I haven’t played a shooter in a while, so I dusted off Return To Castle Wolfenstein for a bit. Yeah, I’ve got a bunch of other games still ongoing, but this one is supposed to be fairly short, and I’m already through three chapters of seven total.

It starts out as a fairly traditional WWII-setting shooter, and I made my way through the castle guards in order to escape via a tram. Back in the village, I got sent to some nearby crypts to check something out, and that’s where you start encountering the supernatural elements in the form of zombies and skeletons. The Nazis are tied into it and up to no good, of course.

The crypts led into a church, where there were more undead and Nazi guards (often fighting each other), and female Nazi special ops agents in skintight catsuits. Which would be a lot hotter if they weren’t so good at killing me; one room had four or five of them in it, and they could take me down extremely quickly, as each hit from the rapid-fire Sten gun they had would knock off 10 health. At the end was the first boss fight, against the transformed version of the local commander Helga. It took a bunch of tries since she has this really annoying attack which sends out spectral skulls which blind you and knock off a lot of health, but persistence paid off.

After that was the third chapter, which starts out with a stealth section where I had to sneak into a base by hiding in the back of a truck. This part was annoying since it’s often not clear when an enemy has discovered you, so quicksaves could be ruined by being permanently stuck in a ten-seconds-from-alarm-activation state. The inside of the base was fairly uneventful, and led to the airfield, where I just had to wade through some waves of enemy soldiers (including some that parachuted in) to get to the launch facility, where I threw the appropriate switches and stole a prototype plane.

And apparently I’m now off to escort some tank in order to rescue a defecting scientist.

It’s not too bad so far, though it’s rather plain compared to most modern shooters. There’s some weapon variety, but I find myself sticking to pretty much one gun almost all the time (usually one of the machine guns).