy from there. So overall the structure of the game is sound with your main missions branching off the city of Isenstadt where you go get your missions from the two resistance factions. The game is well worth the purchase, but you won’t really come back to this and not even for multiplayer since no one’s even playing, and even if there where it’s pretty generic.

Wolfenstein offers great gameplay, a decent story, and just a good solid 8-10 hours, but you won’t be coming back to this one unless you really want to find all the hidden items.

Wolfenstein feels like a game that Raven Software was trying to breathe some fresh air into the franchise by taking inspiration from other shooters popular shooters at the time. But in doing so, the Wolfenstein fails to stand out, let alone stand aside with its contemporaries.

Wolfenstein has the player controlling B.J. Blazkowicz as he aids a resistance group in the fictional German town of Isenstadt. From the start of the game, Blazkowicz obtains a mysterious medallion from Nazis soldier that grants him up to four powers that aid him in combat various ways.

The medallion that B.J. gets to use throughout the game grants the player powers that can be activated using the D-Pad on the controller, giving the player a way to augment their way of shooting Nazis. Powers range from giving the player to move faster and see enemies in the environment, to creating a shield to absorb damage and increase damage output from their own weapons.

However, while the powers are invaluable to help you in a tough fight, the pool of Veil Energy is pretty small, even when fully upgrading the pool to maximum, which I found out that always depleted while in the middle of a firefight.

Also, I found the powers to not be particularly fun or interesting to use. The powers barely feel like they’re tied into the design of the game and the levels; they feel more of an afterthought during the development. Sure, you’ll have specific parts of the level where a power will allow you to pass through a wall, but they’re not integrated into the level in way that allowed me to bypass enemy encounters or setup clever ambushes. The Veil mechanic feels underdeveloped and underutilised, leading me to believe that the mechanic was more of an afterthought during the game’s design.

I appreciated the more open level hub design that the game opted go with for this iteration of Wolfenstein. While the levels themselves are in their own self-contained instance, the player, as B.J., has to walk on foot to get to those instances. Along the way, the player can ambush, or be ambushed, by Nazis soldiers, as well as collect treasures and visit the shop for supplies. However, having to do some extra leg work before being able to continue the story levels does get a bit annoying after a time. The enemy encounters in the hub are randomised, so there were a couple of occasions where I would stumble upon a couple of tough super Nazi soldiers that would tax at my resources.

Unfortunately, Wolfenstein is a game that was largely forgotten about for a reason; it came out at a time when there were plenty of better shooters with light RPG mechanics. While the game certainly isn’t bad, you’ve already played this time of game several times already. As Wolfenstein isn’t available on digital stores, nor backwards compatible on modern consoles, I would not recommend tracking down a copy to experience the game for yourself.

another forgotten shooter by Raven Software back in 2010 when Activision actually had very different games aside from Call of Duty around that time, this time featuring an very different interpretation of the Wolfenstein IP.

really good gunplay with fantastic and creative weapons, good IA and real good upgrade system.

I disliked the open-world hub although it's a nice idea especially from a shooter at the time, this hub quickly turns into an boring backtracking later on and I kinda think if it was more linear like the newest Wolfenstein titles the overall gameplay loop could be a lot fresh at the start to end.

the over the top nature of the game's supernatural elements are quite interesting, though a bit out of place for a game of the franchise. thankfully they ditched everything in the follow-ups by Machine Games.

overall fun game but I was a bit bored halfway through it largely because of the open-world backtracking.

I hesitate to use the term, but this has always seemed like a sterling example of an "underrated gem." Raven came together to craft a solid FPS experience with a few unique features to freshen it up a bit - a semi-open world hub, the magical Black Sun power-ups, a tone that leans more into the occult elements of the franchise than some of the prior entries. In retrospect, I can see how The New Order proved that BJ required some degree of development as a character, since he does come across remarkably flat here along with nearly every other member of the cast. With that in mind, I still have quite a lot of fun shooting up Nazis with magic super-powers and exploring a refreshingly unique setting for the franchise. It may not be perfect, but it's a damn fine game that deserves a lot more love than it's given.

I really, really hate to speculate on behind-the-scenes, production stuff when talking about a game - I am, at the end of the day, uneducated in game development & production, and besides, it always feels less interesting to talk about since its just pure random speculation anyway - but it's kinda hard to talk about Wolfenstein without thinking about the behind-the-scenes of it all, because it feels like so much about the game stems from, I guess, mis-direction during its creation.

See the thing about Wolfenstein is it really feels like it was made by two teams who never ever collaborated; there are individual elements that are interesting to talk about, pieces that could be built into something quite cohesive and well-constructed if put together with the right extra pieces or in the right way. But the final product feels like a handful of really disparate mechanics and designs just thrown together to meet a deadline, there's no other way to conceptualise it in my head. You have a hub level, from which you go to other places around Isenstadt to complete missions, so it's kind of structured like an open-world game where you might come and go as you please to do the sort of things BJ does best - kill Nazis - but everywhere that isnt the hub areas is essentially its own linear level which you have virtually no reason to return to afterwards, unless you want to hunt collectibles (which, like, you might, but honestly I never did and I never struggled either). Maybe I'm not explaining it in the best way, it just feels really jarring to have an "open-world" which is actually just a level selection with some Nazis in it.

