I really, really hate to speculate on behind-the-scenes, production stuff when talking about a game - I am, at the end of the day, uneducated in game development & production, and besides, it always feels less interesting to talk about since its just pure random speculation anyway - but it's kinda hard to talk about Wolfenstein without thinking about the behind-the-scenes of it all, because it feels like so much about the game stems from, I guess, mis-direction during its creation.

See the thing about Wolfenstein is it really feels like it was made by two teams who never ever collaborated; there are individual elements that are interesting to talk about, pieces that could be built into something quite cohesive and well-constructed if put together with the right extra pieces or in the right way. But the final product feels like a handful of really disparate mechanics and designs just thrown together to meet a deadline, there's no other way to conceptualise it in my head. You have a hub level, from which you go to other places around Isenstadt to complete missions, so it's kind of structured like an open-world game where you might come and go as you please to do the sort of things BJ does best - kill Nazis - but everywhere that isnt the hub areas is essentially its own linear level which you have virtually no reason to return to afterwards, unless you want to hunt collectibles (which, like, you might, but honestly I never did and I never struggled either). Maybe I'm not explaining it in the best way, it just feels really jarring to have an "open-world" which is actually just a level selection with some Nazis in it.

There's a monetary system where money can be earned either by finding certain collectibles or by completing missions, and the money is spent upgrading weapons & amulet powers. The game makes a point to tell you that there's not quite enough money in the game to enable you to get all the weapon upgrades, which I must admit is quite clever - usually games of this ilk are all too happy to make sure you're as beefy as possible if you spend enough time grinding some sort of resource - and being forced to prioritise and carefully consider your choices as you go is rather engaging, as you've no idea how much more money there is or how much you personally will be able to find. The problem is that also you can use this money to buy ammunition for all of the weapons, some are which are extremely rare in the game itself; so you immediately have this situation where your fairly limited currency can kind of be wasted? It's a system that would probably work really well in something like, I don't know, maybe Far Cry? But it just feels a bit at odds with the kind of game Wolfenstein has historically been and, indeed, was only one game ago. Power weapons are cool and even moreso when you know you have enough opportunity to use them - one major improvement in Serious Sam 4 was an abundance of laser cannon ammo - but this implementation feels oddly restrictive.

There's a weird problem with the narrative and presentation too, which feels like it hints at mechanics and systems that probably just didn't make it into the finished product; Nazis bark about "the American spy!" whenever they encounter you, but if we're being honest, you don't really do any spying in this game, and what you do doesn't really feel like the sort of thing that would give you the reputation amongst Nazis as a spy. Blazko is made the literal moment he arrives in Isenstadt, and every time you are seen on the street you are instantly recognised, so it all feels like maybe some kind of espionage mechanic was planned and then just dropped at some point? The Saboteur released around the same time and, while I never played it, it seems to hint at the sort of thing that Wolfenstein might have been going for. As you progress through the game, you meet members of two resistances, but while the game makes scarce use of cutscenes except for particularly dramatic moments (and some level transitions), interacting with the games cast consists of them basically blurting out their entire backstory and current motivations the moment they see you. Maybe comparison to the MachineGames Wolfenstein reboot is unfair, a series which started 5 years later and has vastly better characterisation and narrative, but maybe not when this game came out five years after Half-Life 2. I was genuinely shocked to learn John Carmack had been nowhere near this game, considering its approach to story-telling has his "story in a game is like story in porn" ethos written all over it.

This probably isn't the most elegantly written review - a bullet-point list of things about the game that I didn't particularly like isn't really my preferred way to talk about a game - it's just utterly bizarre because there's glimmers of excellence here. I know Raven Software are good and that is on display in Wolfenstein; the moment-to-moment gameplay of the games combat is actually really good, having aged surprisingly well, with a range of weapons and the ability to pair them up with some really entertaining magic powers, a particular highlight being the Empower power-up, which makes it an absolute treat to just strut through the open emptying magically supercharged MP40 rounds into Nazis with. There's a mechanic to the magic powers where you can use magical beasts to your advantage in combat, but only a little bit, or they will turn on you instead, which is really engaging and clever! I wish someone had reconsidered the choice to make the screen black & white when you run out of magic powers, because it reads kinda weird in a game with The Dreaded Regenerating Health System and it ends up becoming really easy to get gunned down because you had way less health than you thought, but this is an issue which is small potatoes in the big picture.

There's probably two decent games in here and then they got put in the teleporter from The Fly and Wolfenstein came out the other end.