24th November, 2021

Beaten 1st time on difficulty – “Bring ‘em on!” (Medium?)
Mods/fixes used:
ioRtCW Source Port

Gotta say, although I give this game a positive score, I was disappointed. A WWII game with nazis & supernatural elements sounds like an awesome idea, but I enjoyed the game most during stealth missions and when there was no supernatural. And for an FPS the guns here are disappointing for most part.

On surface RTCW has plenty, but even in endgame you’ll end up using same 2-3 guns if you want to stay alive. Let’s start with grenades – they’re useless for most part. The area of damage is tiny, you can land one meter from someone and it might take half of their health, throwing is awful too, it’s like they weigh 10kg. I found them to be good against zombies that use shields, but there are like 2 levels where those guys show up… Colt pistol shows up late in game where you don’t use pistols anymore, you can dual wield them which is cool, but useless. And both colt and Thompson use .45 ACP ammo, which is very scarce. However I felt like Thompson is more accurate than MP40, so it had its use but rarely. Tesla gun – it sounds awesome, should be a super powerful gun in the endgame right? Not really and it’s useless for 99% of time you have it. It has super low range, which is weird, because ubersoldiers that use it have unlimited range! And on top of that it doesn’t stun lock more common enemies like SS paratroopers, so you’ll just end up killing yourself if you try to use. Sten gun is silenced but it overheats very quickly, it’s ok at first against weaker enemies but is less desirable to better FG 42 or not overheating MP40. Venom gun and panzerfaust were situational, but pretty powerful. But each has their problems, panzerfaust – no matter if you stand still, the missile can go in slightly different direction than where you were aiming. Wanna kill ubersoldier slowly approaching you with panzerfaust? Take a shot, oops the missile went slightly to the right and completely missed the target. Venom gun is awesome but has insane spread so it was only good in close range and on later levels you are in more open spaces. There’s also flamethrower but it was very situational, however burning nazis alive was fun, though they scream so horribly that you might feel a little bad.

So I only stucked to 3 weapons for most part – FG 42 for most fights, MP40 when I was out of ammo for FG 42 and scoped mauser for long range, occasionally using Venom gun or panzerfaust against enemies like Ubersoldiers or Lopers. It’s been years since I played old CoD or MoH but I have to give a plus to this game for using FG 42, I have never seen this weapon in any WW2 game except Red Orchestra. Most games would just use StG 44.

Bosses are just bullet sponges. First boss is a walking abomination that occasionally attacks you with undead spirits (projectile), shoot, keep your distance and it’ll die. Similar with final boss, though minor enemies spawn constantly but they all use melee attacks and I was mostly ignoring them when shooting at boss. It was also the only boss where I used my tesla gun because he only has melee attacks. Somewhere in middle there is an improved ubersoldier with huge HP and it zaps you to death or spams his venom gun. But in the fight room there is an open room, hide behind a wall, as he approaches and turns towards you, shoot, repeat until it’s dead.

Story is interesting at first. Sometime in middle ages, a sorcerer unable to kill dark knight Heinrich I, traps and buries him underground with a spell. Fast forward to WWII and nazis somehow learned about this and want to free him to win the war. A paranormal SS division is created, led by SS High Priestess Marianna Blavatsky. We don’t learn about her or more about the division until later. We play as Cpt. Blazkowicz (obviously) under OSA command and game starts in Castle Wolfenstein, where we try to escape after being captured and nearly tortured by nazis. Before every mission we get a cutscene from OSA debriefing and our objectives during the loading screen. At first OSA only knows about existence of paranormal division but nothing else, we go after it to learn more, we later learn about X-creatures and different experiments nazis do.

