(This is the 70th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
The FPS genre and id Software is like the Soulslike genre and From Software. It's like the roguelike genre and Rogue. Wolfenstein 3D would kickstart a whole genre of video games that would try to replicate its (and Doom's) success over years to come from this point forward using the exact same style that was pioneered right here, with Hovertank and Catacomb 3D acting as test subjects preceeding it.
With Wolfenstein 3D, id Software improved upon their 3D engine and built a full-scale video game with multiple episodes, a small yet complete story and fast-paced shooting action that ended up being revolutionary, though not perfect. In today's review I'm going to go over my thoughts, which are both positive and negative, but mainly it's a celebration of an achievement that is pretty much the reason for why I decided to do this challenge in the first place.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10
You are BJ Blazkowicz, an American spy of Polish descent infiltrating the Nazi base looking for plans for the Operation "Eisenfaust" (blueprint for building a "perfect" army) and ultimately destroying the Nazi regime. You are captured and imprisoned at Castle Wolfenstein at the start of the game and have to shoot your way out and ultimately make your way to Hitler's bunker and take him out in what makes the first of two trilogies. After releasing the first trilogy, id Software took a few months to create another trilogy working as a prequel to the first one. From a story perspective, you will be satisfied after playing the first trilogy though.
The story is explained in the manual and at the end of each of the three episodes of a trilogy. There isn't much else to it. BJ can be seen holding a minigun on the cover for the game, screaming as he stands over a dead Nazi soldier. You can also see his face throughout the game, as his eyes glean left and right to give an impression that he is actively checking the corridors for enemies. Finally, you see him jump into the exit of an Episode and shout in jubilation whilst doing so. I love BJ Blazkowicz from my time playing Wolfenstein The New Order, but he is a killing machine exclusively in this game, with no heart nor desires other than mowing down Nazis.
Hitler is the final boss, as mentioned, and is in a robotic suit when you finally meet him. When you kill him, he says "Eva, auf Wiedersehen", which is one of many things bosses and all enemies shout in this game. I didn't understand some of it even though I'm German, for example I have no idea what the normal soldiers are saying when they spot you, but having these characters express certain things or simply speak German is a pretty big deal at the time and definitely adds to the shock value that this game provided during its release.
GAMEPLAY | 13/20
This game is a first-person shooter. It revolutionized the entire genre and is called the "grandfather of FPS games". Before this, you had Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D from id Software, which used prototypes of the eventual Wolfenstein 3D engine and were short tech demo-type games that id made as part of their contract with Softdisk, but Wolfenstein was going to be their first big attempt at making a full-scale video game of this type.
PC's were not equipped to play graphically 'demanding' games from a first-person perspective at this time, so developers didn't attempt something like this. John Carmack, the programmer of the engine ended up figuring out though how to make this game run well by both making wall tiles all identically large to reduce the complexity of what the PC would have to display and by only making the PC calculate visible surfaces at a time instead of a whole map.
It was John Romero who then came up with the idea to make this a "loud" and "cool" fast-paced action game, and there you have it.
The end result is what we call today the world's first boomer shooter with handguns. You strafe around maze-like levels to kill enemies like Nazi soldiers of different types, hounddogs, bats and zombies, you look for keys to unlock your way out of the floor you're on, and you make your way up continously through three total Nazi dungeons with 9 floors each to ultimately kill Hitler. The end result is indeed a fun Arcade-like shooter that ... is not as bloody and gruesome as parents from 1992 would make you believe. Open a door and a Nazi will stand there. Shoot him and a bit of blood will come out. Even if you shoot all of them on a given floor, barely a few percent of the entirety of that floor will be covered with them and their blood. The floors themselves don't look brutal, gruesome or scary either. I guess it's called being desensitized by what we have seen since? But it could also be that it's genuinely funny to look back and think that this was such a horrific thing to expose gamers to when movies would depict a billion times more horrific scenes annually. It would be useful to note here that games were not seen as art by not only many individual humans inofficially, but also officially by, for example, the German legislation.
Back to the gameplay. After a couple hours, does it get repetitive? Sure. There are only four weapons in this game that I ever found, and the mini- and handguns pretty much become useless once you find the submachine gun, because all weapons share ammunition, so the single-fire handgun is slower than the SMG and the mini-gun wastes too many bullets needlessly unless you have a group of 3+ enemies standing next to each other, which doesn't happen all that often.
