That’s a hard fight, but I found the trick there–unlike a lot of Wolfenstein II’s bigger battles–was to constantly keep moving. Just like in the later courtroom fight, there’s no real places to bunker down and bottleneck the enemy: you have to keep running fast enough they can’t get a bead on you, sucking up spare health and armor where you can, while gradually running down their numbers.
There’s a couple places in the courtroom where you can catch your breath for a couple of seconds, but yes, the whole deal there is “move, sucker, move”. Which I don’t mind, until some random, useless (but pretty) piece of geometry keeps me from hauling ass around, and that second spent fighting the scenery ends up getting you killed. Or that, because of the cluttered layout and previous gameplay, I should be hunkering down more. It’s an unwritten shooter law that if I agree to be locked in an arena, the game agrees to my unfettered movement.
In short: that level annoyed me. There’s a time and place for barreling around a level, shooting all directions at once, and that stage set-up just wasn’t optimal for that.
As a whole I though Wolf 2 was easier than 1, but there were several places that were quite difficult for me. The courtroom was probably the hardest. The Empire State building was another one that took a bunch of tries. Usually it boiled down to being aware of my surroundings and taking advantage of what was there - which is hard to do when running your butt off.
My first criticism with the game comes in Area 52. The game has been pretty good about the variety and type of levels. But after the area in the tunnels where you get on the train, I felt like the train level was too small a reprieve before they thrust me back into another area just like the one where I got on the train. So I felt a sort of “level fatigue” for the first time in the game.
Sort of a “this again? I just did this”.
It makes sense from a story perspective, but if they were going to do that, they should have made the train level a bit longer, or maybe put in a flashback level for BJ to add some variety in there before thrusting you back into the same kind of level.
Whatever this game’s flaws (and there are a number of them), I’m really super-impressed with the voice acting so far. The actress doing Frau General Engel is effing fantastic and just kills it. BTW I’m SO GLAD they went with a person who actually spoke German for her character and for all the other larger roles (the guy in the diner, for instance), and for PA announcers and such–having lived in Germany I know what German-speakers’ accents in English sound like and nothing breaks my immersion worse than bad fake accents–I know, I know, I’m like a dog with a bone on this topic.
The other guy who deserves a nod for his VA is the actor playing the abusive father (once I saw his picture on IMDB I realized why his voice was so crazy familiar–I think I first saw him on 24 back when). Also Debra Wilson, formerly of MadTV, who plays Grace- I love how they made her character model look like her.
There’s so many situations in this game where I end up wondering:
“Could I have done that whole thing in stealth mode”?
I’ll never know, because every time I botch stealth, I go loud. Very loud. And I enjoy it to its fullest before I die and reload from the last save. Only, sometimes going loud actually works, and I survive, and that’s when I’m left wondering, was I supposed to go loud in that level? Maybe doing it quietly wasn’t even possible.
All right, this is driving me bananas. When you get into the place with the big globe of Venus in the middle that you have to break to get into the passage below it–in that central room, just off it, is another room with a collectible that I can’t find a way to get to. The red blast doors wont open to it, the window won’t break with shooting. There’s a passage above that looks like you could use to get in, but how to climb up into said passage? And yes, even with the stilt legs, I can’t reach. I’m at a loss. Is that one of those sadistic things devs do sometimes to drive players nuts?
I haven’t reached that yet. But today I left Roswell and made a little detour. And oh my god, this detour was awesome.
Thanks, I guess I’ll hit up YouTube and see if anyone there has posted something.
BTW, can someone enlighten me as to how to do the enigma codes? I deciphered the first character but then didn’t see what the next character was that I was supposed to decipher, and I lost one of my collected codes. Doesn’t the timer reset after every character is solved? If not that’s nuts. Maybe I can skip the whole nonsense through the console, anyone know?
Unpopular opinion: devs that continue t put players in no win situations where they have to make Sophie’s Choices over who lives and who dies suck.
Devs who make players shoot dogs can go fuck themselves. And I say that as a cat person.
You don’t have to shoot him. I intentionally missed.
Well, I think he might also be referring to the Dobermans one runs into occasionally during the actual gameplay.
I mean, I don’t personally have a problem with shooting a dog that’s trying to eff me up, but other more sensitive souls may.
I put the gunshot above the family dog and it still howled. Dad finished it off. Point stands.
I’m not trying to convince you not to hate them. It’s up to you how it effects you. I personally like those emotional moments in games. It made me hate the dad even more. I literally stood there for minutes trying to see if the game would time out the Dad’s request, but he kept telling me to do it. I tried to shoot the dad and couldn’t. Finally I figured I would just try and miss.
I did the same thing, but I figure the dog would still howl from the sudden very loud noise. After all, the gun is supposed to be a rifle not a shotgun.
IMHO the father shot the dog in that scene.
Either way it’s bad design. It made me hate the devs, not the Dad.
That dog scene was the only one in the game I really had serious qualms about. In part, it is because they did a good job on modeling the poor hound, and in part, because in general that sort of thing really hits me hard. I get the dramatic point, and it was very effective in making you hate that guy, but it was still icky.
Change yer fuckin’ tampons, ladies…
Or: this is a game about black and whites. No greys. The characters are either shining paragons of humanity, or are the vilest of vile monsters.
It is beautiful design. Machine Games went for gut-level hatred of the arch-viles, and I believe they succeeded brilliantly. I think that Frau Daughter-slapper is an instant classic in computer game villains, for example. Modeled, voiced, and animated perfectly.
Hear hear. Frau General Engel is The Worst (and I loved every minute of hating her).
I’ll take Frau Engel every time over the milquetoast villains we normally get in videogames.