Review by Gianluca “DottorKillex” Arena - Ps4 tested version
Strengthened by the great success of Wolfenstein The New Order, which has brought back not only a saga and an imaginary beloved by the public but also a way of understanding and programming first-person shooters, Bethesda and Machine Games try again, a year later, with this Old Blood, a stand alone prequel set several years earlier than the 2014 title events.
The price is budget (just under twenty euros), but the ambitions do not seem downsized: let's see if it is worth returning to play the role of BJ Blazkowicz.
A jump in the past
From the start screen, and continuing with the first moments of the game, Wolfenstein the Old Blood appears as a tribute to the past of this glorious saga, one of those that baptized the genre of first-person shooters and which, even today , they manage to move the masses thanks to particularly inspired environments and enemies: the eras pass, in fact, but the Nazis are always (together with the zombies) the favorite slaughterhouse when it comes to feeding the magazines.
Set in an alternative 1946, when the world conflict, while definitely hanging on the side of the Germans, has not yet resolved in their favor, the story behind The Old Blood starts with our undercover Blazkowicz, together with an English infiltrator, to stealing confidential documents from Helga Von Schabbs, right-hand man of General Wilhelm Strasse, one of the most influential personalities of the Nazi regime.
Thanks to false documents (and not before a hilarious curtain with the guards in charge of control), our men manage to infiltrate the Wolfenstein castle, located in the Paderborn mountains, a scientific stronghold at the center of the imposing war machine set up by the Krauts, but, unfortunately, nothing will go as originally planned.
Without revealing anything else, suffice it to say that the plot is enjoyable and plausible exactly as it was that of The New Order, that the characters and dialogues, despite the drama of many sequences, tend not to take themselves too seriously and that the results of both the segments that we will be called to play will brilliantly reconnect with the lore of the game and with the events that occurred in the original title.
The charisma of the hero that we will be called to impersonate is palpable, and during the approximately seven hours necessary to view the credits you will not fail to let slip a few smiles.
Stealth and bullets
As a stand alone prequel, The Old Blood does not differ significantly, in terms of gameplay, from what was seen in last year's title, still offering an effective mix of violent and adrenaline-pumping shootings and pure stealth moments, in which to trigger a alarm may mean having to reload the last save.
The adventure, divided into two linked episodes, offers in the first part a tribute to the Wolfenstein castle and to the classic atmospheres of the series and, at the same time, to the game dynamics that have made The New Order successful: alternating between phases in which to slaughter enemies with bar blows and an aggressive and noisy dual wield, the player can always count on the availability of at least two different approaches to each situation, which, in addition to increasing the replayability of the campaign, favors experimentation and breaks the monotony typical of the genre, in which corridors and rooms full of enemies often follow one another relentlessly.
As before, the merits of The Old Blood are to be found in an intelligent and never banal level design, in the feeling of heaviness returned by the weapons and by the shots fired with them and by a level of difficulty always calibrated upwards, which tends to punish unwary players and novice Rambos.
The frequency of the checkpoints and five different levels of difficulty will avoid frustration and ensure a scalable and enjoyable adventure for both veterans and newbies, but already from the fourth of the five levels present things get decidedly complicated, especially when encountering enemies details, such as the Supersoldaten and very robust fusiliers introduced in this expansion.
In addition to a handful of new enemies, The Old Blood also introduces two new weapons, a high-powered rifle (supplied to the aforementioned riflemen) and the explosive Kampfpistol, a true star of the situation, whose shells-bombs will remove the chestnuts. from the fire in more than one circumstance.
If the first episode plays it safe, offering an adventure closer to the atmosphere of the original title, the second, set in the gloomy town of Wulfburg, tries to mix the cards, varying rhythms and settings and riding the wave-zombie: the different nature of the enemy bestiary will almost always force a direct approach, without excluding bullets, and will recall the gameplay dynamics of the forefather of the saga, fast, violent, visceral, to the minds of the most experienced players.
If on the one hand the change of pace is appreciable, and adds variety to the package, the final result, although good, is slightly lower than that of the first part, also thanks to a much more elementary level design and the poor artificial intelligence of the opponents.
General clean up
Gamers who have played The New Order on old gen consoles will be struck by the fluidity of the game engine (firmly anchored at 60 fps) and the clarity of the full HD resolution, but also those who have played the role of Blazkowicz on PS4 and Xbox One will appreciate the general work of cleaning up the code, free from bugs in the version I tested (the Sony one) and with slightly better defined textures, although the basics remain the same as the title that debuted less than a year ago.
More than the polygonal count, what is striking are the design of the environments, the animations of the enemies, the convincing game physics, which allows itself small breaks only on the occasion of some post-mortem at least bizarre poses by the Nazi soldiers.
The quality of the dubbing remains the same, and therefore of a high level, and the quantity of content is more than good, if compared to the budget price at which the title is proposed: if completing the two adventures will require you between six and seven hours maximum, depending on the approach you prefer, a good amount of collectibles and the aforementioned multiple difficulty levels could lead you to a second run, perhaps after letting the product settle for a few weeks.
If the quality of the downloadable content were always that of The Old Blood, in short, no one would complain: this is little but sure.
Final comment
The Machine Games guys hit the mark again, after the excellent results obtained with The New Order: Wolfenstein The Old Blood is a refined and demanding product, which embodies the essence of single player shooters that today (unfortunately) seem to have gone out of fashion, between stealth kills, furious shootings and a level design always on the piece.
The aggressive price, the goodness of the gameplay and the references to other episodes of the saga represent further reasons to proceed with the download, given that for the retail versions we will have to wait another ten days.
