A potentially divisive aspect of Wolf 2's stealth is that, much of the time, if you get seen once, that's it.
Some of the missions I've played thus far have been extremely well-suited to stealth play, others have not, and m'colleague Adam, who handled our Wolfenstein 2 review, tells me that later levels did not, in his experience, seem quite so setup for sneaking.Įven in my comparatively limited experience, the game has an unfortunate habit of defaulting back to faintly tedious metal corridors immediately after a relatively bravura section, and if that continues, sooner or later the urge to just blow through samey levels PDQ is going to overwhelm the urge to ghost them.Įven if that does happen within the next few hours, I'm still going to have an average-length game's worth of sneakery, and won't feel entirely dissatisfied with that. (This is because stealth=extremely slow play, which I'll say a bit more about below). Here comes the big proviso, though: despite having sunk getting on for a dozen hours into Wolf 2 so far, I'm nowhere near completing it. Of course, there aren't anything like as many of these alternate paths as there are in, say, a Dishonored game, but there are enough of 'em to conjure an intermittent illusion that you are creating your own route through what are, in truth, linear maps. So it won't ever direct you to to its various dark corners, mansize pipes and overhead walkways, but if you're a career sneak, you will recognise and exploit them almost unconsciously. The sneaking route, by contrast, inherently involves not knowing exactly what will happen when you round the next corner and takes you to parts of the levels that you otherwise would not see.Īppropriately, Wolf 2 is only a stealth game surreptitiously - it carries itself as if it were a straight-up shooter when, in fact, it is not. Wolf 2 is fairly adept at using a combination of setpiece and level geometry to keep the loop of shoot'n'move ambiently remixed throughout, but it's nonetheless pretty much always about running around frantically and lobbing bullets until everyone else has stopped shouting. The main lure is simply that it makes the core Wolfenstein experience far more unpredictable.
There are entirely legitimate reasons to despise it.
Thing is, Wolf 2's stealth is all kinds of messed up. Both of the latter-day Wolfs are designed primarily to be played as spray'n'play mass murder sims, and they've got a ton of wonderful toys with which to achieve that, but, for my part, I've been there, done that far too many times, and so the idea of treating W2TNC's missions as a quieter, tenser, almost puzzle-like affair is far more appealing. The reason for that is because I'm playing it as a stealth game - a claim about a Wolfenstein game that would have sounded absurd a couple of years ago, but is now taken for granted as a result of 2014's The New Order offering a limited sneaky-stabby path. It's taking me a long, long time to play through Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus.
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