I really like Wolfenstein The New Order. It's one of my favorite FPS I've ever played with its big, meaty guns, fast-paced shooting, and alt-history Nazi-brutalizing story. All things I really enjoy. I'd held off on getting the stand-alone expansion for this long because I'd heard it was basically a re-hash of the first's biggest points but not quite as good. Having just beaten the first game twice in a row, I held off on getting TOB because I thought more of the same would probably burn me out. Having waited these 3 or so years to play it, it's played more or less exactly as I'd heard it did. I played on hard mode and it took me just about 10 hours.
The Guns:
The shooting and gameplay is effectively identical to New Order. You can dash, lean to see stuff, dual wield most guns, all familiar stuff. There are some new weapons in the form of a standard rifle (not the crazy moon laser ones from New Order), a kind of "emergency" grenade pistol, a pipe melee weapon you can use like a bat, and a sawed off shotgun. Unlike New Order, however, no guns in Old Blood have an alt-fire mode. None of the new weapons are that special though.
You can mow down enemies like nobody's business with the sniper rifle, because they love standing still so you can get headshots, so even someone like me who can't aim worth crap can even take down Nazi's like a champ. The pipe is pretty worthless though, as is the sawed-off, as Nazi's can melee you so quickly that you can never get in close to use it against them, and the sawed-off shotgun is basically just a gimmick weapon that's 100% worse than the New Order shotgun that it doesn't replace. It was just something to look cool in the trailer, as far as I can tell. The grenade pistol is neat, but ammo is so limited for it that I often just conserved it so much that I forgot I even had it XP
With the silenced pistol and the pipe melee weapons, this game has more of a stealth-emphasis than New Order did, but I don't think it was really to the game's strengths. By having so many encounters so heavily encourage stealth (as so many have commanders that will summon TONS of reinforcements if you're seen if they're not silently taken out), it really takes away a lot of the frantic, fun running around from cover to cover that made New Order so much fun for me. A lot of this game's elements don't really gel well with the engine that it's building off of, and the level design is just one of them.
The New Enemies:
The other element of the game that really hampers enjoyment would be the new enemy type. The heavily armored Super Soldiers appear very briefly in New Order, but they're a regularly encountered enemy in this. They're a neat stealth-gimmick in the first level when you're unarmed, but later on when they're patrolling, they make a non-stealth approach basically suicide. They're usually patrolling an area with commanders about, so encountering them directly is mostly just a great way to die as they must first be shot near the head until they collapse, special melee'd to break off their chest, and then shot in the chest until they explode. Given the giant gattling gun they carry which can easily mince you, they're really best saved until last. The prevalence of Super Soldiers really makes the stealth approach the only viable one in most situations, especially in the late game, which is why I believe Old Blood was designed as a whole with a stealthy approach in mind and it's not just a case of me being dumb and doing it in a not fun way :P . The game just isn't designed around its strengths, and it really suffers for it.
The other new enemy type is zombies, which while neat the first time are just so generally non-threatening that they REALLY feel like a gimmick. A quick shot with any gun to the head will kill them, and they never really appear in great enough numbers to pose any kind of threat worth taking seriously like the Nazis with guns are. Zombies occasionally have guns, but they move so much more slowly and aim so badly that they're only slightly more lethal than the normal unarmed ones. The zombies being so nonthreatening but only appearing mostly in the second half of the game is why the first 4 chapters took me
about 5 hours to get through while the next 4 took me about half as long. Sure, they make it more action-y, but it isn't in a way that's really interesting or better when compared with the game this one directly compares itself to. I will say though, the final boss fight fucking rocks, and it's definitely the high point of the game.
The Story:
The game is very similar to New Order in story-beats as well. You go into a suicide mission, you get captured, your friend you go in with is killed by a horrible bad guy, you go kill that bad guy, you find the resistance, etc, etc. The main problem Old Blood has is its length though. You don't have time to get to know or care about any of these characters to really give enough of a shit about them. The only exception are the first big bad guy and the friend you go in with, who are both fun, good characters, but they're both death halfway through the game and all you're left with are the resistance members you barely interact with and a bad guy who is nowhere near as compelling as the first (although the game REALLY wants you to think that she is). That combined with how quickly the last half of the levels can be completed just give the second half of the game
a weird, unfinished feeling compared to the first half.
Verdict: Not Recommended. If you're a big fan of the way New Order plays and you NEED more Wolfenstein a like that, then this really isn't much of a game for you, because I'm that guy and I didn't really like it. If you like FPS games in general and you want something a bit different, then this may interest you. It's not as good as the first one. If anything, it succeeds at making New Order's mechanics feel mediocre and rushed. But it's far from a bad game, and it's far from unenjoyable. This is just another game that doesn't really do much anything that is both unique and actually an improvement on the games its directly comparing itself to (i.e. New Order). Anything it does well isn't done as well (or done just about as well) as New Order, and most anything unique it does isn't actually an improvement. Definitely not a bad pick-up if you can get it in the bundle for PS4 and Xbone that has it bundled with New Order (as it costs basically exactly the same as New Order stand-alone), but New Order is just SUCH a better game that it's really hard for me to recommend Old Blood for the price it still asks.
