For old school gamers, this game was a Godsend of its time. It's not quite the original First Person Shooter, but it was the most easily obtained of its time. Not to mention, the learning curve makes it to where you can just pick it up and play it, no questions asked. ID Software had some success in their earlier titles, but Wolfenstein put them directly on the map. They weren't a household name until Doom came out, but we've covered Doom.
Right now, we're going to dive into one of the most glorified ways to kill Nazi's in gaming. Wolfenstein gives you a luger and tells you to go to town. While the first episode never really gets to nailbiting difficulty, do not let that lull you into a false sense of security. This game gets hard. You are William J Blazkowicz (Or BJ for short) and you are a prisoner in Castle Wolfenstein, captured by the Nazi's. You are able to overpower your guard and take his gun and that sets you off on a journey to take down the entire Third Reich. And no, I'm not kidding.
You pretty much go from level to level, collecting bullets for three weapons: The pistol, the MP-40 submachinegun and the chaingun. Your objective is to collect as much treasure as you can and take down the enemy forces using any means necessary. Guards, SS troops and killer dogs are all over the first episode. There are rooms that house at least ten or twelve of these guys and taking them down can be something of a trick.
Another thing this game is best known for is its secrets. There are some very obscure secrets on random walls that sometimes do not differential themselves from other walls. It's not like in Doom where it could be a different color or slightly off angled in its decorations. These walls make it to where, if you want to 100% the game, you'll be pressing the use button and rubbing your face up against a lot of walls.
The more you look at this game, the more you start to realize that a lot of what you love about FPS's got their start right here. Hit scanning enemies also got their start here, and if you don't know what that is, allow me to explain. Hit scanners will fire their weapons and through a random number generator, it's a coin flip whether or not they hit you. You can't dodge and you can't get out of their way to avoid them, you have to hide behind cover. Your weapons are also hit scanners, so there's a part of it that evens out.
Final levels in each episode have a boss battle attached to them. If you started out with the Shareware version, you would have run into Hans Grosse. This big bastard holds two chainguns and he will mow you down within seconds if you stand in his way for too long. Think two chainguns is too much? Well, Adolf Hitler runs around in mech armor that holds four chainguns and once you break his toy, he still runs around with two of them. Still, the fact of the matter is that you can kill Hitler with nothing but your will and your bullets. That is enough for celebration by itself.
The real difficulty of this game stems from a lot of the level designs. This game is far from perfect. It is long and there are times when you will get lost in a level, only to be gunned down by a wandering guard that caught you unaware. Sometimes, the game developers took the idea of a maze entirely too seriously and decided to make a secret maze that you can screw up if you push the wrong wall in the wrong place.
Despite its flaws, it is still a solid, beautiful game that pushed the boundaries of what we know as gaming. Because of it, Doom was an enormous success and ID obviously had fun making it. If you were wondering what to play after the Doom Classic games are beaten, then give this a try. Destroying the Third Reich as a one man army has never been so simplistic and fun. Just remember to know when to use the machine gun rather than the chaingun. Save some ammo and kill the Fuhrer!
