WOLFENSTEIN: THE OLD BLOOD
Still fun, but shown up by newer indie shooters.
Ilove MachineGames’ neo- Wolfenstein series, a collection of winkingly self-serious shooter campaigns that play out like Inglorious Basterds by way of Half-Life 2. With the weather now getting a good bit colder, it seemed as good a time as any to tuck into the developer’s cosy, Bavarian reimagining of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, spiffed up for the new continuity and titled The Old Blood.
I remember really loving The Old Blood in particular—I first played it in the lead up to the release of The New Colossus back in 2017, and I went in expecting a fun FPS romp spiritually connecting me to the chilly autumn nights I spent gaming in years past. I did have a good time, but two Doom reboot entries and a mini renaissance of indie FPSes since have spoiled me, and I found The Old Blood’s flaws as an FPS more grating than before.
CLOAK AND DAGGER
It starts out immediately playing to the series’ strengths. With Valve no longer making videogames with any regularity, Machine Games might be the best in the biz when it comes to those first person gameplay cutscenes spearheaded by Half-Life. The Old Blood begins with one such sequence, showing BJ Blaskowicz drive up to Castle Dubbs, here a 1936 Berlin Olympics-esque concrete monstrosity emerging out of the end of a canyon. Your acerbic British spy pal Wesley gives you the lowdown: Wolfenstein’s castellan, Helga von Schabbs, has intel on Nazi general Deathshead’s secret base. You’ve got to go in, grab the docs and bring it back to the OSA ( Wolfenstein’s cheeky off-brand OSS, the real life precursor of the CIA.)
In addition to being a great cinematic, this intro highlights something I really like about The Old Blood’s structure. It has a sense of place reminiscent of City 17 and the Citadel in Half-Life 2. For the entire first two thirds of the game, you’re either in the guts of Castle Wolfenstein, or you can look up and see it looming over you. This intro gives you a preview of the castle, the cable cars and suspension bridge you’ll use to escape it, and the town of Paderburg where you’ll have an explosive, building defense shootout
to close the first act. I really think that sense of honest, cohesive geography outside straight-up open world games is a bit of a lost art, and The Old Blood’s deployment of it is one of my favorite parts of the game.
Getting into the castle itself, I’m treated to a bit of that Tarantino undercover nail biter dialogue Machine Games is so good at. Act 1 boss Rudi Jäger stops BJ at a security checkpoint. In response to a question about his cover story home town of Frankfurt, BJ mutters in halting, C student at the beginning of their first semester German, “Jah, ein… hot dog.” Jäger bursts out laughing at the obvious joke by the SS man he’s talking to, and waves BJ on his way.
Similar to how Skull Face in Metal Gear Solid V delivers his big-ass language parasite monologue to the completely wrong guy after working on it for like 15 years, it rules that all these Nazi guys in MachineGames’ Wolfensteins keep giving heartfelt, sinister soliloquies to BJ, who can barely understand German.
STEALTH MODE
BJ and Wesley blow their cover and get caught, and after that incredible opening, things take an unfortunate turn. For all its incredible, imaginative vistas of a retro-futurist alternate Nazi history, the neoWolfenstein series loves stuffing its levels with an alarming number of dull industrial hallways. A forced stealth sequence with restrictive pathing around The Old Blood’s bullet sponge übersoldaten enemies really seals the deal on an absolute dud of a first proper level.
Things do get better after your initial prison break. Most of the series’ stealth bits involve crouch walking around semi-open arenas, eliminating Nazi officers to head off reinforcements. There are multiple pathways and approaches to perfect stealth each, and if you get spotted you can just fall back on gunplay.
Takedowns and silenced pistols are nice, but I love the games’ throwing weapons: knives in Order and Blood, and tomahawks in Colossus. The tomahawk has an almost laser-like precision and insanely fast travel time that I love (look at the arm on this guy! Am I playing as BJ Blaskowicz or ‘Touchdown’ Tom Brady?) but I quite like the lackadaisical arc The Old Blood’s knives take through the air. You gotta adjust your throws
accordingly, leading your targets and aiming well above where you want to hit, and it’s always hilarious to see enemies instant death ragdoll from such a low-velocity projectile.
THE OLD BLOOD WEAVES TOGETHER A COMPETENT SHOOTER CAMPAIGN
PIPE BOMB
I have to make an aside here to talk about the pipe. Early in the prison level, BJ gets his first melee weapon of the game, a section of lead pipe. It can be split in two pieces and used like dual knives, or connected together to form a big club. BJ uses it for everything in this game. Section of climbable wall? Use your pipes as climbing tools. Unaware Nazi? Perform a takedown with the pipe. Your quick melee is an attack with the pipe. You use the pipe to pry open doors. BJ’s gaze will linger on the pipe like he’s pondering it before using it in a cutscene. That last one sounds like a joke, but it’s not.
What is going on with this pipe? It feels like someone on the publishing side wanted to produce a memetic melee weapon a la Gordon Freeman’s crowbar, or else one member of the dev team was just really into pipes —I can imagine either one of those characters insistently returning to the subject at meetings until the rest of the team relented. I mean, the pipe is fine, I guess, but it really lacks the charisma and verisimilitude of Wolfenstein’s knives or tomahawks, and it never shows up again after The Old Blood. Is it unhinged of me to ponder the pipe so closely? Perhaps, but only as unhinged as the wayward pilgrim who made it such a focus of The Old Blood in the first place.
QUIET RETORT
The shooter combat when things get loud is… fine? Machine Games’
’Steins occupy a midpoint between super fast boomer shooters and stop-and-pop, Xbox 360-era fare.
This isn’t a bad thing—again, I’d put Half-Life in the same category, and Half-Life is perfect—but the neoWolfensteins always feel like they’re a tweak or two away from a truly great FPS gunplay groove.
BJ moves just a bit too slowly, enemies blend with the environments too much and don’t have adequate location feedback, and The Old Blood in particular is in desperate need of that Call of Duty- style crosshair flash and plfft plfft plfft sound effect when you score a hit on an enemy. The Old Blood is still fun, and has some imaginative set-pieces, but its shooter fundamentals really pale in comparison to recent indies targeting a comparable design niche like CULTIC or Fortune’s Run.
The Old Blood weaves together a competent shooter campaign as it winds its way through the castle, eventually shifting to a final act in the nearby town of Wulfberg. The game ends on a bit of a sour note with a lackluster final boss and a distinct ‘let us never speak of this again’ energy to its transition into
The New Order’s opening scenes.
Annoyances aside, The Old Blood still managed to be a nice companion on some early fall nights. I leisurely made my way through on normal difficulty on my Steam Deck, hitting an hour or two each night before bed. There are worse ways to while away weekday autumn evenings while your girlfriend watches TikToks nearby. I just hope Machine Games tweaks its shooter mechanics up to a level matching its storytelling in time for the hopefully-still-coming-andnot-a-co-op-shooter Wolfenstein 3: The New [Insert Object or Concept].