Wolfenstein 3D is over a decade old, but can be appreciated with the appropriate hardware, namely an old PC and a liking

User Rating: 6.7 | Wolfenstein 3D PC
Wolfenstein 3D is the first FPS to ever be released for any platform ever. It is in my opinion, one of the best games ever made, although its age has shone greatly and the game can be found on other platforms that are a bit better than this one, plus you’d have to have a weak PC to play this game.

Wolfenstein is a castle in Germany and you ply as a prisoner who is escaping from that castle. The prisoners name is B.J. and although he doesn’t talk, you can almost tell just by his actions that he’s a tough guy. Wolfenstein 3D is easily one of the most basic stories but its story is actually quite interesting. You basically take on six different chapters broke into nine levels each. Although there’s quite a bit of secrets to be found in the game to add replay value, there’s no real reason to go through the game twice, plus it’s pretty short and not difficulty at all, even on the hardest difficulty level.

As you progress through this game, you get to meet a boss at the end of each chapter, which is pretty well done. While the first boss is pretty simple, as you progress the bosses get tougher to take down mainly because of all the enemies that surround them.

Since this is an FPS, of course there is weaponry and the list of weapons is amazingly terrible. You get four different weapons with no crossfire. These weapons are: chaingun, machine gun, pistol, and knife. Each weapon except for the knife takes the same type of ammo, so when you run out of ammo, you run out of ammo for all your weapons except the knife.

The enemies you face are quite unique. There are only a handful of them, but the good news is that there are lots of them to kill, pretty much from start to finish. There’s your basic guard, machine gun guard, officers who move fast, dogs that bite you, and even zombies you face later on. The zombies are by far your most dangerous type of enemy, since they don’t make any noise when they see you and can do incredible damage, even at long range.

Wolfenstein 3D does have some interesting extras, namely getting 100% on the kills, secrets, and treasures that you find on each level. While this doesn’t change the game to much other than personal pride, it’s a nice touch and back in the early days of gaming it proved to be a lot of fun to get 100% on all of these. But now it just feel’s shallow and more like work than fun.

If you enjoy repetitive environments, then you’re going to love the game’s levels. The levels get repeated constantly and although it’s 3D, there’s no stairs or anything. So each level is one floor with no stairs multiple levels. Finding secrets is pretty challenging. The secrets can be anywhere in the levels your in and there’s no telling where they are, and this also affects your treasure findings too, sometimes even kills.

The graphics in Wolfenstin 3D are terrible. Repetitive environments plague every level of this game and nothing stands out. Character models are muddy and un-interesting to look at and you can see the small squares on each character that make up this low poly count game. I can’t believe this used to be impressive back in the 1990’s.

Wolfenstein 3D actually has some good sound. The music can be catchy at times, but there’s no voice acting except for the guards when they see you and when they die. The opening and closing of doors is insanely loud, enough to wake the whole castle though. The weapons sounds are of mixed results. While the chain gun sounds fantastic with its loud boom of bullets spraying everywhere, the machine gun sounds wimpy and so does the pistol.

To really advance through the levels of Wolfenstein 3D, you need to have keys to open up locked doors. The gold and silver keys can be found on each level, and these keys will unlock locked doors with the same color marching the keys that will take you to the elevator and to the next level.

All in all, Wolfenstein 3D is a classic. It’s so old that it won’t work on your computers, which enough said that you shouldn’t get a junky old computer to play Wolfenstein 3D, just rent it on the GBA if you can and play that version instead.