The worst part about this game from a gameplay perspective for me was the secret-finding. This game has secret doors just like Catacomb 3D had, but in that game, you would just shoot magic projectiles and it would cover a few tiles and you would figure out quicker if random tile #879 had a secret behind it. In this game, secrets are also hidden behind random secret tiles. Unfortunately, since this could be any tile and you need to push SPACE into it instead of shooting, this means you are constantly projected to that horrific buzzing sound that plays when pressing SPACE. It's somewhat tolerable when you press it separately for each tile, but progress this way is slow. Best thing to do is hold SPACE and strafe along an entire wall, but here is where you get that terrible sound penetrating your ears constantly, and it is literally so bad that I had to stop at one point because of a headache I got from it. I enjoy secrets in games like this, but not when finding them means subjecting yourself to these horrors.
The worst part is that for the boss fights, you are pretty much forced to figure out where the secret doors are. This is OK once you initially find them, but until you do, you just keep pressing SPACE everywhere until something opens up. These doors have weapons, ammo and health packs in them, which you will need, because once you die to a boss once, you only spawn with a handgun and 8 rounds of ammo, which means that without these secret doors, you simply cannot beat a boss.
Overall, I had a fun few hours with this game minus the headache. I can tell how this game was seen as revolutionary, and with only half a year of development no less, so I'm looking forward to the improvements id Software will come up with for Doom, which released in 1993.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
Voice acting exists, as already described. Enemies shout stuff at you when they spot you and when you kill them. Sound quality is of course not great, so even as a German I couldn't decipher all of what was said, but it's a nice way to add immersion and alert players of enemies being in the same room as you, so I overall found this to be a plus for the experience.
Sound design ranges from horrific for the sound of unsuccessfully trying to open doors or strafin around, to pretty good for the sound of guns and doors opening and closing.
The soundtrack I found to be kind of disappointing. It reminds me more of the subtle background music of Catacomb 3D rather than the metal, fast-paced sounds of 1993's Doom for example. At least placing the tone somewhere in between I would have enjoyed more. While I don't think the soundtrack suits the game very well, as its own thing I think there are some solid tracks here, but it's not a soundtrack I'd care to listen to again necessarily.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10
Graphics look better than for Catacomb 3D, that's for sure. Wall tiles have some actual textures to them instead of being solid single colors. Decoration was added, like posters, plants, tables and more. There is more enemy variety and the spritework is slightly improved. This was all possible thanks to a switch from 16 color EGA to 256 color VGA compared to Catacomb 3D.
That said, these are still rudimentary 3D graphics in a game that sacrifices graphical presentation by design to allow for the PC's of the time to actually handle the gameplay, so suffice it to say, this is not going to win awards for looks.
I did appreciate a few minor things though, like the way you could see enemies get hit by your shot and die way off in the distance as small sprites, or how the portrait of BJ would keep starting to the sides and how he would get bloodied up the lower your health would go.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10
You stroll around in Castle Wolfenstein filled with Nazis that shout things at you in German. On top of that, you are playing this in first-person. Does it get any more immersive than this in 1992? The portrait of BJ staring to the sides, the posters and Nazi emblems hung up on the walls and the animations of enemies getting hit and dying all are minor things that add to the atmosphere in this game as well.
CONTENT | 7/10
This game gives you access to four weapons, it has 7 types of enemies in the original trilogy, it has two trilogies (six episodes) with 9 floors on each, and four difficulty levels to test your prowess on. Pretty good. Though the fast pace doesn't match as well as you'd like with the rather low amount of enemies you will find on each floor (especially compared to Doom) and therefore repetitiveness can kick in after the first trilogy.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 6/10
The maze-like design of every floor is a clever way of extending the time it takes for players to go through them, but I found some to be overly confusingly laid out at times. I also found that on many floors, there weren't as many enemies as I would have liked to see, so I thought that there were too many breaks inbetween the shooting. There is also one major thing I disliked, which is boss encounters. You encounter one and pretty much immediately die on your first attempt. On your second, you realize that you have no weapons and ammo to really work with anymore, since you lose everything at death, which means you are forced to run around the room to find secret areas to restock. I don't like the idea of restricting the player to a few lives either.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10
This game managed to achieve something on a scale that no other game that tried to do something in first-person view ever could achieve: Make a fast-paced FPS game that was fun to play and actually ran well. It's revolutionized a genre, something only a couple dozen games over history could say, so it deserves the high praise it gets for innovation (especially since this game will kickstart a slew of FPS games that will find themselves on my challenge spreadsheet over the coming years).
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
You can try to beat your high score, try to up the difficulty and try to find more of the secrets and treasures in the game to go for 100% completion. You could go for 4 or 5 out of 5 here if you were to include all those fanmade levels you can play as well.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 66/100
This game is a big part of video game history for its innovation. Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake are played to this day, both old and new iterations, and id Software took arguably their biggest step right here. The game is still fun for a couple hours, but didn't age quite as well in parts and still leaves a lot of potential left to be explored in 1993's Doom, which I'm already looking forward to.
