There are moments in this game that I love. Seeing and hearing more of Castle Wolfenstein, and the soldiers that begrudgingly inhabit them, (To their boredom before we pop their heads open), was really immersive. And, getting to see more of what the Allies were trying to accomplish in 1946 before losing is fun, and foreboding for what we see in The New Order and The New Colossus. Not to mention seeing soldiers and officers fall over balconies when you shoot them. In the sections filled with horror, the music ambiance fits well, and adds to the "horror" of the undead.
However, there is a lot to this game that makes it feel either rushed, or really overcorrected. Cutscenes between levels are silent, and short, and instead of placing you in the level right away, the game fades to black with text before you start to play. This breaks the immersion from the original game, and it fails if the original intent was to make this game feel like a file that you read in Caroline's archives, or if were trying to be a German expressionist film.
The level design is rough. This game relies so often on sneaking and killing officers to the point that every checkpoint there is a new set of officers target. Not only that, but sneaking is also made harder because enemies notice the dead bodies scattered about. This makes timing more crucial. In addition, there are sections where you cannot reliably get to the officer without encountering enemies and triggering the alarm. When you need it the most, the silenced pistol in The New Order was reliable, but in this game a shot in the face does not guarantee a kill for even a normal soldier. And, although the guns are cool and fun to shoot, they are not fun to reload, which makes getting through sections of this game tedious more than fun, worse even when it feels that enemies take a random amount of damage before they are on the floor.
When you have to be in combat, this game, even in its normal difficulty, is more difficult compared to The New Order. There were many times where I just ran past the enemies because the level was too small and the enemies were too packed for Blazko to shoot through. The scene just before you go on the tram is one such place. Sections of levels either leave you with too much armor, or too much health, turning combat into a race to pickup items. Many levels do not provide enough cover, even if this game and The New Order emphasize a duck-and-cover style of combat.
Enemies can be one of the most annoying aspects to this game. One annoying encounter is with those enemies that are colored orange and have a tank. Seeing those guys explode from shooting their tank is fun, but trying to kill them is not. The design of the enemy is to encourage you to attack their tank, however the only weapon that can penetrate that tank is the bolt-action rifle, and by then, you are normally in a non-sneaking combat encounter where you have to shoot their tank from their front. Another annoying encounter are with the super-soldiers that are detached from their umbilical cord (defeating the purpose of the ones that are not). There were many times where I died in the middle of the cutscene of you prying open their chest cavity by other soldiers, or when you finally stab it in the heart. This completely ruins the fun of the carnage that you enact on them. Not to mention the many times I died trying to inflict as much damage as I can on their power source. It is not a fun combat encounter, and sadly they are featured well enough to make this game not fun.
The second "half" of the game is a zombie game. The zombies are not fun; they take little damage to kill, but they are at random very fast, they hit you with a seemingly random amount of damage, and if you do the bad thing and decide you want to shoot them all dead, you will quickly be overwhelmed. It's like COD zombies except there are no rounds, there is limited ammo, and limited items to heal or recoup. Of course, it is supposed to push you towards the end of the level, but is it not the point to kill everything you see? In addition, after the earthquake that begets these zombies, anyone you kill, including in the sections where you need to sneak, will turn into a zombie. This makes sneaking more difficult, and ultimately makes whether you will succeed in getting through the level random.
The story is okay, and I like it when writers include stories of the occult. But this story is not so imaginative, nor satisfying. Unlike The New Order, where you have a horrifying encounter with Deathshead early on, you are not clued into who Helga is or what she is trying to do. Deathshead was established as a character that liked to play God with people, but Helga is just some officer that you do not even get to attack yourself. The idea behind N*zi Zombies is especially nothing new, and I would not be surprised if the writers stole letters from Treyarch's COD titles. None of the allies that you meet with along the way survive, and except for learning where Blazkowitz got his breathing technique from, nothing important seemed to feed into the original game.
The final boss is the worst part of the game. The arena that the boss sits in is too small (with eventually an overwhelming amount of enemies crawling through), and filled with too little amount of resources to defeat him (or the enemies) that instead of frustrating me it actually bored me. Damaging the monster is not interesting nor satisfying, and its hitbox (its mouth) is too weird to consistently hit with grenades or weapons. When you finally gen in enough damage, the developers decided it was a good idea to swarm the arena with a horde of zombies, which just ruined my desire to defeat him. As of writing, I have not defeated him, and I think I am satisfied enough without the victory.
This game is ONLY worth it if it is ON SALE. I do not think this game is satisfying enough to play or pay close attention to. At full price, this game is kinda buns compared to other games on sale, and on sale, there are more games that are more fun for cheaper. I like MachineGames and I really like Wolfenstein and its legacy, but this game is only as good as dried blood.
