Fun and hectic single player, but buggy multiplayer make Wolfenstein's return a little less exciting than his last.
You play, as always, B.J. Blazkowicz, a legendary hero of WWII. If you didn't know, his job is to kill Nazis and foil their evil schemes. And he's really good at it.
The bad-assery starts as soon as the first cutscene begins. You single-handedly bomb a Nazi battleship and fly away in an enemy plane in the nick of time. Sounds good, huh? It actually gets better.
Soon you discover a secret plot about a strange dimension called the Black Sun, and you are sent to Germany to investigate. After your first mission, you are sent to a small German town, whose name is really hard to pronounce and even harder to spell. There you can accept missions, fight Nazi patrols, and talk to various NPCs.
The main gameplay reveolves around shooting everything in sight, with an impressive arsenal, ranging from the standard MP40 to beam-blasting particle cannons. It's essentailly the Call of Duty formula. However, there is a twist. You can harness the power of the Black Sun and enter a super dimension called the Veil. When you do, everything turns to an eerie green hue, and you can access "super powers" called Veil powers. You can slow time, create an energy shield, walk through walls and make your bullets hit harder. Not to mention the even cooler Black Market upgrade system, which lets you make your guns and powers even more deadly. I fitted my Kar98k with a silencer and scope, and could take out bad guys from afar without their friends noticing. The Veil upgrades are less usefull, really just making the powers more dangerous, like bouncing back bullets with the shield instead of absorbing them.
Some poeple were a little worried about the engine of Wolfenstein. How does an oldish engine hold up against the new techs out there? In short: It doesn't. The graphics are far from bad, but you will not see anything eye popping here. The environments range from Call of Duty 2-esque towns to mangy sewers and even Indiana Jones style underground bases. Some of these look wonderful from afar, but as you look closer, they look choppy around the edges. They are fun to traverse through though, and you generally won't see any weird Nazi deaths or objects popping through walls. Lighting effects are quite advanced though, but that's about it.
While running through single player, you will encounter tons of enemies, ranging from inept SS soldiers to a pillar crushing beast, resembling those of Doom 3. Wolfenstein has always been about beating the odds and shooting the living **** out of everything, so don't expect any superb tacticts from the AI. Just know there will be lots of them. And they will be tough.
Since Wolfenstein is a quasi-horror game, you should expect a good soundtrack and excellent sound effects. This is where Wolfenstein shines. There seems to be song for every occasion, like fighting Nazi's or discovering an artifact (que the Indie dooo-dooo). All the weapons sound terrifying and loud, and you can hear your character splashing in puddles, thumping someone in the back of the head, or removing your bayonet with a satisfying squelch. On a side note, the actors are quite skilled. I really felt like I was in Nazi Germany with all the "Ze American iz 'ere!" cries.br />
Multiplayer is not that great. While it's far from bad, it's just not that fun. You can choose three classes, Medic, Engineer and Soldier. They each have their own special abilities like medkits and stachel charges and you can upgrade their weapons. There is Team Deathmatch and two objective based games. It sounds fun in theory, but it executed a little poorly. There are three problems with the multiplayer. First of all the graphics are terrible. They literally look like they were pulled from Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which was made in 2001. The second is that there is not a lot to keep you entertained, except for some achievements. You'll get bored after a couple of hours. The third and most important issue is that the lag is terrible. It really hard to kill someone when they're running around and then they disappear.
To sum it all up, Wolfenstein is a very fun game, but has quite a few problems. You will enjoy the single player campaign a lot, but probably won't want to give it another try (unless you are going for achievements). Mulitplayer might have you entertained a little while, but you'll probably just go back to playing Call of Duty WaW.