The Guns:
The shooting and gameplay is effectively identical to New Order. You can dash, lean to see stuff, dual wield most guns, all familiar stuff. There are some new weapons in the form of a standard rifle (not the crazy moon laser ones from New Order), a kind of "emergency" grenade pistol, a pipe melee weapon you can use like a bat, and a sawed off shotgun. Unlike New Order, however, no guns in Old Blood have an alt-fire mode. None of the new weapons are that special though.
You can mow down enemies like nobody's business with the sniper rifle, because they love standing still so you can get headshots, so even someone like me who can't aim worth crap can even take down Nazi's like a champ. The pipe is pretty worthless though, as is the sawed-off, as Nazi's can melee you so quickly that you can never get in close to use it against them, and the sawed-off shotgun is basically just a gimmick weapon that's 100% worse than the New Order shotgun that it doesn't replace. It was just something to look cool in the trailer, as far as I can tell. The grenade pistol is neat, but ammo is so limited for it that I often just conserved it so much that I forgot I even had it XP
With the silenced pistol and the pipe melee weapons, this game has more of a stealth-emphasis than New Order did, but I don't think it was really to the game's strengths. By having so many encounters so heavily encourage stealth (as so many have commanders that will summon TONS of reinforcements if you're seen if they're not silently taken out), it really takes away a lot of the frantic, fun running around from cover to cover that made New Order so much fun for me. A lot of this game's elements don't really gel well with the engine that it's building off of, and the level design is just one of them.
The New Enemies:
The other element of the game that really hampers enjoyment would be the new enemy type. The heavily armored Super Soldiers appear very briefly in New Order, but they're a regularly encountered enemy in this. They're a neat stealth-gimmick in the first level when you're unarmed, but later on when they're patrolling, they make a non-stealth approach basically suicide. They're usually patrolling an area with commanders about, so encountering them directly is mostly just a great way to die as they must first be shot near the head until they collapse, special melee'd to break off their chest, and then shot in the chest until they explode. Given the giant gattling gun they carry which can easily mince you, they're really best saved until last. The prevalence of Super Soldiers really makes the stealth approach the only viable one in most situations, especially in the late game, which is why I believe Old Blood was designed as a whole with a stealthy approach in mind and it's not just a case of me being dumb and doing it in a not fun way :P . The game just isn't designed around its strengths, and it really suffers for it.
The other new enemy type is zombies, which while neat the first time are just so generally non-threatening that they REALLY feel like a gimmick. A quick shot with any gun to the head will kill them, and they never really appear in great enough numbers to pose any kind of threat worth taking seriously like the Nazis with guns are. Zombies occasionally have guns, but they move so much more slowly and aim so badly that they're only slightly more lethal than the normal unarmed ones. The zombies being so nonthreatening but only appearing mostly in the second half of the game is why the first 4 chapters took me
about 5 hours to get through while the next 4 took me about half as long. Sure, they make it more action-y, but it isn't in a way that's really interesting or better when compared with the game this one directly compares itself to. I will say though, the final boss fight fucking rocks, and it's definitely the high point of the game.
The Story:
The game is very similar to New Order in story-beats as well. You go into a suicide mission, you get captured, your friend you go in with is killed by a horrible bad guy, you go kill that bad guy, you find the resistance, etc, etc. The main problem Old Blood has is its length though. You don't have time to get to know or care about any of these characters to really give enough of a shit about them. The only exception are the first big bad guy and the friend you go in with, who are both fun, good characters, but they're both death halfway through the game and all you're left with are the resistance members you barely interact with and a bad guy who is nowhere near as compelling as the first (although the game REALLY wants you to think that she is). That combined with how quickly the last half of the levels can be completed just give the second half of the game
a weird, unfinished feeling compared to the first half.
Verdict: Not Recommended. If you're a big fan of the way New Order plays and you NEED more Wolfenstein a like that, then this really isn't much of a game for you, because I'm that guy and I didn't really like it. If you like FPS games in general and you want something a bit different, then this may interest you. It's not as good as the first one. If anything, it succeeds at making New Order's mechanics feel mediocre and rushed. But it's far from a bad game, and it's far from unenjoyable. This is just another game that doesn't really do much anything that is both unique and actually an improvement on the games its directly comparing itself to (i.e. New Order). Anything it does well isn't done as well (or done just about as well) as New Order, and most anything unique it does isn't actually an improvement. Definitely not a bad pick-up if you can get it in the bundle for PS4 and Xbone that has it bundled with New Order (as it costs basically exactly the same as New Order stand-alone), but New Order is just SUCH a better game that it's really hard for me to recommend Old Blood for the price it still asks.