Wolfenstein

I went into Wolfenstein with not a lot of expectations, after reading some pretty scathing reviews online for the game, with Jeff G's being one of the few giving me hope that this would be a decent followup to Return to Castle Wolfenstein.  After hearing that it's not that hard, and assuming that reviewers were playing on normal, I figured I'd get my money's worth out of Raven's newest shooter, and picked Bring 'Em Hard from the difficulty list.  I gotta say, the trip through alternate history Nazi WW2 continues to be an awesome experience, even without the appearance of Mr. Hitler.
 
After a pretty cool opening sequence, we see B.J. riding a train into the German town of  Isenstadt, where a group of allies forces are trying to stop the Third Reich from basically running their quiet little village into the ground.  The game plays as a hug-and-spoke experience, where you take on missions, then following the marker on your compass, you find your way to a door, truck, etc that will lead you to the location of wherever you need to go.  It works pretty well, and coming back into Isenstadt after a mission gives you a chance to stock up, upgrade weapons and abilities, and then set out again to complete the next assignment.  Bad guys always repopulate when you come back, so you often find yourself fighting to get wherever you need to go in town, but it never got boring or repetitive to me (in fact, after I got really good at taking down one particular "blue man", I usually looked forward to finding one patrolling the streets what I could take on).
 
The graphics engine is enhanced Doom 3 fare, it's not going to win any awards, but it looks good if not great most of the time, especially with the resolution hiked up and all the effects turned on.  Most of the enemies are well done and the environments look adequately destroyed to convey a sense of war.
 
Of the few real complaints I have with the game, one is how inconsistent the difficulty is going from one mission to another.  Even taking them on in the order they're more or less assigned to you, you seem to hit a really tough mission following by one that is almost too easy.  This continued until the final section of the game, where it suddenly, even for hard, got to the point where I really just wanted to break something (see Last Boss).
 
In the end, Wolfenstein is a good game and a fine follow up to Return, which I enjoy immensely as well.  I have very few problems with the game as a whole, and look forward to Raven's next chapter in the world of B.J. Blaskovich.