eturn to Castle Wolfenstein was designed by two different companies. Nerve wrote the online, multiplayer version, and Gray matter wrote the single-player, story mode.
The multiplayer mode eschews traditional deathmatch play in favor of teams of Allied soldiers facing off against teams of Nazi soldiers in three different games. Players choose to be soldiers, medics, engineers or lieutenants. Soldiers can use any weapon except dynamite. Engineers can repair stationary guns and place and disarm dynamite. Medics can drop health packs and revive "dead" characters. Lieutenants can drop ammo and call in air strikes. There are no health packs or ammo on the maps, so teams have to have medics and lieutenants to survive. All three games are objective-based, and many of the objectives require blowing things up with dynamite. The soldiers provide the firepower the other three classes need to stay alive.
In the single-player, story mode game, players take the role of William Joseph (B.J.) Blazkowicz, an OSS agent captured trying to infiltrate Castle Wolfenstein, where the Nazis are believed to be doing experiments in rocketry, biological weaponry and the occult. The game starts the same way the classic Castle Wolfenstein 3D did, with B.J. making his escape from his cell and picking up a Luger. From there, the player tries get B.J. out of the castle so he can foil whatever the Nazis are up to in their archaeological dig in the mountains beyond. Along the way, B.J. uses a selection of guns and other weapons to fight a variety of Nazi troop-types as well as mystical menaces and terrifying magic and technology hybrids. B.J. can't pull himself up onto boxes and balconies Lara-Croft style, but
he can lean to peer around corners.
A supremely playable shoot-'em-up
Castle Wolfenstein is a franchise that is almost as old as the personal computer. The original game was written for the Apple II, but it was the shareware game Castle Wolfenstein 3D for the PC that demonstrated there was a market for first-person shooters if you were shooting the right villains. The Apple II version was more of a creep-and-stealth game, while CW3D was a pure shoot-'em-up. The single-player mode of RtCW combines these two genres. Some sections it is best to sneak and use the various silenced weapons. In some sections it is best to soften the room up with grenades and then charge in with machine gun blazing. Both methods have their satisfactions and are well mixed through out.
In the multiplayer mode, RtCW is not doing anything that has not been done before. Unit types and team-based games are available in all of the popular online shooters. What RtCW does, however, is integrate these elements into a supremely playable, greatly enjoyable game.
It is
one thing to make lieutenants responsible for handing out ammo, but if it was hard to call for that ammo and hard for the lieutenants to find the character who called for it, then the game would be crippled rather than improved. It is not hard. The call for ammo, like the call for a medic,
is a simple keystroke, and it create pointer in the proper character's HUD so the player can easily get their character to where it is needed. In addition, re-spawns of dead character are delayed. This causes characters to return to play in ready-made squads, all in the same place and able to support each other, a big improvement over re-spawning immediately and then having to search out other characters on the player's team, as happens in other on-line games.
First-person shooters are all about who you are shooting, and there is no better target than Nazis. The only shame is that in this version of Castle Wolfenstein, the Germans speak accented English; it felt more real when they shouted at you in German.
— Eric
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