Game Details Developer: MachineGames

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Platform: Windows (reviewed), Xbox One, PS4

Release Date: May 5, 2015

Price: $20

Links: Steam | Official website MachineGames: Bethesda Softworks: Windows (reviewed), Xbox One, PS4May 5, 2015: $20

Last year’s Wolfenstein: The New Order was a surprise critical hit, successfully blending fast-paced action, strong character development, pulp aesthetics, and Nazi-based technological horror into a refreshingly bizarre big-budget first-person shooter. But developers MachineGames and publisher Bethesda Softworks chose to follow that success up not with a set of expansions or a DLC plan, but instead with a smaller standalone adventure: The Old Blood. In making a smaller game, they took a gamble—could the Wolfenstein cocktail work a second time, without all the ingredients of its fuller predecessor?

For The Old Blood, the answer—eventually—comes to a qualified yes. But for a relatively short game, it has a major problem of pacing, with almost all of its best bits pushed into the second half of the game. In so doing, it reveals that its standalone structure might have severely limited its potential as a game.

Let’s push things forward

The core issue is one of progression. One of The New Order’s greatest strengths was how it gave a sense of progress as you moved through its levels. Everything about it reinforced the idea of progress—you met more characters, learned more about the alternate history, got better weapons, fought tougher enemies, found new locations, and even acquired entertaining collectibles, like English rock’n’roll songs sung in German. This gave the original game a propulsive momentum. Every component worked in harmony to maintain player interest in the world at a level beyond the combat engine.

On the other hand, The Old Blood keeps a narrow focus on a single mission in (another) Castle Wolfenstein and the nearby city of Wulfsburg. Other characters exist primarily to just give you missions or attack you. These pawns offer almost nothing like the sustained relationship development of The New Order, and Old Blood foregoes clever secret areas and backstory hints hidden throughout that game. The only notable collectible in The Old Blood is numbered piles of gold.

Without that dash of personality, it’s possible to frame the first half of The Old Blood as an all-combat Wolfenstein. This is not a bad game idea; the combat in The New Order was quite good and The Old Blood manages to maintain its speed and, usually, it’s effective level design. The game follows a consistent model of small side corridors leading into large spaces filled with pieces of not-quite-sufficient cover. This tends to force effective shoot-and-move combat, where you’re always in danger of being flanked but can usually find just enough respite if you keep your wits.













The Old Blood reinforces its combat focus by highlighting a “Challenge” mode, which takes some of the best sustained portions of the story campaign and lets you play through them in a competitive, scored mode. This is good if you really like Wolfenstein’s combat, but it's difficult to recommend on its own without the pulp story or sense of progress driving the rest of the game.

It’s worth mentioning, though, that even if you do love Wolfenstein’s combat, the game perversely keeps you away from it in the beginning. By far the worst sequence in the game is the first level, with an imprisoned B.J. Blazkowicz escaping under the eyes of twisted metal proto-supersoldiers. It’s a level spent almost entirely in stealth and, bizarrely, it’s a Wolfenstein mission with only occasional access to actual guns. Perhaps it’s intended to serve as a tutorial for The Old Blood’s world and systems, but anyone who’s played The New Order won’t need that. The whole thing feels frustrating and perfunctory.

What are you wearing?

Even after that introduction, there’s a feeling that something's missing as The Old Blood continues. Halfway through the game, you come across a mirror. In a quick cut scene, Blazkowicz adjusts and cleans the mirror, showing your player character’s body for the first time. It answers a question I had for the first few hours of the game: “What on Earth am I wearing?”

This isn’t an idle question—the lack of feedback about Blazkowicz’s current state strikes at the heart of what makes The Old Blood different from last year’s surprisingly excellent The New Order. In The New Order you always feel fully embodied by the game world—that’s part of what made it feel special. Part of this was simply visual: the most memorable image of The New Order was B.J., 20 years later, staring blankly out a window in a Polish sanitarium.

But the idea of embodiment was much deeper than that. Walk through your base in The New Order and other characters talk to, tease, enlighten, or make out with you. They responded to your presence and your interest, and if “you” were shirtless or naked, as The Old Blood implies, they would sure as hell let you know it. They gave the game a solid sense of place, something The Old Blood generally lacks.

Get into the second half of The Old Blood, however, and things become monumentally more interesting. The addition of new environments in a set of caves, a village, then a city, is good on its own. But you also run into characters (who notice the fact that you’re almost naked!) and specific references to German history in the Nazi era, like an adaptation of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. Through these middle sections, The Old Blood is transformed into a near-perfect continuation of The New Order, using both story and novelty to great motivation.

It doesn’t quite last—the focus on Nazi occultism leads to a climax that’s less interesting than The New Order’s examination of the effects of Nazi science-without-ethics—and it ends up making the first half of the game feel like a deliberate withholding of the good stuff that actually was possible. It’s a reminder that while The Old Blood does manage to achieve greatness, it doesn’t quite have the scope to do so consistently enough.

The good:

Fast, fun, Wolfenstein combat

Propulsive middle levels

Sliding into crouch while dual-wielding shotguns

The bad:

Almost story-free first half lacks a sense of progress

Occult Nazi story less interesting than New Order’s alternate history

The ugly:

A first level almost entirely without shooting

Verdict: Buy it, after exhausting The New Order