The Wolfenstein series is a foundational part of my gaming background.
Actually, that’s not quite true. Wolfenstein 3-D and its standalone sort-of-sequel, sort-of-expansion, Spear of Destiny, are a foundational part of my gaming background. To date, I’ve never played any of the subsequent Wolfenstein games. Not because I wasn’t interested in them, mind, but because I just sort of… never got around to them, really.
I decided that enough is enough, however, and it’s time I caught up on the continuing adventures of William “B.J.” Blazkowicz and his efforts to thwart the Nazi war machine. And I thought I’d write about it for good measure, too. So read on for a bit about my background with the Wolfenstein series, and onwards into my experiences with the first of the “new” games to me: Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War on Xbox.
One cannot overstate the importance of the shareware sector to PC gaming in the early 1990s. For the unfamiliar, shareware is a method of distributing software where the developer and/or publisher of a game or application gives away part of the product for free, complete with a license that allows unlimited copying and redistributing to whoever you see fit, but asks for a “registration fee” to unlock the full potential of whatever the product actually is.
In the case of games, this was often implemented as an episodic approach. “Episode 1” of a game would be given away as the “shareware version”, which you’d find downloadable online, on magazine cover discs and through shareware libraries (who often charged a small duplication fee to cover media costs and a small profit for themselves, but weren’t charging for the game specifically), and typically between two and five additional episodes would be provided, often in a nice packaged version with a physical manual just like a retail game, if you’d just be so kind as to send your registration fee through the post to the developer and/or publisher.
Such was the case with the original Wolfenstein 3-D — though interestingly, the shareware version of Wolfenstein 3-D was not my first contact with the series. No; instead, I first encountered it through its direct-to-retail, non-shareware, boxed follow-up (and narrative prequel), Spear of Destiny. This was part of a big pile of PC games that my brother had left behind at our house for some reason — I assume he either didn’t feel he needed them, or simply didn’t have room for them — and which I had taken to exploring on the family PC, since we’d recently switched over from using the Atari 8-bit and ST computers as our main machines to an MS-DOS-based IBM 386.
Spear of Destiny immediately blew me away, because it was doing things that I’d previously only associated with arcade machines or games consoles. Specifically, it was doing smooth scaling and rotation of sprites and wall textures, quite unlike anything I had ever seen before on a home system. Even the Super NES, with its “Mode 7” scaling and rotation capabilities, didn’t have anything that looked quite as impressive as Spear of Destiny did.
I was at school at the time, and of course, it wasn’t long until I invited friends over to come and see this amazing new game I’d got. I spent a particularly hefty amount of time playing the game with my friend Ed; we’d often play “cooperatively”, with one of us handling movement on the mouse, and the other taking care of shooting and opening doors with the keyboard.
Spear of Destiny absolutely enraptured the pair of us. There was an incredible sense of atmosphere to the game, created through the moody (for the time) music and stereo sound effects. On more than one occasion, Ed and I genuinely felt something from the game: the thing that particularly sticks out in my mind from the time was the boss levels, which had music that was enough to set us right on edge and react with genuine near-panic when the stage’s boss finally put in an appearance.
Curious about the “Wolfenstein 3-D” that Spear of Destiny mentioned throughout its packaging and documentation, I eventually managed to track down a copy of the shareware version through our local shareware library, Ideal Shareware. This was a little company run by an elderly man named Ian in his free time, and he often attended local computer fairs with a huge range of disks available for purchase. I eventually struck up a friendship with Ian and did a bit of work for Ideal Shareware in my free time — writing catalogue entries and helping him out at some of the computer fairs. But I digress; the important thing is, I had discovered Wolfenstein 3-D.
I was intrigued to discover that Wolfenstein 3-D was basically more of the same that Spear of Destiny offered, only structured a bit differently. While Spear of Destiny was a linear sequence of thirtysomething levels, Wolfenstein 3-D instead offered six episodes of ten levels each, though only the first episode, Escape from Castle Wolfenstein, was available to play as part of the shareware version.
I (and, on regular occasions, Ed) played that shareware version to absolute death. And, before long, I discovered the modding scene for the game, at least partly thanks to Ian from Ideal Shareware, who knew that I was a big fan of the game, so he asked me to check out a selection of disks he was planning to add to his catalogue, each of which included some utilities which could be used to edit Wolfenstein 3-D in either its shareware or registered incarnations.
I was initially quite taken with a tool I forget the name of which allowed you to edit all the wall textures in the game, but quickly discovered that I didn’t really know how to do pixel art. I found greater success with a tool called MapEdit, which is probably self-explanatory: it allowed you to create your own levels for Wolfenstein 3-D.
So I did! And I had a lot of fun doing so. Not only that, I made some money from it, too; one day, while browsing the GAMERS forum on CompuServe (our online service of choice in the pre-Internet days) I happened to come into contact with a chap called Carlton Griffin. He claimed that he was collecting together Wolfenstein 3-D levels for an official “Super Upgrades” pack that would be put out by Wolfenstein 3-D‘s publisher, Apogee, and he would pay, too.
