Skateboarding games have always been one of my favorite genres. They’re intense, require an insane amount of skills and coordination, and are just so much fun to play. I started all the way back to the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and ended at Skate 3. From there, the genre pretty much died, but Olli revived the series a bit, and I fell in love with the first game.
The second is no different, and that’s both good and bad. On the plus side, the game feels smoother, there are more tricks, the entire game is more responsive, and there are more modes and new levels and themes. The downside is that it’s pretty much the same game with no real evolution of the series.
Career mode is where you will spend most of your time. Here you have six different goals, varying in tricks, scores, and special spots. Using the left analog stick, you can push down and then up to pop the board up and flick it around to do tricks. Holding it down over a rail will allow you to grind. To properly land a trick, you must press X right before landing, or they will all be sloppy. This trick system is similar to Skate’s and is a great evolution of the button combo system.
Sadly, you can’t do grabs, and there’s no vert skating. Half-pipe rounds would have been fun, and it’s sad that the sequel doesn’t really add all that much. There are two other modes, which are trick spot and just a leaderboard tracker. They’re fun but aren’t really different from the career mode.
The game looks nice with fun music, awesome 2D scenes, and a great Hollywood/Los Angeles theme, and it’s just super smooth. With all that said, OlliOlli 2 is a great entry for newcomers and veterans who will find enough new stuff in the career mode to consider a purchase.
You would never think of Halo and real-time strategy; the two might not mix all that well. Halo Wars was a huge deal when it was first released, as it was a huge risk. It was the first time anyone but Bungie touched the Halo franchise, and many were skeptical. To my own surprise, the game checks most of the good RTS games off the list, but being the first time in this category, it does have its issues.
The first issue is the story. The 15 missions are accompanied by pretty pre-rendered cutscenes we have grown to love from the series, with great voice acting and stellar music. You play as Sgt. Forge, who is assigned to the Spirit of Fire and must destroy an ancient world that is full of an unstoppable army built by an ancient race. The Covenant wants these weapons, and they capture a human scientist named Anders, as the machines can only be activated by human touch. It’s not the best story, and it really fills a minute gap in the Halo timeline and doesn’t really mean all that much.
When it comes to actually playing the game, you are greeted with RTS basics, and I mean the minimum basics, as the game never moves on past that. Most RTS games require you to find and acquire resources to build an army to defeat the enemy. Halo Wars has only one resource, and this is in the form of generic supplies. You can find crates along the ground, but you must build supply pads on your base, and this is the first thing you do on every single mission. Second, your base has limited slots for buildings, and this is where the game breaks down a little. I would have 3–4 supply pads upgraded to advanced ones, and it still takes forever to get enough resources to steadily upgrade all my buildings and troops. A solid 25–30 minutes is needed just to maintain an army to defeat most enemies on a map and even longer to get all the upgrades.
It’s a frustrating battle of nursing your resources, with most time spent waiting for them to accumulate, which is not fun and quite boring. Nearly every mission where I was given a base had my guys just standing there for 20 minutes so I could research as much as possible for only what I needed for that map. The armory is used to research technology only, and this comes in the form of +10 to population, Spirit of Fire strikes, more troops per unit, etc. After you acquire all the research here, which is only a couple of tiers, the building is useless, and you can recycle it and build another supply pad. The barracks are used for only two ground troops and for researching their upgrades. The Air Depot has three different air types, and the Vehicle Depot has a few things as well. It’s very basic, with only the core Halo units you have seen in the console games. It covers every discipline well, and they all do their job fine, but some units require over a thousand supplies, and this can take up to 1-2 minutes to accumulate just for one unit. So instead of being able to send out drones to acquire a mass amount of supplies, everything is essentially rigged to a timer, which makes things not very fun.
The population cap is 40, and that’s not many troops considering some larger units can take up to six population slots. Once you get them out and fighting, it looks pretty awesome and feels just like a Halo game with familiar enemies and sounds. The Spirit of Fire attacks can give you a leg up, but they don’t feel as powerful as they should. A MAC attack or carpet bomb, even fully upgraded, may do 1/8 to 1/4 damage to an enemy base. You would expect for the long cooldown time that you can wipe out all of or most of a base and larger enemy units. It’s so incredibly unbalanced and frustrating that I always felt I never had an advantage, no matter how well I played. Even when you get multiple bases, it doesn’t help outside of giving you quicker access to troops and more supply pads. With the pop cap at 40, you would think more bases would mean a larger population increase.
