All these years later, Return to Castle Wolfenstein offers a very fun single-player experience.
The level design is generally intuitive, and grows stronger as the game progresses. The areas you occupy in-game are made more immersive through immaculate attention to detail and period-appropriate decoration.
Certain aspects of the game's visual presentation have aged particularly well, for instance characters' faces and the weapons.
There's good feedback in firefights - you'll usually be able to tell whether you've hit your enemy. However, hitboxes aren't very accurate. Spend enough time using a sniper and you'll realise that many of the shots you clearly miss in fact hit the intended target. It's better to wrongly register misses than not recognise hits, I suppose!
The stealth can be frustrating. It's almost as if AI detection works using RNG instead of a coherent pattern. Sometimes you'll be spotted half a mile away through a dark mist; sometimes the soldier you're sneaking up on will have no peripheral vision whatsoever.
It took me a while to adjust to the absence of an aim-down-sight ability for most weapons in the game, but as your arsenal expands you'll find something that works for your play-style.
A slightly frustrating component of the game is its tendency to use a start-of-level save instead of your latest quicksave for its automatic reload.
There are probably fixes for all of the issues I've raised in this review, but nothing in Return to Castle Wolfenstein agitated me to the point of caring to seek out mods or patches. Take the game as you find it and you'll still be having fun most of the time.
The level design is generally intuitive, and grows stronger as the game progresses. The areas you occupy in-game are made more immersive through immaculate attention to detail and period-appropriate decoration.
Certain aspects of the game's visual presentation have aged particularly well, for instance characters' faces and the weapons.
There's good feedback in firefights - you'll usually be able to tell whether you've hit your enemy. However, hitboxes aren't very accurate. Spend enough time using a sniper and you'll realise that many of the shots you clearly miss in fact hit the intended target. It's better to wrongly register misses than not recognise hits, I suppose!
The stealth can be frustrating. It's almost as if AI detection works using RNG instead of a coherent pattern. Sometimes you'll be spotted half a mile away through a dark mist; sometimes the soldier you're sneaking up on will have no peripheral vision whatsoever.
It took me a while to adjust to the absence of an aim-down-sight ability for most weapons in the game, but as your arsenal expands you'll find something that works for your play-style.
A slightly frustrating component of the game is its tendency to use a start-of-level save instead of your latest quicksave for its automatic reload.
There are probably fixes for all of the issues I've raised in this review, but nothing in Return to Castle Wolfenstein agitated me to the point of caring to seek out mods or patches. Take the game as you find it and you'll still be having fun most of the time.