The FPS genre and id Software is like the Soulslike genre and From Software. It's like the roguelike genre and Rogue. Wolfenstein 3D would kickstart a whole genre of video games that would try to replicate its (and Doom's) success over years to come from this point forward using the exact same style that was pioneered right here, with Hovertank and Catacomb 3D acting as test subjects preceeding it.
With Wolfenstein 3D, id Software improved upon their 3D engine and built a full-scale video game with multiple episodes, a small yet complete story and fast-paced shooting action that ended up being revolutionary, though not perfect. In today's review I'm going to go over my thoughts, which are both positive and negative, but mainly it's a celebration of an achievement that is pretty much the reason for why I decided to do this challenge in the first place.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10
You are BJ Blazkowicz, an American spy of Polish descent infiltrating the Nazi base looking for plans for the Operation "Eisenfaust" (blueprint for building a "perfect" army) and ultimately destroying the Nazi regime. You are captured and imprisoned at Castle Wolfenstein at the start of the game and have to shoot your way out and ultimately make your way to Hitler's bunker and take him out in what makes the first of two trilogies. After releasing the first trilogy, id Software took a few months to create another trilogy working as a prequel to the first one. From a story perspective, you will be satisfied after playing the first trilogy though.
The story is explained in the manual and at the end of each of the three episodes of a trilogy. There isn't much else to it. BJ can be seen holding a minigun on the cover for the game, screaming as he stands over a dead Nazi soldier. You can also see his face throughout the game, as his eyes glean left and right to give an impression that he is actively checking the corridors for enemies. Finally, you see him jump into the exit of an Episode and shout in jubilation whilst doing so. I love BJ Blazkowicz from my time playing Wolfenstein The New Order, but he is a killing machine exclusively in this game, with no heart nor desires other than mowing down Nazis.
Hitler is the final boss, as mentioned, and is in a robotic suit when you finally meet him. When you kill him, he says "Eva, auf Wiedersehen", which is one of many things bosses and all enemies shout in this game. I didn't understand some of it even though I'm German, for example I have no idea what the normal soldiers are saying when they spot you, but having these characters express certain things or simply speak German is a pretty big deal at the time and definitely adds to the shock value that this game provided during its release.
GAMEPLAY | 13/20
This game is a first-person shooter. It revolutionized the entire genre and is called the "grandfather of FPS games". Before this, you had Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D from id Software, which used prototypes of the eventual Wolfenstein 3D engine and were short tech demo-type games that id made as part of their contract with Softdisk, but Wolfenstein was going to be their first big attempt at making a full-scale video game of this type.
PC's were not equipped to play graphically 'demanding' games from a first-person perspective at this time, so developers didn't attempt something like this. John Carmack, the programmer of the engine ended up figuring out though how to make this game run well by both making wall tiles all identically large to reduce the complexity of what the PC would have to display and by only making the PC calculate visible surfaces at a time instead of a whole map.
It was John Romero who then came up with the idea to make this a "loud" and "cool" fast-paced action game, and there you have it.
The end result is what we call today the world's first boomer shooter with handguns. You strafe around maze-like levels to kill enemies like Nazi soldiers of different types, hounddogs, bats and zombies, you look for keys to unlock your way out of the floor you're on, and you make your way up continously through three total Nazi dungeons with 9 floors each to ultimately kill Hitler. The end result is indeed a fun Arcade-like shooter that ... is not as bloody and gruesome as parents from 1992 would make you believe. Open a door and a Nazi will stand there. Shoot him and a bit of blood will come out. Even if you shoot all of them on a given floor, barely a few percent of the entirety of that floor will be covered with them and their blood. The floors themselves don't look brutal, gruesome or scary either. I guess it's called being desensitized by what we have seen since? But it could also be that it's genuinely funny to look back and think that this was such a horrific thing to expose gamers to when movies would depict a billion times more horrific scenes annually. It would be useful to note here that games were not seen as art by not only many individual humans inofficially, but also officially by, for example, the German legislation.
Back to the gameplay. After a couple hours, does it get repetitive? Sure. There are only four weapons in this game that I ever found, and the mini- and handguns pretty much become useless once you find the submachine gun, because all weapons share ammunition, so the single-fire handgun is slower than the SMG and the mini-gun wastes too many bullets needlessly unless you have a group of 3+ enemies standing next to each other, which doesn't happen all that often.
