PREVIEW – Once upon a time, there was a Swedish developer team, whose name was MachineGames. This little group was already having some success with former videogames, like The Darkness’ first game and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay – these were both put together under the wings of Starbreeze Studios, before they left to form a group on their own.

But the new name brought them a new task: Bethesda assigned them to revive the Wolfenstein franchise after a somewhat disappointing 2009 game, so they came up with Wolfenstein: The New Order, finishing it in 2014 May. The game was accepted positively worldwide and although Bethesda did not give them half of their kingdom, they wanted to see more of the story.

The princes and princesses have been thinking for a while until they came up with an idea to fulfill their assignment. We can expect a standalone DLC, which has a big potential to be enjoyable after picking it up. Why is that, you may ask?

Prequel

Let’s start with the fact that The Old Blood dares to take a sharp turn away from the happenings of The New Order. If you did not have the full game last year, it’s alright, because the expansion tries to distinguish itself away from it as much as possible to just be a prequel and nothing else.

With this, they also managed to answer some questions from The New Order, so everyone can easily jump into BJ Blazkowicz’s stories from 1946. 1946? Yeah – the Nazis were still fighting with what they had – remember, the second World War ended by then and we were into the beginning of the Cold War -, our hero will have two different missions to complete.

Don’t be a nasty woman, Helga!

In the first one, we have to get into the castle of Wolfenstein (we’ll get back to this later), and in the second one, we have to stop Helga Von Schnabbs from unleashing an ancient and dark power, which can remind some of you of happenings from a previous game – we’ll get back to this as well.

So the game itself wants to be a prequel, not spoiling anything from the story of The New Order, while still giving some answers here and there. This ties the two titles together quite nicely, hats off for that. The question could rise however: if this is just a standalone DLC, what are the chances of MachineGames simply copying over assets from The New Order?

Although this was their original idea, they instead took the time and effort to make new textures, guns and such, to not make us feel that we’re playing with a lazily thrown together DLC.

The well-known castle is back!

We can say this because of the melee weapon as well – sure, they could have just simply gone down the knife route and just be done with it, but they refused. Instead of the knife, you will have a steel pipe. These tend to be massive and can hurt quite a bit with one solid swipe, plus it’s not something that breaks in a few minutes.

The steel pipe was turned into a progression tool – you have to rely on it at a few places. Breaking some thin walls and climbing up through some holes is going to be possible with the good old pipe, so it’s not going to be used solely for killing. It is a clever solution.

Previously the Wolfenstein castle was mentioned – yep, this is actually a nod to the 2001 game Return to Castle: Wolfenstein, but they didn’t just stop there. Collectibles will also make a return as well as some familiar faces for those who played this almost 1.5 decade-old game. (And also, the second story can remind you of the final boss of RtCW as well…) They still managed to take this further by the appearance of zombies.

Forget them zombies

They won’t be dumb enemies like in Dying Light for example, especially because of some of them will have the ability to use rifles against us. Well, that can lead to some interesting moments, that’s for sure…

…especially, if the developers will make the DLC as action-packed as they promised. If this happens, we might actually say this sentence: „oh wow, two hours have already passed, when I wanted to play for only thirty minutes…” – this is usually a sign of a decent game. Combining the pulp movie genre with a B category action movie is an interesting idea, if it doesn’t end up making fun of itself and if it manages to keep its style. If they pull it off, it can be nice. Just don’t cross the line, that is all.

If you have missed The New Order…

By avoiding the spoiling of the happenings seen in The New Order, they might even make some of the players go out and pick that game up. This can turn into a genial move, but as it is a two-edged sword, it can backfire too: if the DLC is nothing special, then he/she might probably skip out on the full game, so we’ll see what the Swedes have put together… aside from the fact that one time they drunk themselves under the table. No joke, they actually took some audio recording equipment to a bar and ended up talking German while being drunk.

The audio was then shown to a German guy, who approved of the recordings – this in turn was used in one event, where we’ll end up in a tavern full of drunko Nazis. This might be a very funny moment, when we’re going to fight some drunk as F Nazi soldiers. These small details can make or break the success of The Old Blood – Mick Gordon actually put together a brand new soundtrack for the DLC itself. Another small detail.

May 5th is Wolfenstein Day!

We don’t have to wait much for the release, as the digital version will be out on May 5, but for those who want to collect the games in physical format, they can pick The Old Blood up from May 15. The 15 GBP price will likely be converted to around 20 euros, so the cheap price is a plus. We wait. And then we lived happily ever after.

-V-