There's a monetary system where money can be earned either by finding certain collectibles or by completing missions, and the money is spent upgrading weapons & amulet powers. The game makes a point to tell you that there's not quite enough money in the game to enable you to get all the weapon upgrades, which I must admit is quite clever - usually games of this ilk are all too happy to make sure you're as beefy as possible if you spend enough time grinding some sort of resource - and being forced to prioritise and carefully consider your choices as you go is rather engaging, as you've no idea how much more money there is or how much you personally will be able to find. The problem is that also you can use this money to buy ammunition for all of the weapons, some are which are extremely rare in the game itself; so you immediately have this situation where your fairly limited currency can kind of be wasted? It's a system that would probably work really well in something like, I don't know, maybe Far Cry? But it just feels a bit at odds with the kind of game Wolfenstein has historically been and, indeed, was only one game ago. Power weapons are cool and even moreso when you know you have enough opportunity to use them - one major improvement in Serious Sam 4 was an abundance of laser cannon ammo - but this implementation feels oddly restrictive.

There's a weird problem with the narrative and presentation too, which feels like it hints at mechanics and systems that probably just didn't make it into the finished product; Nazis bark about "the American spy!" whenever they encounter you, but if we're being honest, you don't really do any spying in this game, and what you do doesn't really feel like the sort of thing that would give you the reputation amongst Nazis as a spy. Blazko is made the literal moment he arrives in Isenstadt, and every time you are seen on the street you are instantly recognised, so it all feels like maybe some kind of espionage mechanic was planned and then just dropped at some point? The Saboteur released around the same time and, while I never played it, it seems to hint at the sort of thing that Wolfenstein might have been going for. As you progress through the game, you meet members of two resistances, but while the game makes scarce use of cutscenes except for particularly dramatic moments (and some level transitions), interacting with the games cast consists of them basically blurting out their entire backstory and current motivations the moment they see you. Maybe comparison to the MachineGames Wolfenstein reboot is unfair, a series which started 5 years later and has vastly better characterisation and narrative, but maybe not when this game came out five years after Half-Life 2. I was genuinely shocked to learn John Carmack had been nowhere near this game, considering its approach to story-telling has his "story in a game is like story in porn" ethos written all over it.

This probably isn't the most elegantly written review - a bullet-point list of things about the game that I didn't particularly like isn't really my preferred way to talk about a game - it's just utterly bizarre because there's glimmers of excellence here. I know Raven Software are good and that is on display in Wolfenstein; the moment-to-moment gameplay of the games combat is actually really good, having aged surprisingly well, with a range of weapons and the ability to pair them up with some really entertaining magic powers, a particular highlight being the Empower power-up, which makes it an absolute treat to just strut through the open emptying magically supercharged MP40 rounds into Nazis with. There's a mechanic to the magic powers where you can use magical beasts to your advantage in combat, but only a little bit, or they will turn on you instead, which is really engaging and clever! I wish someone had reconsidered the choice to make the screen black & white when you run out of magic powers, because it reads kinda weird in a game with The Dreaded Regenerating Health System and it ends up becoming really easy to get gunned down because you had way less health than you thought, but this is an issue which is small potatoes in the big picture.

There's probably two decent games in here and then they got put in the teleporter from The Fly and Wolfenstein came out the other end.

Esse jogo é uma maluquice tremenda, mas sem o carisma que os Wolfensteins The New Order e The New Colossus tem (esses últimos também tem maluquice, mas não necessariamente sobrenatural).

Esse é um ótimo exemplo que prova o potencial da Raven Software quando se trata de produzir experiências do estilo da velha-guarda do FPS. Assim como em Quake 4, Soldier of Fortune e Singularity, ela (pelo menos pra mim) conseguiu fazer um jogo divertido com uns diferenciais interessantes, mas que ainda assim é chato no geral e desinteressante.

Eu não acho esse jogo memorável, e acredito que a maioria das pessoas que gostam da franquia e já jogaram esse jogo também compartilham dessa opinião.

A franquia já tinha se envolvido com o sobrenatural antes, que foi em Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Porém, nesse jogo de 2009, chamado apenas de 'Wolfenstein', o sobrenatural foi usado tanto que chega no ponto de ser parte central do jogo. E isso pra mim é um problema.

A questão é que os poderes sobrenaturais, pelo menos pra mim, não são interessantes, e eu praticamente não usei eles durante o jogo, com excessão das vezes em que eu fui obrigado a usar eles pra prosseguir no jogo e no finalzinho dele, quando eu já estava de 'saco cheio' da história do jogo e eu só queria terminá-lo logo. Fora que a história em si, tentando enfiar goela abaixo toda essa parada sobrenatural foi tão genérica e chata pra mim que eu realmente não me lembro de nada da história, nem dos personagens secundários.

