Running at about six hours, this game is a lot of fun with a decent story and some great action packed fights. If you haven't played either, I would recommend playing this first, then picking up last years release. By keeping the elements that made The New Order a great, old-school shooter, The Old Blood offers 5 to 6 hours of mindless and extremely enjoyable FPS gaming. [SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.] I really liked New Order, especially the alternate history they created, but I sort of craved for the old Wolfenstein. So in Old Blood, it felt great to crawl around in old german castles and villages again, and the supernatural part really brought back dear memories from previous titles. Great game, I wish they'll keep on making more traditional FPS like this. Competent, compelling gameplay, but with an uneven tone. The Old Blood is a solid, fun and challenging shooter, with its distinctive mix between old and new school. Unfortunately, the original The New Order set the bar very high, and this expansion clearly can't keep up. Blazko's new adventure is surely still fun and challenging, yet far from the must-buy experience that The New Order was. The game’s B-movie vibe is evocative of the work of those skilled filmmakers who embrace the silly or even the self-consciously stupid. The Old Blood is just OK. It’s a great deal for the price – as a $25 digital download via the PlayStation Store, the Xbox Games Store and Steam, it’s a rarity in an era when 25 bucks might get you a couple map packs’ worth of downloadable content – but I’ve discovered there’s such a thing as too old-school. Familiar environments recall Return to Castle Wolfenstein and the 2009 Whether you want to go stealth or guns blazing, combat is the bloody heart of this experience small amount of money you'll get game which is longer than most other shooters Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is a damn good standalone expansion to The New Order. The games story this time around isnt as good as the other two but still good. Castle Wolfenstein is a good setting for the game. The gameplay is the exact same as The New Order, which is amazing by the way. This is also a prequel to The New Order, and sets up the game good. Достойная игра, с классным миром и крутыми героями. В игре порой слишком много кривоватого стелса + порой прям видно проблемы с балансом сложности. Видно, что игра - дополнение, а так - вполне неплохо. Terrible shooting, cant aim in this game. Challenge levels is s**t, greate idea to add this when you release game on consoles. Same as Wolfenstein: The New Order. I hate the weird robots and huge heavy guns. It will be great, if there if there is none of those. Enemies and dogs are so weak. It gets boring fast. It will be great if I there is **** and **** in the game with no too unrealistic things and magic weapons. Wolfenstein: The Old Blood được sáng tác bởi nhạc sĩ Mick Gordon, ông cũng sáng tác nhạc nền cho The New Order. Để tạo ra âm nhạc với phong cách có thể phản ánh trò chơi, Gordon đã dùng những bộ đàn bốn dây, dành thời gian để chơi đàn mandolin và cello bị hỏng. Ông cũng đặt một số thứ bên trong cây đàn piano, để tạo ra âm thanh độc đáo. MachineGames are still masters of first-person violence, but this return to Castle Wolfenstein doesn't give them anything new to work with. need to know What Is It? Standalone prequel to The New Order. Play It On: Quad core CPU, 4Gb RAM, 1Gb GPU Reviewed On: Intel i5-2500K, 16Gb RAM, GeForce GTX 970 Price: $20/£15 Release Date: Out now Publisher: Bethesda Developer: MachineGames Multiplayer: Leaderboards Website: Official site A standalone prequel to last year's excellent Wolfenstein: The New Order, The Old Blood marks a return to the classic shooter's traditional ideas, environments and plot beats. It's a strange creative shift. The New Order proved that it was possible to separate B.J. Blazkowicz from Castle Wolfenstein and still create something that felt like a Wolfenstein game. I admired it as much for its idiosyncrasy as its gunplay: it's a game of surprising heart, staggering violence and stylistic originality. It traded techno-gothic Nazi fortresses for retro-futuristic Nazi moonbases and was better off for it. The Old Blood is far more familiar. It's set in 1946, involves both a return to and an escape from Castle Wolfenstein, and plays out the consequences of Nazi occultism in a manner that will feel eerily familiar to anybody who has played Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Raven's 2009 reboot of the series. Even as a fan—perhaps because I'm a fan—I was happy to see the series move away from gothic castles and gunfights in crypts. Yet here we (and they) are.  