Wolfenstein: The Old Blood

2025-01-01
Waking up today hungover on New Years there's a bad taste in my mouth and I'm thinking killing Nazis might just make my headache go away. That's the thing about Machinegames' fascist annihilator games: they make every kill look, sound, and feel so good that you can't help but feel rejuvenated by the violence. Hours into Old Blood and those headshots didn't stop feeling fan-tastic. And that's really the crowning achievement of Old Blood: it's brevity. Where The New Order kept going and going and going, eventually devolving into fight after fight with bullet-sponge-y enemies that'd only die to one type of gun on one part of their body, Old Blood is happy to be zipped through in well under 5 hours. The whole time you're going to new places being introduced to new characters and most importantly being armed with more toys with which to dismantle and dismember the most Third of Reichs.

Old Blood does commit some warcrimes along the way. Namely an incredibly poor beginning that sees you powerless in the least fun of ways stealthily worming your way through a prison escape. The section where you pilot a mech seems like it should be a power fantasy but you have to keep getting out to clean off zombies from the front of the thing so much it made me feel like I was driving through Texas back country scraping piled up flies from the grille of my car. I also found the emotional beats fairly lacking, especially the conclusion to the Annette and Kessler arc which was fumbled by the fact that I didn't even realize you had to save one or the other till Kessler was already dead. I guess it's hard to get a story across when you're busy driving a pipe into the skulls of Nazis.

Minor quibbles aside, if you're able to stick out the frustrating introduction you're in for a treat. I didn't even touch on how it goes all sci-fi in the last third, the fun "kill the Kommandant or he'll call perpetual reinforcements" system, or how the stealth-y violence echoes the wonderful Escape From Butcher Bay in a lot of ways. Hell, I'm installing the New Colossus right now. Let's see if we can't get this headache to go away.