Well, for my first “Games That Didn’t” post, I’ll talk about a game that didn’t, just minutes ago for me.

Sometimes there are game that just don’t, and that for various reasons. Sometimes it’s bad gameplay, sometimes some gameplay mechanics are just incredibly bad, and sometimes there’s game breaking glitches. But fact of the matter is, some games just don’t. And Wolfenstein, sadly, didn’t.

Read on to see why it didn’t!

The game itself
Presentation
The starting cinematic looks great. I looked at it and thought “Wow, this looks awesome, there’s definitely lots of production value in the game”… And then the cinematic ended. The graphics too a drastic drop, even in following cinematics.  The graphics still look not bad at all, but compared to the opening cinematic it’s weak. The basic area of the game is just browns and grays, pretty lame-looking. The other areas are darker browns and grays, with occasional green. Again, not great. Also, the framerate is occasionally choppy and there’s random drops at times.

The sounds were okay. Basic gunfire sounds and nazis screaming stuff. Nothing special here. The voice acting is okay from what I’ve seen, but far from stellar.

The story is a bit lame. Agent BJ Blazkowicz(did they ever say what BJ stood for?), from the previous Wolfenstein games, is sent to help out a group of a resistance or something. And he’s literally the only guy in all that group to actually do something. Basically he becomes an errand boy for them, though he always ends up destroying nazi bases. The story progression is pretty much “Go to that place, go to the end, pick something up, get back here”, which is a bit on the boring side. And the nazis are doing historically innacurate paranormal research to summon monsters and transform themselves and use magic to take over the world. Meh. Different than the usual WW2 game, but not incredibly interesting anyways.

Gameplay
The gameplay is normal FPS stuff. If you’ve played one FPS this generation, you already know how this one plays, since it’s no different. This one features no actual cover system, resorting to just having a crouch button instead. The aiming is actually pretty smooth, one of the few console-FPS this generation that I’m actually not having too much trouble with. The zooming-in aim is obviously more accurate, but the normal aim works quite well too.

The “special” element here is the Veil. A sort of power BJ get’s access to early in the game. Using the D-pad you can use various powers from the Veil. A force field that will stop bullets, something that will make your weapons stronger, you can slow down time and just use to Veil to go a bit faster and go through certain walls (most of the time there’s a marking to show you where to use it. This adds a few fun elements in the game. The shield protects you if there’s no cover around, the Veil lets you see things you can’t usually see, like certain enemies, the slow down can get you out of tight situations and the empower thing can make fights a lot easier by making you bullets go through barriers and such.

There’s also a fun upgrade system, where you can use money you find to upgrade your weapons. You can add scopes, make them more powerful, reduce recoil, increase magazine size, and various other things. It’s a fun system for sure. Also, in the black market, where you can boost your guns, you can also boost your Veil powers. I don’t know how the black market can do that, but they can. The quirk here is that you have to find certain books in the levels to be able to do some of the Veil upgrades, and those books seem pretty tough to find (in the time I played I only found 1).

And there’s lots of things to find. While you’re not blowing the heads off nazis, you can explore the levels, go off the normal path, to find stuff. It’s just gold, documents that explains some things about the story and the tomes of power (which I talked about earlier). If you’re really into it you can add some playtime to the game by finding everything.

The playtime is a problem here. Even by not rushing through it, you’re looking at around 6-7 hours of gameplay in single player. Less if you do no exploration at all.

Overall
It’s not bad. Not bad at all. With more effort they could’ve made a genuinely great game. But it falls short in quite a few aspects here. And, of course, there’s a reason it didn’t.

Why it didn’t
This is a big problem with me. Game-breaking glitches. This one is particularly bad, and it makes me wonder if the developers did any testing on the product. And I know for a fact that I’m not the only person who encountered this glitch. When I started up the game there was a patch, so I thought they forgot to fix a minor bug or something before printing the game, and that I wouldn’t get any game-breaking glitch. But I have no idea what that patch was for, and I did end up getting a glitch. Nice.

So what happened? Well, far enough into the game (after around 5 hours of gameplay), I get back from a mission into the Hub area (which connects to all other maps, and friendly bases/the black market, things like that). There, I get a cutscene. After the cutscene, I get killed. Some airborne enemy which I forgot existed shot a few rockets at me. So I die. I reload the last checkpoint, which was a bit before the cutscene. I get to the cutscene, but this time I skip it, since I already saw it. And then… I’m not holding a gun anymore, I can’t run, I can’t shoot, I can’t throw grenades, I can’t use melee attacks. What can I do? Walk around, and use the Veil. I can switch guns too, but that’s useless since I can’t see or use them. And anything that requires the Triangle button still worked, so if I found a turret I could still shoot stuff. Not very useful since they’re few and far between. My other alternative for combat was using the Time-stop power, which, upgraded, damages nearby enemies… not very handy and highly limited.

So my only option? Restart the game completely. I tried quitting the game and reloading my save but the glitch was still there. No matter what I do I have no guns anymore, and pretty much no proper way to defend myself.

So this game didn’t, because the developer didn’t pinpoint such a game-breaking glitch, which should’ve been caught by the developer way before release. The game might be good, but a glitch like this is a bit too much.

The Save Factor
If the glitch is corrected, and it’s seemingly a random occurrence (but if you get it, it’s game-breaking), I’d say the Save Factor for this game is:

20$ (not the best FPS out there, but worth checking out, especially for fans of the series)

jobocan Console, Games, PC, Review, The Games That Didn't, impressions, ps3, xbox 360