MachineGames' particular sense of style has survived, however. The new Castle Wolfenstein is lovely to look at, a brutal marriage of Helm's Deep and Half Life 2's Citadel. B.J. regards it, the regime that occupies it, and everything that happens within it with the same mixture of folksy wisdom and barely-constrained rage that made his reinvention in The New Order such a surprising success. Your scenery-chewing Nazi foes retain their fondness for Tarantinoish monologuing and in-your-face physical threat, something that MachineGames remain particularly good at evoking in the first person. The script veers from darkly funny to utterly deadpan in a way that implies the intelligence working away under Wolfenstein's implacably dumb exterior. That said, what was novel a year ago isn't necessarily novel now. Nothing in The Old Blood exceeds what was achieved in The New Order, and there are moments when the two are uncannily similar. There's even a bit where you're confronted by a senior female Nazi while carrying a wobbly tray of drinks. This is clearly deliberate, but now doesn't feel like the time for Wolfenstein to put out a greatest hits album: it only just made a case for its continued relevance. Despite the skill involved in The Old Blood's execution, it's disappointing to be confronted with so much familiarity after last year's flood of original ideas. These are still good tricks, but they're the same tricks. The Old Blood shares The New Order's impactful gunplay but lacks its predecessor's pace and variety. A forced stealth section near the beginning lasts long enough to become irritating; what follows alternates between running gunfights, open-ended arena encounters and defense sequences with little escalation. Its high points are, as before, the moments when it lets you take on a room full of Nazis as loudly or quietly as you please. The way Wolfenstein seamlessly transitions between stealth and deafening violence is still its best trick. For every arena that makes the most of that freedom, however, there's another that is too small, too linear or too prescriptive to really deliver. Then there the low points: on-rails turret bits, bullet-sponge enemies, a fiddly vehicle section. The introduction of the supernatural doesn't add anything that you haven't encountered in a hundred other shooters, including more than one prior Wolfenstein game. The final boss marks The Old Blood's lowest ebb, a healthbar-whittling chore that lacks the visual ingenuity and environmental puzzle-solving of its counterparts in The New Order. There are new weapons, but the majority of these are reverse-engineered versions of guns from the previous game, downgraded to match the '40s setting. The sawn-off shotgun is gratifying to use, however, and a new grenade-launching pistol provides you with a room-clearing panic button mitigated by limited ammunition. The campaign took me around four and a half hours to complete on the second-hardest setting, with about 50% of the game's hidden collectibles picked up along the way—completionists are likely to get a few more hours out of it. There's also a score attack mode that allows you to replay certain arena combat encounters from the campaign in order to compete on global leaderboards. This is a welcome addition, one that I'd like to see fleshed out in future Wolfenstein games: it makes the most of the game's excellent-feeling guns, and offers a way back into raw combat for those unwilling to sit through the cutscenes and stealth sections again. The Old Blood is a false start for Wolfenstein's life after The New Order, a creative step backwards that survives primarily because of the strong groundwork laid in the previous game. It will always be fun to fire these guns and MachineGames's presentation is still ahead of the curve, but this isn't the game you should play if you want to explore those qualities—that game was released a year ago. Wolfenstein: The Old Blood MachineGames are still masters of first-person violence, but this return to Castle Wolfenstein doesn't give them anything new to work with. Joining in 2011, Chris made his start with PC Gamer turning beautiful trees into magazines, first as a writer and later as deputy editor. Once PCG's reluctant MMO champion , his discovery of Dota 2 in 2012 led him to much darker, stranger places. In 2015, Chris became the editor of PC Gamer Pro, overseeing our online coverage of competitive gaming and esports. He left in 2017, and can be now found making games and recording the Crate & Crowbar podcast. |