The worst part about this game from a gameplay perspective for me was the secret-finding. This game has secret doors just like Catacomb 3D had, but in that game, you would just shoot magic projectiles and it would cover a few tiles and you would figure out quicker if random tile #879 had a secret behind it. In this game, secrets are also hidden behind random secret tiles. Unfortunately, since this could be any tile and you need to push SPACE into it instead of shooting, this means you are constantly projected to that horrific buzzing sound that plays when pressing SPACE. It's somewhat tolerable when you press it separately for each tile, but progress this way is slow. Best thing to do is hold SPACE and strafe along an entire wall, but here is where you get that terrible sound penetrating your ears constantly, and it is literally so bad that I had to stop at one point because of a headache I got from it. I enjoy secrets in games like this, but not when finding them means subjecting yourself to these horrors.
The worst part is that for the boss fights, you are pretty much forced to figure out where the secret doors are. This is OK once you initially find them, but until you do, you just keep pressing SPACE everywhere until something opens up. These doors have weapons, ammo and health packs in them, which you will need, because once you die to a boss once, you only spawn with a handgun and 8 rounds of ammo, which means that without these secret doors, you simply cannot beat a boss.
Overall, I had a fun few hours with this game minus the headache. I can tell how this game was seen as revolutionary, and with only half a year of development no less, so I'm looking forward to the improvements id Software will come up with for Doom, which released in 1993.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
Voice acting exists, as already described. Enemies shout stuff at you when they spot you and when you kill them. Sound quality is of course not great, so even as a German I couldn't decipher all of what was said, but it's a nice way to add immersion and alert players of enemies being in the same room as you, so I overall found this to be a plus for the experience.
Sound design ranges from horrific for the sound of unsuccessfully trying to open doors or strafin around, to pretty good for the sound of guns and doors opening and closing.
The soundtrack I found to be kind of disappointing. It reminds me more of the subtle background music of Catacomb 3D rather than the metal, fast-paced sounds of 1993's Doom for example. At least placing the tone somewhere in between I would have enjoyed more. While I don't think the soundtrack suits the game very well, as its own thing I think there are some solid tracks here, but it's not a soundtrack I'd care to listen to again necessarily.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10
Graphics look better than for Catacomb 3D, that's for sure. Wall tiles have some actual textures to them instead of being solid single colors. Decoration was added, like posters, plants, tables and more. There is more enemy variety and the spritework is slightly improved. This was all possible thanks to a switch from 16 color EGA to 256 color VGA compared to Catacomb 3D.
That said, these are still rudimentary 3D graphics in a game that sacrifices graphical presentation by design to allow for the PC's of the time to actually handle the gameplay, so suffice it to say, this is not going to win awards for looks.
I did appreciate a few minor things though, like the way you could see enemies get hit by your shot and die way off in the distance as small sprites, or how the portrait of BJ would keep starting to the sides and how he would get bloodied up the lower your health would go.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10
You stroll around in Castle Wolfenstein filled with Nazis that shout things at you in German. On top of that, you are playing this in first-person. Does it get any more immersive than this in 1992? The portrait of BJ staring to the sides, the posters and Nazi emblems hung up on the walls and the animations of enemies getting hit and dying all are minor things that add to the atmosphere in this game as well.
CONTENT | 7/10
This game gives you access to four weapons, it has 7 types of enemies in the original trilogy, it has two trilogies (six episodes) with 9 floors on each, and four difficulty levels to test your prowess on. Pretty good. Though the fast pace doesn't match as well as you'd like with the rather low amount of enemies you will find on each floor (especially compared to Doom) and therefore repetitiveness can kick in after the first trilogy.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 6/10
The maze-like design of every floor is a clever way of extending the time it takes for players to go through them, but I found some to be overly confusingly laid out at times. I also found that on many floors, there weren't as many enemies as I would have liked to see, so I thought that there were too many breaks inbetween the shooting. There is also one major thing I disliked, which is boss encounters. You encounter one and pretty much immediately die on your first attempt. On your second, you realize that you have no weapons and ammo to really work with anymore, since you lose everything at death, which means you are forced to run around the room to find secret areas to restock. I don't like the idea of restricting the player to a few lives either.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10
This game managed to achieve something on a scale that no other game that tried to do something in first-person view ever could achieve: Make a fast-paced FPS game that was fun to play and actually ran well. It's revolutionized a genre, something only a couple dozen games over history could say, so it deserves the high praise it gets for innovation (especially since this game will kickstart a slew of FPS games that will find themselves on my challenge spreadsheet over the coming years).
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
You can try to beat your high score, try to up the difficulty and try to find more of the secrets and treasures in the game to go for 100% completion. You could go for 4 or 5 out of 5 here if you were to include all those fanmade levels you can play as well.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 66/100
This game is a big part of video game history for its innovation. Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake are played to this day, both old and new iterations, and id Software took arguably their biggest step right here. The game is still fun for a couple hours, but didn't age quite as well in parts and still leaves a lot of potential left to be explored in 1993's Doom, which I'm already looking forward to.