Missions are at least varied, with some escorts, defense, offense, and various others. One frustrating mission had me on a ship fending off a flood with a timed sweep that killed everything in sight. It took almost 45 minutes just to clear everything off the ship. Another mission had me station vehicles at five different spots to blow open a large base shield. I had to constantly go back and forth, defending them and clearing spots to put them down. There are not enough troops to leave with each vehicle due to the low population cap. Every troop is essential.
With all that said, Halo Wars has the units, looks, and sound down for a great RTS game, but it’s so rudimentary, unbalanced, and boring, with the majority of your time spent waiting for things to build and cool down. There’s a lot of mission variety, but it won’t matter as the rest of the game plagues these missions. The story is also nothing memorable and doesn’t mean much in the Halo universe. I really can’t recommend this to RTS fans or Halo fans unless you’re curious.
A mysterious girl in a red cloak sets sail on a strange SteamPunk-inspired machine to always move to the right. It’s never clear what your purpose is or why you’re going on this short two-hour journey, but you’re doing it, and it’s quite interesting.
Your ship rolls instead of flies, but that’s okay. Inside the ship, there are several red buttons that do various tasks. The whole purpose of the game is to keep the ship moving by either hoisting your sails when there’s wind or using fuel and keeping the engine running. By the ignition button, there’s a steam release button and a brake. Behind the ship are buttons to suck up fuel on the road and a lift to insert objects into for fuel. The front of the ship has a pulley system, and there is a fire hose and repair torch. Most of these items you won’t get until you come across them on your journey. It’s pretty satisfying to micromanage something as simple as always stopping the machine to grab a box of fuel on the road and having a machine pull it in for you.
As you sail across the landscape, you will bump into a few puzzles. These require a little platforming mixed with figuring out how to get your ship through a door or across a lake. They are fairly simple, and after a little fiddling, you will figure out what to do. Outside of this, though, the game is void of anything. Once your ship is moving, there’s literally nothing to do, especially when you have full sails and don’t need to micromanage your engine. I was also annoyed that the music starts and stops so abruptly, and several minutes will go by of absolute silence.
The game looks beautiful with hand-drawn art, but it drives me crazy not knowing what the purpose of this game is, and I don’t like that. I’m all for minimalist game design, but developers who make you go on a journey with no background or story are just lazy and not cute or innovative. The various button-pressing mechanics are fun and a brand new concept I have never played before, but what’s the point at the end of two hours? Did I actually make a difference or accomplish something besides finding the credits?
Far: Lone Sails has very interesting gameplay mechanics, but it’s hard to recommend outside of sheer curiosity. Don’t expect a grandiose or heartfelt story here; just an interesting game to look at and button-pressing gameplay.
Playing as a ball of yarn isn’t a new concept. Nintendo first did it with Kirby’s Epic Yarn, and it was a charming blast. Coldwood tries its hand at crochet platforming, and it’s done fairly well. I can’t really explain the story much, as it really doesn’t exist. Yarny, the character, is on a journey to find various crocheted figures to attach to a photo album. Who this family is and the reasoning behind Yarny’s animation and coming to life are never explained. The entire idea doesn’t make any sense at all, but we’re here for the platforming.
The game has physics-based platforming and puzzle-solving. There’s a trail of red yarn behind you, and this is your lifeline. It can wrap around things, create bridges, and be used as a grappling hook. Simple puzzles involve hooking the yarn on points and creating bridges to drag objects up, while more complex ones involve wrapping the yarn in various ways to activate a pulley or open a door. It’s very interesting and unique, and there are so many different types of puzzles, but the problem relies on the mechanics around them.
The platforming is either heavy or too springy. Yarny will jump on an object and immediately bounce off of it in a forward motion only. It’s very hard to control this movement, especially when the camera doesn’t pan over quickly enough. The game is also hindered by poor pacing. I enjoyed running around pushing objects, pulling levers, and swinging around like a monkey, but once I got my groove and momentum, a big puzzle would halt my progress, interrupting the trance. I prefer just going forward and enjoying the scenery while swinging around and knocking things over, but once those puzzles started, I got frustrated.
Part of this has to do with most mechanics not being explained early on; the objects you need blend in too much with the background, or it’s very unclear that there’s a hook-off camera that you must jump to. Checkpoints are placed frequently, but some are misplaced, as I would have to repeat a long, easy section just to get to the one annoying jump or off-camera grapple and fall again and again. In some areas, I started over a dozen times just to get it right.