A questão é que eu me diverti bastante do início do jogo até o meio. A partir do momento em que o final do jogo começava a dar as caras, o jogo ficou MUITO chato e eu nem consegui mais acompanhar a história, que já não era das mais interessantes.

Uma coisa que me irritou durante o jogo são as animações. A animação do personagem que controlamos, B.J. Blazkowicz quando corre é bizarra e desconfortável. O mesmo vale para as animações dos inimigos, A maneira como eles correm, são atingidos pelas balas das armas, e caem no chão quando abatidos é muito estranha. Até as animações dos personagens e inimigos de F.E.A.R., de 2005, são muito melhores que as desse jogo, de 2009.

Um outro problemaço desse jogo é a câmera. A câmera balança MUITO. Eu nunca havia ficado desconfortável com a visão de um jogo FPS. Nem as animações de teleporte do poder 'blink' de Dishonored, que causam uma distorção na imagem, conseguiram me deixar desconfortável.

O jogo é bastante curto. Porém, ao mesmo tempo, pareceu que a última hora foi interminável. Eu acho incrível que esse jogo conseguiu descer de divertido para chato em poucas horas de jogo.

A história é maluca, sem pé nem cabeça, exageraram muito na dose de sobrenatural, mesmo que isso já tenha sido explorado no passado, e por algum motivo mais bizarro ainda, o Wolfenstein: The New Order, de 2014, segue 'um pouquinho' como continuação desse jogo.

Enfim, esse aqui tinha potencial. A Raven Software já produziu outros FPS que eu curti, mesmo também não tendo grandes histórias, como os que eu citei no começo desse texto, e eu acho que esse jogo poderia ter sido muito melhor.

Pena que hoje em dia ela está 'presa' na Activision e fadada (pelo menos por enquanto) a produzir os Call of Dutys que todo ano são lançados. Um baita potencial desperdiçado.

This is just a very fun shooter. Most of the guns feel great to use. The MP's feel good, I love shooting bolt action rifles in games, flamethrower is cool, the tesla coil is crazy, a bunch of fun stuff. The supernatural powers also just make stuff fun. Empower just letting you shoot through cover is great, and the Shield melting enemies when you touch them with it is also awesome. BJ really just feels like a walking disaster.

Also god bless whoever decided to have pickup-able melee weapons in this game. The way you can just throw them at a Nazi's head and insta-kill them is endlessly entertaining, especially since the weapon will just bonk of their head and fly somewhere.

The hub is also neat. It does get a little back tracky, but I still find it entertaining to go through it.

I do wish that you could lean in this game though. Return to Castle Wolfenstein let you lean for some fucking reason even though you couldnt shoot out of it, and it just feels like it would fit way more in this game.

Playtime: 10 Hours
Score: 8/10

My first ever experience with the Wolfenstein franchise before The New Order came out and it was great to revisit it recently. This game has B.J. fighting Nazis as usual, but during WW2, and not the new Nazis won the war time-line that Machine Games have created. It has you travel to Germany to help the resistance, as you try to stop the Nazis from accessing this other dimension, that has allowed them to give their soldiers super powers, and create futuristic weaponry.

The cool part about this game is that you get this medialion that gives you powers as well, such as traveling between dimensions, slowing down time etc.. Its really a cool element and adds some flavor to the pretty standard GPS gameplay, before Call of Duty fully took over.

Gameplay wise, you get to move around freely around this town, which acts as a hub world. You can do main missions and side missions to earn extra cash, to buy weapon upgrades for all your guns, which is definitely a fun system. You can also find collectables such as extra gold, Intel and tomes of power. I really enjoyed the world design and it made it stand apart from other shooters of the time.

Combat is fun as well as you have a mixture of your standard WW2 weapons and the cool futuristic guns which are fun to use. It's not as fast pace as the newer games, but it's still a lot of fun and addictive. Like I said, I really enjoy the weapon upgrade system, and it just makes you feel like your progressing well without the need for RPG mechanics in a game that doesn't need them really.

The story is fairly basic and straight-forward, and it won't be at all as gripping as the newer games, however I did like the more straight forward and less over the top nature. It's a slippery slope and it will just depend if you prefer the older games in this series or the newer ones. This game kind of sits in between the two, which is why I have such a fondness for it.

My one real question is, where the hell is the remaster for this game? Hell I'll even take a port of it on GOG, because unless you have an older console, it's the only real way to play this game sadly. If you do find a copy of it, I highly recommend giving it a shot!

The chronology and canonicity of the Wolfenstein games gets hazy at best, and this one is not helping much. Considered a loose sequel of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, it also is supposed to be the starting point of the next saga handled by Machine Games which follows up with The New Order.
Unfortunately, this is an average FPS with nothing real interesting to it. A central hub lets you access the various levels of the game and you're once again investigating the Nazi's paranormal division. The next games brought much more to the franchise.