this was not my first time trying to play the this series, it was actually my second time, i'd played a good chunk of new order but enddd up giving up on it because I really wasn't having a good time with it, I loved the setting and style and vibes but I hated the gameplay, I hated how punishing it was and the stealth focus and how it just felt really bad to play, the violence was uncomfortable too but the fact its nazis made it a lot easier to stomach, I mean, if there's any group it's fine to go to town with duel wield shotguns on its nazis right, but it felt like it never really let you because by the time you got even a few of them you were already gunned down, going into old blood i'd tried again initially to play on normal but I kept dying before I even hit chapter 2 and it was super annoying but then I restarted it on very and it really fixed it for me, it went from an experience I might have quit again on normal to a game I loved playing and it felt nice to just, have a good time with it and not worry about difficulty or having to play in ways the game wanted me to play, the game is very gamery about its difficulty settings with the easier ones outright mocking you in just super petty ways which seems very in spirit with how ID seems to work, but the game itself doesn't carry over many of the more icky more toxicly dudey bits that make ID games so unappealing to me, and you get to kill nazis, also i picked very easy partially out of spite, you can't gatekeep me from having fun with that attitude.

the gameplay on normal was not fun, like I said, you die very fast so the game heavily encourages stealth to the point where the painkiller-esque run and gun duel wield shotgun stuff Is an active detriment to you and should be a last resort that will likely get you killed and this just wasn't fun, the loop of stealth with brief moments of catharsis might be a fun loop for some but for me i just couldn't vibe with it, it felt like I couldn't use most of my toolset because if I tried to use any gun other than the pistol i'd be bombarded by enemies at could kill me in a second, but this is wholley fixed on very easy, I can stealth if I want but if I fail this (sometimes by omniciant AI or bugs!) I can just rush around and duel wield shotgun some nazis in the face and it's more fun this way, you get the cool stealth still but if you just want to like, merk a room of nazis because that's fun? then you can! easy mode saves the game. that's not to say the stealth is bad at all, sure its basic and comes down to a pistol, throwing knives and takedowns (which I hated doing because they just felt too gruesome for me, especially when you have to do it on animals, i wish these could be skipped), but there are some fun stealth puzzles like with the power armour people you have to find a power source to take down or even entire sections you can skip with a little knowledge of the environment, it's like an imsim lite in that way at least on easy because you can choose to do the stealth like the game wants you to or you can disregard it, it gives the game a much more free feeling rather than how needlessly restrictive the game is on normal. it's a shame its like this because when you can do the gun stuff it's a lot of fun! your weapons are somewhat restrictive creatively, just pistols, machineguns, a rifle and two kinds of shotguns with a grenade pistol as the one really unique weapon, but they all are super fun to use and you can even duel wield most of them which is amazing, i think this way is the way the game is at its best, with duel wield shotguns blasting your way through fancy rooms full of nazis. i think this displays why difficulty settings are important, it opened this game up for me when before i'd never have liked it, sure you could argue "oh you're playing it wrong" or "you cheated the game and yourself!" and like, good? lol? i'm playing the game the way i want and having fun, if that upsets you then that's a you problem.

one of the games strengths outside of how fun the gameplay is is the levels and the vibe, it's like a pulp, campy but very dark adventure, like a more adult version of something like an uncharted or an indy game, it has super varied levels and a cool progression where you can see new and old levels from the places you go that make the place feel super real (and beautiful, some of the skyboxes and vistas look amazing and the game has some really well done lighting especially during the village night segments where so much of it is lit entirely by fire) and gives you a really good sense that this is a real place you're going through and the places you do go are really varied, like caves and fancy castles with huge libraries, cute countryside towns, you have cable car escape missions and boat rides and even a full on haunted looking graveyard and the things you do there are super varied too, the game has some of the coolest setpieces in any shooter, you'll have sniper shootouts in cable cars and boat turret segments, fight zombies and huge monsters and pilot mechs, it's all really silly and dumb and so fun and so my speed, the zombie segments especially were the games highlight, i love zombie games and though its only a few chapters its the games highlight and one of the more fun zombie experiances of its generation. the supernatural stuff did a lot more to endear me to it than the scifi of new order it does have to be said, but it was such a cool adventure that i am excited to give that game another shot because its worldbuilding was amazing and knowing i can manage it on easy mode now makes it seem much less daunting. the music is a little bit more iffy than the rest though, not that it's bad but its very "movie score" and this is just not a vibe i'm into, it's well made but just very bland, which is a shame because while i can be super iffy on some of his OST's like dooms really grating metal, his work on SOMA and prey were both really good!

the story is fun as well, the cast isn't super memorable, nor are the villains compared to the more menacing ones i remember from my time with the new order but it's a fun ride, just like the levels, you have some really cool scripted scenes with the villains, a choice later on that determines what ending you get and the worldbuilding is really good, it sets up the future alt-history of new order really well with all the notes and posters dotted around, but the more adventury tone helps keep it a lot less depressing than what i played of new order, it's more optimistic for a lot of its run and just here to let you have fun killing Nazis, it's not needed though for the sequels from what i can gather, it's just a fun side story that gives more context and that leads well into the first game. one big positive is the length, it's very short and i was able to binge it in 2 sittings, you're looking at 3, maybe 4 or 5 hours your first run and that's a perfect length for a shooter for me, since i don't play a lot of them and it's not a genre i enjoy a ton, so something short so i can have my fun and see everything without giving it time to get too repetitive is great and its paced so well, the game goes by super fast and there's always so much new things happening like the set pieces and new weapons and settings.

for ports you're good with either system here, both the xbox one and ps4 versions are both perfectly fine, i played with the disc copy on ps4 which ran me £6 on ebay, but the xbox one ver seems fine and its cheaper, sadly this one isn't on switch though like it's sequels. this wasn't the first game in the series since it was made as sort of a prequel to wolfenstein the new order on next gen consoles, a first true next gen experiance since the new order was on 360 and ps3 (on 4 discs on the former! it's so beautiful) but it did get followups in the form of wolfenstein 2 the new collossus also on next gen including a very impressive looking switch port, the VR game cyberpilot that i have and it seems super fun and there was also a spinoff with youngblood that was the *other* reason i went to play this, since i really want to play youngblood with my partner, it seems like the most my thing of the other games in the series and i'm really excited to try it! this was, much like new order, made by machinegames who would become the series main developer, making both sequels and also working on some campaign stuff for other ID things like quake and helping with their doom games. of note also was that it was directed by Jerk Gustafsson who had prior to this worked on some of starbreeze's best games like riddick and one of my favourite shooters: the darkness! so it has some of that DNA in here, you should pick it up and you'll see what i mean, it's a fun game and one that i think is a great entry to the series on the whole, i'll probably try new order next but the 2009 game by raven software *really* interests me, so i may make a little detour there first.