Outside of that, the game plays fine with 13 levels. You will be busy for a good 4-6 hours since some areas are really tough to get through. I loved the scripted moments, and some of the dangerous areas where Yarny runs from animals are pretty fun, but those big puzzles just really halted all the fun.
The game looks absolutely stunning, with realistic-looking textures and a huge variety of environments, including forests, tundras, toxic waste dumps, construction sites, and swamps. It’s incredible to look at and experience, and the music is great despite the same track repeating over and over through each level. It got irritating quickly.
Every time I play a Call of Duty game, I expect less and less each time. The game is designed from the ground up for the lowest common denominator and people who have never played games before. Infinite Warfare is no exception, being the third game from Infinity Ward this console cycle. I have to give Infinite Warfare some credit, as it did surprise me more than the series has since Modern Warfare 2, and that’s saying a lot. The game has excellent acting and surprisingly interesting characters that you kind of care for, which scared me coming from such a mindless series.
You play Lieutenant Reyes, who is part of the USDA and is trying to protect Earth from the SDF, who are a bunch of rebels living on Mars and want to wipe out all of Earth. It’s a typical war plot with basic objectives, but the chatter in between is quite entertaining and kept me hooked. I actually sat through the entire game in two long playthroughs, which I have never done for Call of Duty. They usually get boring after the second mission or so. I do have to mention that the use of Kit Harrington (Jon Snow in Game of Thrones) is wasted on a villain that is rarely seen in the game and whose character never evolves or has the potential to grow. Why did they use him for a half dozen lines of dialog? I know Call of Duty is famous for using celebrities in its games (Ghosts being the worst use), but this seemed rather pointless with almost no face time.
Reyes’s partner, Lieutenant Salter, creates a strong duo that helps drive the game forward. I was actually able to figure out what was going on at all times, and the story never got convoluted or overly complicated. The game also changes pace quite often, which keeps it from getting boring despite these changes being the same and just shuffled. Outside of boots-on-the-ground combat, there is some zero-G combat and space combat in a jet. The space combat is great, and the Jackal has buttery smooth controls and feels very cinematic and challenging. The only objectives here are to destroy other fighters and larger ships while keeping missiles off of you and staying out of danger. Locking onto other jets puts you in auto-pilot mode, where the game will automatically follow the jet and you just have to shoot it down.
Zero-G combat is used the least, but it is still quite fun. You can tether to objects for cover, grapple enemies, and initiate pretty awesome melee kills. The environments are rather beautiful, with a lot of detail and massive objects in the background. This is not an ugly game by any means. Once you get indoors, though, the game is boring and stale, with metallic corridors, generic monitors, and the same crap we’ve seen over and over again. There are a few small moments outside of all this, such as when you can call in certain weapons or airstrikes to turn the tide. It feels good to use them, and they always come in handy right at the last moment.
One thing that really surprised me was the use of side missions that you could optionally go on. According to the Trophy listing, most people never played these as they are rare achievements, but it helps divert people away from the main story if they just want to finish real quick and move on. These missions include a few stealth operations as well as flying the Jackal and rescuing hostages. This was a nice mixed bag of gameplay that was fun to play through. The main reason to go through these is to take down top officers from the SDF that are part of the “card system,” which is a series of “hits.” It’s pretty meaningless and just one more reason to unlock an achievement.
Once you finish the campaign (about 6 hours), there is the multiplayer suite, and honestly, the campaign is stronger this time around. The multiplayer is very safe and doesn’t do a single thing different from what we’ve seen before with the same type of maps and modes that we’re used to. Is it worth grinding through the Prestige levels? Probably not, but there is zombie mode, which is even starting to show its teeth these days.
Sadly, Infinite Warfare just doesn’t have any personality, despite all the pluses it brings to the series. At its core, it’s still a generic space shooter that has strayed so far away from what made Modern Warfare great that it’s laughable. With the fake made-up guns (which are actually interesting), robots, and spaceships, this could have been any other name, and it would have still been a good game. The Call of Duty branding seems to hurt the game more than help it these days.
With that said, Infinite Warfare doesn’t’ deserve the flack it has gotten from fans, is surprisingly smart and entertaining, and at least tries to do some new stuff that we haven’t seen before. The multiplayer is passable, but at a bargain bin price, you are in for an entertaining day of shooting robots and saving the planet.
Remedy Entertainment is one of my favorite developers. You may know them from little games like Max Payne and Alan Wake. These were both fantastic third-person shooters with great characters and an interesting story. It’s been a while since we have seen anything from them, and Quantum Break was quite ambitious with big-name actors, live-action cutscenes, and just an overall large budget.
