Return to Castle Wolfens Review
Xbox Live subscribers willing to spend the time to learn the game's maps properly will definitely get a lot of enjoyment out of the game's online component.
Each team is made up of four character classes that work well together. The soldier is a standard player class, with access to the game's heavier weapons. The engineer class can drop or defuse dynamite, making him necessary to complete objectives that include blowing something up or preventing something from being blown up. The lieutenant class can drop ammunition packs for his teammates, which is a must, as there are no ammo or health power-ups in the multiplayer mode. He can also call in devastating air strikes. The medic drops health packs for injured teammates and can also bring dead players back to life. This is useful because Return to Castle Wolfenstein doesn't just let dead players respawn instantly. The game uses the concept of reinforcements that spawn in waves. When you die, you can either wait for a medic or just jump into the reinforcement queue, which is basically a timer that ticks down a few times every minute. Advancing players can also capture forward reinforcement points on the map, which lets players respawn a little closer to the action.
While Return to Castle Wolfenstein's multiplayer is fantastic, it has a steep learning curve and a few technical issues. The learning curve comes from having to learn each of the game's large multiplayer maps. The first time you jump into a match, you'll be thrust into the fray without any indication as to what you're supposed to be doing and where you're supposed to be doing it. You'll have to call up the objective screen to see what you're supposed to be doing, but the only way to find out where you need to be is to explore. A multiplayer-map tour mode that let you do flybys of each map's major choke points and areas of interest would have really worked wonders here for getting new players up to speed.
The multiplayer mode's other problems are technical. Like Unreal Championship before it, Return to Castle Wolfenstein can suffer from some pretty awful lag when you're connected to a bad server. As of this writing, the bad servers seemed to outnumber the good, lag-free servers, but as most things go with online games, this could change at any time. Suffice it to say that it's definitely possible to find a smooth, perfectly playable server, but don't expect to find one terribly often using the quick match option. Careful filtering with optimatch is the easiest way to find servers that are fast and full.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein's large environments look great, and the player models are all sharp and decently animated. However, the game could have used some higher-impact death animations, as you never really feel like your weapons are doing real damage. The game has some really fantastic special effects--particularly the fire from a flamethrower and the explosions from air strikes--but they do come at a cost, as the frame rate isn't very stable. It never completely chokes and slows to a crawl, but even when there aren't any other players or enemies onscreen, turning past a large section of ground causes the frame rate to noticeably fluctuate. Owners of high-end televisions can play the game in 480p, which looks a bit sharper.
The game's sound is good but not great. The music is all good, and most of the weapon sound effects are nicely done as well. The fact that, for the first time in the series, the Nazis all speak English--in poor German accents, no less--is disheartening. Beyond that, the voice work for some of the characters can be pretty grating. The game makes use of its Dolby Digital 5.1 support in typical first-person-shooter fashion, so if you open a door and quickly turn around, you'll hear the door opening in your rear speakers.
In the end, Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a fairly uninteresting single-player game, but its multiplayer mode is a ton of fun. Xbox Live subscribers willing to spend the time to learn the game's maps properly will definitely get a lot of enjoyment out of the game's online component.
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Player Reviews
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Either online or off Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a must own for Xbox owners Continue »
Critic Scores
- TeamXbox 4.7 / 5
- IGN 9.3 / 10
- Extreme Gamer 7 / 10
- GameZone 9.2 / 10
- Game Chronicles 9.6 / 10
- TechTV 4 / 5
- Eurogamer 8 / 10
- Thunderbolt 8 / 10
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- Activision
- Nerve Software
- Historic First-Person...
- Release: May 6, 2003 »
- ESRB: Mature
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