Publisher: Activision
Developer: Raven Software
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista; Pentium 4 3.2 GHz or Athlon 3400+ CPU; 1 GB RAM; 8 GB hard-drive space; GeForce 6800 GT/ATI X800 video card
Genre: FPS
Release date: Available now

A classic video game is like a favorite old song; although it might’ve been copied and redone many times, the original always seems to have a warm spot in your heart. If you’re a shooter fan, Wolfenstein 3D is one of those games. Created by id Software in 1992, Wolf 3D is the granddaddy of the first-person shooter genre. You, as a captured American soldier, fight your way out of a maze of 8-bit rooms, shooting Nazis, finding hidden rooms and treasure, and eating dog food to stay alive. The basic FPS formula that Wolf 3D established survives to this day, but with Wolfenstein developer Raven Software has thrown a little RPG spice into the classic recipe, while once again placing the fate of the free world in your hands.

Office of Secret Actions (OSA) agent B.J. Blazkowicz is in yet another pickle as the story opens. Blazkowicz has infiltrated a Nazi warship, but he’s been discovered, and in the process of fighting his way to the main deck and a waiting German fighter plane, he accidentally unleashes the destructive power of a mysterious medallion he has pilfered. He returns the artifact to his headquarters in Great Britain and learns the Nazis believe that the medallion is the key to an awesome destructive force that’s not of this world.

Blazkowicz returns to the fictional German town of Isenstadt and finds it to be a full-scale battleground, with the Nazis trying to fight off a determined resistance movement. He also discovers that the town seems to be ground zero for an energy source known as the Veil. While on a mission to an archeological dig site, Blazkowicz finds another medallion just like the one he liberated from the ship. When the medallion comes in contact with Veil energy, it grants the user supernatural powers, including the ability to walk through walls and slow down time. Armed with this power, and aided by Isenstadt’s resistance fighters, the OSA agent seeks out the Nazi general who plans to use the Veil power to secure the final victory of the Third Reich.

The first thing you need when you start to install Wolfenstein is patience; the installation process took 35 minutes on my system, which sports a fairly fast DVD-ROM drive. But once you’ve got the game installed and configured, there’s practically no stopping from beginning to end. You have a wide variety of weapons at your disposal, running the gamut from the typical machine guns and rocket launchers to a particle cannon and a gun that fires bolts of electricity. The Veil powers are key to your success, granting you access to areas that are inaccessible without it. The power steadily drains from the medallion as you use it, but it can be replenished by standing in the visible plumes of Veil energy that can be found almost everywhere in the game. The action is pretty much as you’d expect from a Wolfenstein game: shoot everything wearing a Nazi uniform (hearing the anguished cries of “Mein leben…” from the dying enemies, just as they did in the original game, brought a macabre smile to my face). But to shake things up a bit, Raven has added a series of RPG-style quests. Some of them are necessary to the story, while others are optional side quests handed out by resistance leaders. A detailed, annotated map and an icon on the HUD compass are included to keep you going in the right direction, and there’s an excellent variety of settings, from the hub world of Isenstadt to forests, hospitals, factories, even an otherworldly final level that will look somewhat familiar to Half Life fans. Multiplayer modes are somewhat sparse, limited to Team Deathmatch, Objective, and Stopwatch, a unique mode in which each team tries to complete an objective before a timer expires; the team with the faster completion time wins the match.

I’ve never really been a fan of collecting gold or finding hidden areas in shooters; they take you out of the story and artificially extend the running time of the campaign. And, just like Wolf 3D, there’s plenty of both in Wolfenstein. The gold and mystical objects called tomes that you find can be exchanged on the black market for weapon upgrades. The tomes are very important to find, since they can get you increased Veil powers, but the 16 tomes are so well hidden that you really have to tear the landscape apart to find them. When you actually get around to shooting Nazis, the pace of the game becomes breakneck, with enemies hiding around every corner. Some of the baddies have been altered by Veil energy to become very tough to dispatch. Graphics are mostly impressive, although the characters are surprisingly stiff and the lip-sync animations are very poor. Sound effects are excellent, as is the orchestral score, which adds the right amount of drama to the proceedings. But the typical shooter shortcomings are also here: brain-dead enemy AI, clipping issues that leave weapons suspended in mid-air or embedded into walls, and boss battles that aren’t all that difficult to win, provided you have the patience to endure dying lots of times until you figure out the trick. And in an unexpected break from PC shooter tradition, Wolfenstein utilizes the checkpoint saving system instead of quick saves. Obviously a concession to the console crowd, the checkpoint saves are not much of a problem. There are plenty of them, and they’re placed pretty much where you’d normally want to quick save, but they forgot some at vital points in the final level, causing me much frustration. Also, I would’ve liked to have had a minimap on the HUD instead of having to tab out of the game to look at the map.

In Wolfenstein, Raven has taken the basics of the classic FPS tradition and added some interesting and entertaining elements, creating a flawed but fun and simple shooter that fans of the series will enjoy. Unfortunately, 21st century shooter players are likely to be turned off by its myriad little problems. But the series has come a long way since ’92, and this new installment has the series headed in the right direction.

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