The game starts off with you playing Jack Joyce, who is the brother of William Joyce and gets stuck in a fight against Monarch Solutions to save the universe. It sounds pretty cliche, but the time-bending gameplay and story have some merits. Paul Serene, the antagonist of the game, steals a time-travel device from William Joyce and uses it for profit. The game does this whole start at the end, then work your way back to the beginning sort of story, filling in gaps along the way. I really wanted to like the story here, as the acting is top-notch and the live-action cut scenes are fantastic, but it’s so convoluted and there are so many things that aren’t explored.
One such thing is the end of time. It’s frequently mentioned that the end of time is caused by a fracture in the time machine, but we never see it. Seeing the end of time would have been fascinating, if only for a little while. On top of this, the five different choices you make in the story don’t affect the outcome of the story, which makes it feel pointless. After each chapter, there is a junction in which you play as Paul and have to make a choice. Then you get a 15-minute live-action cutscene, which is the best part of the entire game.
The gameplay itself has time-stopping and bending abilities with Jack Time. Rushing enemies to fly by them, using time blasts for AOE effects, shields, and various other abilities. You will use them all throughout the game, but it feels forced. The guns feel fun to shoot, but they’re all so generic and boring. The same four enemies repeat, and to make you use your powers, they throw in enemies that are immune to your powers and ones that you need to use your powers to get past their armor. They don’t show up often, but when they do, it slows down the gameplay and makes it drag.
I did use different weapons for different situations, but I had no choice, as the game can be so difficult at times that you need to use these weapons or powers by default and not by choice. You can upgrade your powers to make them more useful, but they require hidden upgrade points, which are really hard to find (I only found 5 through my whole playthrough), so it defeats the purpose of having an upgrade system if the points to use it are hidden. The action and storytelling are also poorly paced, with entire chapters of just pressing buttons, walking around, and climbing things. Then you would get an hour of non-stop shooting. Then the final boss took me 3 hours to beat, as it’s so incredibly difficult and requires you to use all your powers beyond what the game will allow. You can only turn so fast, move so quickly, and shoot so much with time bombs going off behind you and enemies zipping around and shooting you. It’s overwhelming and clearly breaks the system in place.
I really wanted to love this game, but it’s entertaining at best and very forgettable. The game looks fantastic with amazing character models and animations, but the PC version suffers severe performance issues as it’s poorly optimized. The art style, however, is rather dull, with nothing but sterile gray hallways, generic buildings, and nothing that really stands out. Outside of the Nissan and Microsoft product placements and the yellow accenting throughout the entire game.
Remedy really could have done more here, but most people will find it either too boring or too hard to care about. It’s an entertaining weekend playthrough, but nothing more.
I love adventure games as they tell incredible stories with such detail that most other games can’t put out. They put action and gameplay on the back burner to bring the story upfront and into your face. They are typically slow-paced and keep you hooked with interesting characters, settings, and atmosphere. Night in the Woods is about a cat named Mae who drops out of college and comes back to her hole-in-the-wall town to hang with friends and discover a mystery plaguing her town.
The game starts out fine with several scenes of character introductions and plot setting. Mae meets up with her four friends, and each day goes by with several activities such as talking to people, attending band practice (complete with a rhythm mini-game), and checking your laptop. This is fine and all, but this dragged on for way too long. Several days went by, and almost nothing happened outside of character development. The game talks about the real-life struggle of today’s younger generation (Millenials) and the day-to-day lives of lower-middle-class Americans. The game is set in a cartoony paper cut-out style but set in real-world problems that are very unique and interesting. I really connected with the characters, and their problems were genuine and real, but I wasn’t sure if I was playing a game sometimes.
Each night you go to sleep (after several days go by), you are presented with the only real gameplay here, which is annoying platforming on confusing “maps” to find four band members to complete the dream sequence. You go through five of these maps, and they are boring, a chore to navigate, and feel like forced gameplay. Outside of these sequences, there’s nothing but text and story. I really think this should have been a visual novel or just an animated cartoon rather than a game.
The actual relevancy of the title only comes into play during the last half-hour of the game, and it’s forgettable and almost feels forced compared to the day-to-day struggles of the characters, which are more interesting. I like how the game is written and the characters it portrays, but if you’re going to make this a game, actually give me a game to play. I started getting bored towards the end and just wanted the entire game to end.