After talking it over with my parents — we all knew that talking to strange men on the Internet was something you had to be a bit careful about, even back then — we agreed that I could send him my levels and my contact details. I honestly didn’t expect to hear anything back after that, but a few months later, a package arrived from the States, including a copy of the full, registered version of Wolfenstein 3-D (which I had not managed to convince my parents to order for me up until this point) plus the two Super Upgrades disks, also known as Wolfmaster. Not only that, but there was a cheque for $200 in there, too. I was officially a professional game designer!
It should hopefully be clear from the above that Wolfenstein 3-D and Spear of Destiny are immensely important to me. As such, I’ve always been curious about whether or not the subsequent Wolfenstein games, which all deviate quite considerably from the original game’s straightforward “maze with Nazis” formula, could capture the same magic. So I decided to play all of them, beginning with the Xbox version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein from 2003.
I picked the Xbox version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein rather than playing a modded, modernised PC version because the console ports of Return to Castle Wolfenstein (available on PS2 and Xbox, with some differences between the two versions) contain a brand new prologue episode — plus I really like the original Xbox’s controller for first-person shooters.
For the unfamiliar, Return to Castle Wolfenstein isn’t really a “sequel” to the original Wolfenstein 3-D or Spear of Destiny. Rather, it’s the first of several reimaginings that the series has had over the years. Players once again take on the role of the series’ primary protagonist, William “B.J.” Blazkowicz, and battle their way through a linear sequence of levels (with related sets grouped together into “missions”), blasting Nazis along the way.
This time around, rather than the eventual aim being to defeat Adolf Hitler (as in Wolfenstein 3-D‘s third episode), Return to Castle Wolfenstein instead leans into the more speculative end of the Wolfenstein setting, which concerns the Nazis’ fascination with the supernatural and the paranormal.
In the original Wolfenstein 3-D and Spear of Destiny, this was primarily manifested through the dangerous “mutant” enemies you would encounter in later stages — and Spear of Destiny concluded with you battling the “Angel of Death” himself — but in Return to Castle Wolfenstein, it involves the subordinates of SS chief Heinrich Himmler and their efforts to resurrect Heinrich I, aka King Henry the Fowler. In reality, Heinrich I is regarded as the first German king, and a figure that real-world Himmler supposedly believed himself to be a reincarnation of. In Wolfenstein world, Heinrich I was a necromancer with power over the dark arts and command of the undead, so one can see why the Nazis might be interested in recruiting him for their cause.
The console versions of Return to Castle Wolfenstein begin in Egypt, with Blazkowicz, working for the international Office of Secret Actions, following the trail of a Nazi archaeological dig that is seeking to dig up the third of three “Death Knights”, whose remains are apparently crucial to the resurrection of Heinrich I. Subsequently, Blazkowicz and his comrade Agent One (played by a second player if you’re playing the campaign in split-screen co-op) are captured and imprisoned in Castle Wolfenstein, and this is where the 2001 original PC version kicked off.
From hereon, Blazkowicz must work to escape from his predicament, find out what the Nazis are up to and thwart various schemes along the way, including Oberführer Wilhelm “Deathshead” Strasse’s cyborg super soldier programme and the resurrection of Heinrich I.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein shows its age in a few ways — both positively and negatively. Let’s get the negatives out of the way first.
Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, the game is pretty drab in terms of presentation. There’s a lot of grey and brown and not much else; even in the few levels that feature outdoor areas, there’s not much in the way of colour, with even trees and grass looking a bit dull.
Not only that, but it’s very dark for a significant portion of the runtime, with no player-held light source available. This is very atmospheric, sure — and we’ll come back to atmosphere as a positive in a moment — but there are a few sequences where it’s extremely difficult to see where you’re going and, less forgivably, where enemies are lurking.
The absence of modern first-person shooter staples such as regenerating health are keenly felt during sequences on harder difficulty levels where Nazis have inhumanly pinpoint accuracy. In some cases this leads to sequences that feel near-unwinnable, where you’ll get fatally shot in the head the moment you open a door if you’re standing in the wrong place. This is very annoying after the first few times. That said, the Xbox version in particular has near-instant restart times, meaning there’s no staring at load screens during these sequences, which makes them a tad more bearable, and each individual level is relatively short, meaning it’s generally not too much of a problem to restart a stage from scratch and try to hold on to a bit more of your health ahead of tough encounters.
The bosses are rubbish, too. They’re all bullet sponges with uninteresting attacks. The only one that really presents a challenge is the second one, and this is only because it has a pretty unfair electrical “Tesla” attack that can target you immediately at almost any range if you’re within line of sight; I eventually cheesed it to a certain degree with some items I’d been saving, but Heaven knows how you’re supposed to get through that if you’d inadvertently used these items beforehand.
The final boss in particular is a huge letdown, involving circle-strafing your way around a big armoured dude and a few skeletons, making sure he can’t hit you with his sword. Feared master of the dark arts? No match for a chaingun and running in circles, it turns out.
