Return to Castle Wolfenstein

The Good
I greatly enjoyed this game. You start off as an American P.O.W locked up inside the depths of Castle Wolfenstein. Then a guard comes in to check on you, and you drop from the ceiling and break his neck, steal his gun and get the hell out of there. Once out of the castle after a shitload of Nazis, you come into the Catacombs where you meet up with some friendly zombies and demons. It really just goes on like that. 7/10

The games visuals are pretty damn good on high detail, and while running on Id's Quake 3 engine, It's quite advanced. The character models are well detailed, and the enviroments are pretty interactive. You can knock down armour knights, blow holes in walls to uncover SECRET AREAS where there is treasure and sometimes meals to eat if your injured. For being quite dated, the texture detail, bump-mapping features, highly detailed sky and all things are excellent. The developers have did a good job with the graphics. 8/10

The sound effects in the game are quite impressive. While in the catacombs, fighting bosses and just lurking around dark areas, the music creates quite a creepy atmosphere. If you fire a weapon in a big room, if you listen carefully, you can hear the reverb. Your aresnal also sounds very realistic. 8/10

Depending on your system specs, this game offers great performance even on low spec machines. If you want total smooth performance on highest detail then you will need at least:- 1.2 ghz Pentium 3 Processor 64mb 3D Accelarator Video Card Sounblaster LIVE PLayer 5.1 Card

The Bad
Sometimes the game's cut-scenes can be a bit cheesy, but what's a game without cheesy moments, eh. Also, some character animations can be dodgy, but other than that, the game is brilliant.

The Bottom Line
If you like killing Nazis and monsters at the same time, then this is the game for you. And if you like playing online, there is a multiplayer feature, but you're better playing Enemy Territory online, its better. I would reccomend this game to anyone who enjoys an action-packed and scary FPS experience.

OVERALL RATING: 8/10

The Good
Starting with the visual look, Return to Castle Wolfenstein looks very good. Everything is detailed very correctly - the characters look just like taken from movies, weapons and items look just like they've been taken from a real weapons depot and put into this game, architecture - just can't describe it with my words, it speaks totally for itself. Even the zombies, robots and other fictional creatures look very realistic with this detailed elaboration. The effects of explosions, fire, gore and so on are less satisfying, but still look descent.

Of all first person shooters, RTCW has the most impressive sound effect I've ever heard, especially when shooting from a weapon. All weapons sound so powerful like they wouldn't sound in any other PC/video game ever. What Nazis say during the battles fits it nicely. The voice acting is very excellent, maybe not even from the best in video games, but still, very, very descent. The soundtrack is a perfect 5 also and has some of my favourite soundtracks from video games.

And of course, lets talk about the main component, the gameplay. Well, what should I say, brilliant, nothing else. Greatly done architecture gives good variety in level design, levels themselves are just epic, a good weapons arsenal with fictional weapons also in it, cool, hot, and hostile enemies, and a very good storyline. Besides an epic single player campaign RTCW has a great multiplayer component, which was later given a stand-alone add-on Enemy Territory, and which is simply one of the best on-line games in FPS history. Nuff' said about the gameplay, it's just a masterpiece, that is it.

The Bad
I can't really think of any bad sides of this game - technically perfect, fun factor is also a 5 out of 5, is there even anything bad in it? Maybe somebody could even point out a few things, but I just can't.

The Bottom Line
A must have game for any FPS fan out there, RTCW is not only a descent FPS game by itself, but its also a perfect sequel to Wolfenstein 3D. If you feel good of killing Nazis in a PC game, this game will give you an orgasm.

The Good
RTCW's enemy AI is brilliant; in the single-player game, enemies act intelligently, and in concert with each other, making for a challenging experience. Levels are set up strategically -- it'll take some thinking to work around some of the missions! The plot involves Nazi mysticism, steampunk supersoldiers, and zombies... what's not to like?

Oh, and a survival horror game with GOOD voice acting? Wow. That's almost a violation of some law...

The Bad
Some of the weaponry is remarkably unrealistic -- torch someone with a flamethrower, he'll simply sit there unruffled and shoot back at you until he dies. For that matter, you can do the same thing... making the flamethrower effectively useless, except against zombies (the enemies that can't shoot at you). The Tesla Gun, in the hands of a level boss, can kill you from so far away you can't even SEE who's shooting you... but when YOU get it, it's a remarkably short-range gadget, and not at all reliable.

For a game that plainly had so much thought in the level design, I found the "level bosses" to be remarkably vanilla... Big Bad Uglies that require you to pound on them unmercifully until they die. In the meantime, they'll kill you five or six times, so make sure to save... whoopee. In this day and age, I expected something more akin to Half-Life, as opposed to an updated "level boss" system.

The single player game is remarkably short, finishable in under ten hours without much stress. Given the cost of the game and the hype, I (again) expected more.

The Bottom Line
A fine, if short, WWII themed shooter, with lots of fiction/horror mixed in. Skip the level bosses, and it's a great, strategic, thinking man's game. More than worthwhile, once the price drops a bit...