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy this game, but the praise it is given is a little ridiculous. It doesn’t do anything special in its own genre, and as a game itself, it’s barely that. I can only recommend this game to hardcore adventure game or visual novel fans who are okay going through hours of text and dialog with almost zero gameplay. It’s a great time killer and a fun way to burn away a lazy weekend afternoon, but nothing more than that, and there is no memorable story to care about from this.
Life is Strange is one of my favorite games of all time and one of my top adventure games. The atmosphere, music, characters, writing, and story all made me feel nostalgic to be a rebellious teenager again, and it seriously sparked my imagination long after I finished playing it. Before the Storm pulls us back to Arcadia Bay as Chloe Price and helps us see who Chloe really was before the events of the first game.
We also get to see who Rachel Amber really was to Chloe, as this was a huge mystery in the first game that wasn’t fully explored. Rachel helped shape who Chloe was in the first game, and she had a huge impact on her life, albeit a short-lived one. We also get to see the formation of the people around Chloe in the first game, such as her parents and some schoolmates. Before the Storm still captures that teenage nostalgia of being free and not having to worry about the stresses of adult life such as bills, cars, a job, and food. All we had to worry about was our feelings and friendships, which are probably the most cherished parts of our lives.
What the game fails to capture, however, is the great pace and actual gameplay of the first game. Before the Storm is very slow to start and to pick up and was almost boring for the first hour, and without the gameplay quirks of the first game, all you have is an adventure game with very few decisions to make. Most of BtS is just watching events unfold and clicking on objects. So gameplay takes a backseat, and the story kind of did too. The characters are still as strong as ever, but there’s just not much to build here, as Chloe’s life before the first game was fairly generic and not much different from most teens’ troubles.
Each episode did tend to leave a cliffhanger somehow, and I wanted to know what was going to happen next, but there was a lot of filler content, and most of the actual events that involve the first game are far and few between. If you never played the first game, this would actually be quite a boring and generic adventure game with no meaning. I could have easily settled on this game being just a one-hour animated movie to fill us in on Chloe’s earlier years.
At least the visuals were slightly upgraded with some better lighting, but overall, it’s a seriously dated game that all adventure games have seemingly been doing. I can only recommend this game to anyone who finished the first game, but don’t expect a tear-jerking and emotional roller coaster like it provided. You’ll sit through a few heartfelt moments and some laughs, and that’s about it.
First-person military shooters have received more controversy than any other genre in gaming history. Going from WWII games every few months to modern military shooters and then to futuristic, gamers just can never be happy. DICE decided to change things up for the first time in a decade and release a historical military shooter that other franchises are now coat-tailing.
BF1 is also the first AAA World War I shooter to date, and it was a nice change of pace. There is a lot of history behind WWI that never gets talked about, and DICE could have easily just made another WWII shooter. The weapons, historical figures, battles, and politics behind WWI were brutal and fascinating at the same time. WWI was a kind of limbo between modern technology and the warfare of old; it was an interesting time for sure.
BF1 doesn’t follow the traditional sense of telling a tale of a fictional squad and one hero trying to get through the theaters of war. We get to see different mini-stories with quite interesting characters throughout the entire war. These mini-stories are anywhere from 5 to 3 levels long, and they allow us to get a taste of everything rather than bore us to death with a 6-hour campaign of the same thing over and over again. There are five mini-campaigns, to be specific, and they all play differently. One has you running a tank down French frontlines, while another has you gunning enemies down in a jungle, and then you’re in Italy as a heavily armored soldier mowing down opposing soldiers on a mountaintop. Then you get to follow Lawrence of Arabia and a small part of his story in Constantinople. It keeps things interesting, and I felt like I was able to experience all the weapons and various ways to play the game. BF1 actually incorporates a lot of stealth, which is unheard of in this type of game, and it’s completely optional.
Once you’re done with the campaign, BF1 truly shines in multiplayer. Battlefield 3 was already my favorite multiplayer game of the series, and BF1 picks up the baton and carries it with pride. The multiplayer mode has a personality all on its own. Thanks to the many modes, there’s so much fun to be had in multiplayer, and to prove this, it’s one of the few shooters I still play online months after release. You have a few typical modes like Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, but it’s the Campaign mode that really pushes BF1 to the top of the list. The campaigns are loosely based on the maps of the single-player mode, and these are vast maps that have several objectives that each team needs to complete. Depending on skills, the Allied team will push through and complete them, sweeping across the entire map of 100 players. The Axis players need to keep them back using planes, tanks, motorcycles, and any weapon they can pick up. The tug-of-war aspect is so addictive and allows for a lot of strategies and the feeling of being a small part of a big war.