Campaign starts like a normal WWII nazi shooting game. We escape the castle, enter the nearby village, killing many soldiers and officers. Soon we enter underground crypt where undead warriors from medieval times are waking up and killing everybody they meet, nazis included. Shortly after leaving the crypts behind, we stumble into all-female SS Paranormal division. Although this is a 2001 game, their design is very 90’s imo. They all wear leather suits, either covering their entire body, or leaving some space to show cleavage and belly button. And of course they’re all young and sexy. They also use only silenced sten guns and reminded me of female black ops assassins from Half-life. They’re very quick, agile, use silenced weapons and wear heals. Next, after this weird encounter with paranormal and with no further clues, we go to stop launch of V2 missile with some new chemical warhead. This starts as a stealth mission, we need to get inside the base without triggering the alarm. Honestly I really enjoyed this part. Near end of this mission we are introduced to another new enemy – SS Paratroopers. They use exclusively FG-42 and are tougher than standard SS Soldiers. They also get a pretty cool intro, literally parachuting into the base we’re attacking and having a unique track played in background. After that it’s finally time to investigate Secret Weapons Facility runned by a scientist dubbed “Deathshead”. This mission is more of a human-made horror, with nazis experimenting on people with genetics and attaching weird machinery. This is where we get Venom gun, which is really fun to use here because the underground labs are full of tight spaces. And of course, a new enemy – Loper. A deformed human torso with stretched, muscular arms and no legs, instead it has some kind of tesla generator, it's very quick and jumpy, and will use its generator to deal a lot of damage if it gets close to you. When we meet them, they get out of their cells by accident and they kill everyone. Sadly we only get to fight them on this mission and one more later, they are deadly but fun to fight. After that and only just witnessing Deathshead escape via his submarine, we go after him to X-labs. We’ll meet more lopers near end and a new enemy – Ubersoldier. They use venom guns too and panzerfausts, later on they also use tesla guns. This is where we fight a second boss, improved Ubersoldier with tesla gun, which I mentioned before. We leave the labs and back to chasing paranormal. After breaching a dam, we get to a village that’s near chateau and where a meeting of key SS commanders is supposed to take place. We have to go quietly through village without triggering the alarm and killing 5 SS commanders on our way. I think this is the first mission without introducing a new enemy or weapon. However, you’ll notice something after entering the chateau – enemies like female SS soldiers or SS paratroopers got their health doubled. You can pretty much feel that as at this point you killed so many before that you know you need around 10-15 bullets from MP40 to kill a paratrooper, for example. So this is a weird difficulty bump and I admit game got pretty tough from there. I had to quicksave a lot. Last mission is getting to the dig site where Heinrich I is buried, you know, the guy I mentioned at start and stop him. Undead return, as well as Ubersoldiers with tesla guns. Our tesla gun is useful in this mission against undead.

This whole journey might sound exciting, but it had its ups and downs. The aforementioned bullet spongy bosses aside, fighting hordes of soldiers with subpar AI gets boring over time. On some missions it's easy to get lost and it's not clear where are you supposed to go next, X-labs were the worst in that regard. You have no limit to how many weapons you can carry, yet you’ll default to 3 weapons because others are not useful most of times. This game has also weird balance when it comes to realism and consistency. I get it that ammo for Thompson is scarce, because nazis used 9mm for their MP40, not .45 ACP, but why not just add random parachute drops over maps? Or when we go to Secret Weapons Facility, we go through city recently bombed by Allies and meet resistance fighters there, couldn’t they use Thompson as a source for us to get more ammo? The all-female SS use silenced sten and what’s really cool, their stens get overheated too and they will hide while it cools down, just like our sten. But then we meet ubersoldiers and their tesla guns are overpowered, meanwhile our is kinda shit. The best bits for me were the stealth missions and mission in bombed city. No paranormal bullshit or weird latex SS assassins. I once got a flashback to either first CoD or MoH, in a submarine dock as I’m pretty sure one of those game had a mission with submarine docks. Like Wolf3D this game has secrets and gold to find. But gold is useless, as there’s no life system in place and no scoreboard of any kind. Sure, there is a summary at the end of how many secrets you found, but to find a secret you need to be in that room, you don’t need to pick any items there for it to count. Feels like a throwback to first game and nothing else.

Soundtrack is surprisingly high value, we have a very cinematic orchestral soundtrack. It’s pretty good within the game and works for what is happening on the screen, but not something I would listen to in my free time. Visually it’s pretty good for 2001 game and it runs on Quake III engine. I would even say it looks better than first MoH and that came year after RTCW. AFAIK ioRtCW doesn’t change the visuals of this game, just expands the engine, adds some modern features for modders to use and adds support for widescreen, multiple speakers etc. And I would highly recommend you to play it with ioRTCW, worth it just for widescreen support alone. And if you decide to install mods, most popular mods work with ioRTCW so you can install them on top of that. I’m playing one right now called RealRTCW and it works great.

Honestly I don’t know if I would recommend this. It definitely aged better than Wolf3D, but unless you are really curious what you missed from that area, I wouldn’t recommend buying this today. If you already have it and want to try, ioRTCW is a must.