Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)

Return to Castle Wolfenstein came out in 2001, as a farmed out sequel to an id Software property largely overshadowed by Doom and Quake.  Computer Gaming World gave it a fairly lukewarm 3.5 stars at the time, comparing the game unfavorably to Half-Life and No One Lives Forever.  It's hard to disagree with the sentiment.

I know I played this once upon a time, but I have next to no memory of it.  I remember the opening castle you begin in, but only the very start of it.  I actually remember a bit of the burnt out industrial area too, and the "lopers" that would chase you.  Yet that is all.

I've played a lot of older shooters lately, but I actually found this one had some rather extreme difficulty spikes, which surprised me.  You take a lot of damage very quickly from relatively low level enemies on the medium setting.  A lot of the combat encounters seemed designed around rather simple, and frustrating, ambushes.  I quicksaved a lot to diffuse them, as there seemed little other way to avoid those traps short of springing them, and then trying again better informed.

The catacombs were a slog especially.  As dark, brown and drab as the most often mocked late 90's early 00's FPSes.  Although I actually really enjoyed the stealth levels, which I wouldn't have expected, since I usually hate stealth.  They had a nice puzzle element to them.  They also served as a much needed reprieve from the increasingly bullet spongy, hit scanning, almost immediately lethal enemies that were being thrown at me.  The game indulged in some rather creative outdoors areas too, which helped a lot to break up the monotony of the assorted murder mazes set in catacombs, labs and castles.

Those hit spongy, hit scanning enemies are probably the games biggest short coming.  The only way it knew how to up the difficulty was to throw enemies with bigger numbers at you.  More HP and more damage.  Which is frustrating because even Quake and Quake 2 had more interesting combat encounters, where enemies had attack patterns you could learn and use against them.  The meat and potatoes enemies of RotC are just hit scanning, ambushing Nazis.  Not much to learn or adapt to there.

The weapons were alright I guess.  I found myself heavily relying on the silenced SMG, just because the game was so lethal when you really get a hornets nest of nazi's pissed off at you.  That and the humble scoped rifle to deal as much damage from a distance as I could.  Throw in your limited stamina for running, and BJ Blazcowicz felt almost feeble in this title.  If I tried to go into a room and just mow down everyone with a chaingun, assuming I survived the encounter at all, I'd be so low on health I'd have to replay that room anyways.

All in all, revisiting this game it just didn't impress me.  I may have been better off just skipping it.