Finally, the game was clearly developed on a relatively limited budget. Although it has some very good voice acting — it’s always nice to hear the late Tony Jay chewing the scenery, though his role as the Office of Secret Actions director is relatively subdued here — there’s not much in the way of music throughout, with only a few different tracks used repeatedly over the course of the whole game. It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to have not incorporated some more modern remixes of the classic Wolfenstein 3-D tunes throughout the game; the score is solid and atmospheric enough, sure, but it’s all a tad forgettable.
Right, those are all the reasons you might bounce off Return to Castle Wolfenstein out of the way, so let’s talk about what this game does well.
Top of the heap, unquestionably, is atmosphere. Despite being a very different sort of game, Return to Castle Wolfenstein made me feel very similarly to how Ed and I felt when we were playing the original Wolfenstein 3-D and Spear of Destiny all those years ago. Excellent use of sound, ambience, music, lighting and encounter design means that there are some genuinely tense sequences throughout.
Tying in with this is the level design. As a first-person shooter whose original incarnation dates back to 2001, Return to Castle Wolfenstein hails from an age before campaigns in the genre went in the “linear corridor shooter with spectacular setpieces” direction. Instead, Return to Castle Wolfenstein’s levels encourage exploration, with each stage featuring multiple secrets to be discovered, and there are often multiple routes available to reach a particular destination. While none of the levels descend into the outright “maze” territory of Wolfenstein 3-D and Spear of Destiny, there’s a nice sense that each stage is a little mini-“world” where you can unlock shortcuts back to earlier areas in case you need to retrieve health items or ammunition.
Despite the drab visuals, there’s some nice variety in the stages, too. Exploring the Egyptian tombs of the early stages feels very different from picking your way through the halls of Castle Wolfenstein itself, and the game continues to mix things up from there. Some particular highlights from the late game include a quasi-stealth mission through a German village where you must assassinate several SS members on your way to your destination, and the following level, which involves exploring a large, opulent mansion to track down the Nazis behind the attempts to resurrect Heinrich I.
The one thing Return to Castle Wolfenstein reminded me of more than anything else during my playthrough was Rare’s Nintendo 64 first-person shooters, GoldenEye and Perfect Dark. Like those games, Return to Castle Wolfenstein allows multiple play styles, depending on if you prefer playing sneakily or going in all guns blazing, and each level’s objectives generally have a bit more to them than simply “reach the exit”. A bit of inadvertent alarm-triggering can sometimes lead to fun improvisatory sequences, too.
There are two levels that are ostensibly “stealth” levels, where you will fail the mission if an enemy sets off an alarm, but anyone who usually baulks at the idea of missions like this will be pleased to hear that in both cases, a good 75-80% of the level involves confronting enemies who are nowhere near an alarm button, meaning you generally only need to be overly sneaky towards the concluding part of the stage.
That said, playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein in a somewhat stealthy manner is an absolute pleasure. You gain access to powerful long-range rifles quite early in the game, and get magnification scopes for them not long afterwards. And you get plenty of opportunities to use them effectively.
In a lot of today’s setpiece-heavy corridor shooters, chances to pick enemies off from a long range can sometimes feel quite rare outside of pre-scripted scenarios, but in Return to Castle Wolfenstein there are plenty of organically occurring situations where the best thing to do is find a means of provoking enemies from a distance, then delivering some immensely satisfying headshots from your favourite rifle. This is especially effective later in the game, where you come up against strong enemies that can otherwise feel a bit bullet-spongy if you try to go toe-to-toe with them.
All in all, I had a good (perhaps not great) time with Return to Castle Wolfenstein. There were quite a few frustrating sequences throughout, where I found myself repeating the same section over and over again due to one particular enemy’s inhuman aim, but I managed to overcome all of these with a bit of perseverance, and occasionally changing up my strategy a bit. (On one particularly memorable occasion, the difference between immediate death and eventual survival was which side of the frame I was standing when I opened a door. I have to laugh in retrospect.)
This is very much a game where the point is the journey; the point is the way you feel while you’re playing it, working your way through its atmospheric levels and successfully overcoming its increasingly challenging encounters. The overall ending is a bit underwhelming compared to everything that had come before, and you certainly won’t get to know anything particularly interesting about Blazkowicz as a person over the course of the entire game, but then you didn’t in the original Wolfenstein 3-D and Spear of Destiny, either.
Take it on its own terms, as a turn-of-the-century, post-Half-Life first-person shooter whose emphasis is on atmosphere, clever level design and challenging encounter design, and there’s a lot to like here. The newer Wolfensteins may make more of an effort with narrative and characterisation, but there’s a pleasing purity to Return to Castle Wolfenstein that means it’s still worth a play if you think you’re up to the challenge.
Plus if you beat the Xbox version, you unlock the original Wolfenstein 3-D in all its six-episode glory. And it plays great with an Xbox controller!