Multiplayer is just so amazing, and with all the expansions, there’s nearly endless fun. However, the weapons themselves make up half the multiplayer. The WWI-era weapons are predecessors to WWII and feel almost ancient, but not really. From the giant scopes on weapons to various melee weapons and rough-shooting machine guns, BF1 nails weapons down perfectly. These feel so good to shoot and are so satisfying to just try out and mix up. The various classes you can pick incorporate a good balance of weapons and abilities. From medics being able to revive teammates and using single-shot rifles to heavy-mowing down enemies with highly inaccurate machine guns, it’s just a blast to experience. The only letdown is grinding to unlock new skins, and weapons take forever. You earn rare cash for unlocking items, and I highly suggest only spending these on weapons. There are loot boxes you can earn to unlock stuff for free, but it’s a grind, for sure.
Lastly, the visuals are absolutely stunning. Some of the best ever seen in a shooter, and the game actually takes on its own art style rather than looking like a bleak, dry historical shooter. There are lens flares, darkly contrasted visuals, and the various lighting effects are stunning. The audio experience is just as powerful as Battlefield has always excelled in that department time and time again.
Overall, Battlefield 1 is a fantastic historical shooter and one of the best to come out in over a decade. The campaign is refreshing and fun, and the multiplayer will keep you busy for months after beating the campaign. I just wish the campaign was longer, as I wanted more unique stories to play through, and that feeling is always a good sign. Hopefully, Battlefield 2 (?) will expand upon all of this and maybe even jump-start wars.
Good campaigns are kind of rare in FPS games these days, but 2016 brought back a ton of great FPS campaigns, and it was glorious. Wolfenstein II is another game that focuses more on its story and characters than its multiplayer, which is always a welcome change.
You play BJ Blazcowicz as the story picks up right after The New Order. It’s 1961 in America, in which Hitler and his Nazi regime have dug their roots deeper into the world. BJ and his cohorts from the last game are trying to start a revolution and gather the last remaining scraps they can muster. It might sound like another typical FPS, but this game has heart, soul, and character. Every character is memorable, loveable, and downright awesome to experience. The entire cast just works so well together, including the villains. The Nazi villains are ruthless, deadly, and just despicable, and it takes good writing to feel that way about a character.
The story kept me going through the whole game, as there were plot twists and sudden shock moments that had my blood boiling. One moment, I thought everything was over, only to have the story take a turn for the worse or better. It’s so well written and something you will talk about for a while. Outside of the story, the awesome shooting action is back and slightly improved and streamlined. One important thing to mention is that the boss fights are gone, but this is kind of a blessing as they were mediocre in the last game.
There’s a weapon upgrade system, collectibles, and new contraptions (that you acquire halfway through the story) to change things up. Each weapon gets three different upgrades, and they are all extremely useful. From less recoil to suppressors, some even alter the ammo and dynamics of the weapon as a whole. The arsenal is broad and strong, from energy weapons to grenade launchers, three-round auto-shotguns, and assault rifles. Every type of weapon is covered, and they all feel great and unique. You will constantly switch up weapons for different enemies. Enemies are well thought out this time around and are evenly balanced with health. I felt like the difficulty didn’t jump around so much like the last game; the entire game was challenging, with a hard section towards the end of each level.
The gameplay also changes with each level as you enter different environments. On some levels, you’re underwater a lot; on others, you’re wearing environment suits; and on some, you’re weaponless. The entire campaign is mixed up and feels so smooth and well organized that I just couldn’t get enough. Each enemy takedown feels satisfying, and I wanted to go out guns blazing, but stealth is easier to do in this game, so taking down commanders without sounding alarms was so awesome. Using takedown moves, ax throws, and silenced pistol shots was the way to go when you were heavily outnumbered. These areas in the last game were a chore to navigate, and the enemy placement made it nearly impossible to get through a whole section without being detected.
My biggest complaint would be the level design. While the ideas were great, I got lost often and didn’t know where to go. Hallways all looked the same, and there weren’t many landmarks to figure out where to go. The environments are beautifully created, but the layout is a bit dull. There’s at least plenty to do with the optional objectives on the hub base, Das Hammer, and some endgame content to work through.
The visuals are stunning, especially on PC, with all settings cranked up to the max. Great lighting, textures, and highly detailed models made this game come to life. I honestly can’t recommend Wolfenstein II enough; it’s one of the greatest FPS games made in the last decade.
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