Wolfenstein TNO was a game I played back around in the time of it's release, I heard of it through positive word of mouth even though I wasn't the avid FPS game player at the time like I am now, I dropped after getting about halfway into the game mainly due to how dull I found it. Fast forward 11 years and I've beaten many FPS games since then including Return to Castle Wolfenstein among many others. I also bought the Wolfenstein PS4 physical collection that came with The Old Blood almost a year ago so I decided to revisit TNO, I also am not a big fan of MachineGames' take on the Wolfenstein series with the New Colossus being a game I questioned why I finished at all.
With that out of the way, I do kind of like TNO but that is because I played the game on the 2nd lowest difficulty, anything higher would make the design shortcomings all the more apparent and start to annoy the hell out of me.I'll start with the story, at best it ranges from tolerable to outright obnoxious. Most of the good things I can say for it is that the cutscenes are generally not very long and it does an okay job for giving a reason why BJ goes from point A to B. However, the game's story I can't say is well written.
You got BJ needing to monologue his inner thoughts almost every few minutes and they just come off as a lousy way of humanizing him since the dialogue barely adds anything of note to the scenes.
This could all be forgiven if the characters were good which they are not, they are either too one note to even care about them or barely have enough screen time or interesting interactions to care. For example, Fergus' survivor's guilt only gets mentioned once and never pops up again. The side characters get fleshed out through levels where all you do are fetch quests and don't add much to the campaign in terms of gameplay.
Deathshead only shows up at the start and end of the game with Fergus or Wyatt being a short boss fight and never has BJ be conflicted on having to face them. Frau Engel only gets to do anything of note at all because control is wrestled away from the player. The rest of the characters are either just there or BJ cares about them through dialogue like Anya especially, one sex sex scene and they are dating.
One big annoyance about the story is how like I mentioned before control is wrestled away from the player to make BJ look weak. In the 2nd prison break level, BJ gets caught not once but TWICE and it was out of the player's control. In the final level, BJ takes out an entire battalion of Nazis, the guy is a one man army but then he gets jumped by Frau's lover in a cutscene. I died a number of times to that preceding fight so to be beaten in a cutscene really got on my nerves. Then the game tries to give Deathshead character by monolouging or wrestling control away for him to do something bad. It rarely ever feels organic.
Gameplay is weird at first, you'd be mistaken for thinking TNO is a CoD campaign with how scripted it is, but luckily the former does get better. Gunplay in TNO is thankfully pretty solid with great weapon sounds and death animations.
TNO's gameplay is at it's most fun, it tends to have weaker enemies and gives me ample time to tank enough hits moving from cover to cover. What TNO essentially is FEAR but without slo mo and the ability to hold all your guns.
Gameplay starts to faulter when the game shoves in tankier and more harder to kill enemies and since the guns are hitscan and enemies start taking more bullets to kill, battles become a quick game of hoping you can make it to the next cover spot in time and finding enough medkits to get your health back. Your health does regen up to certain thresholds but it doesn't mean a lot when the threshold gets lower the more you get shot at.
It also doesn't help that to pickup health and ammo, you need to contantly press the interact button, remember how I said how it turns into a game of hoping you make it from cover to cover? Now, add constantly picking up ammo and health while getting shot at.
Add to this, that you can't hold medkits or how enemies don't drop health upon death and firefights when challenges starts to amp becomes games of luck rather than skill. That's also when you put in that concentrated gunfire from 2-3 foot soldiers can kill you quickly.
It's a shame that TNO has these shortcomings since the arena design does support the idea that the player should actively be on the move where cover shooters just often have you sit in one place and wait for health to regen. Ideally, TNO's combat should be about running, tanking hits, using the lean button to get kills, relocate, pick up some health, then using the shotgun upclose while approaching a group of enemies from behind. It SHOULD make you feel like you are on the move especially with the ways the player can flank but instead the shortcomings just make me feel like I win because I'm lucky.
Overall, okay game but I get why I never really connected with it
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