What is Return to Castle Wolfenstein?

In 943 AD, a German prince known as Heinrich dominated Western Europe with his army of undead and Dark Knights created by black magic. There was no one who could stand in his way - until a monk stopped Heinrich by sealing him in a deep underground tomb.

A thousand years later, in 1943 AD, the Second World War had started to go bad for Nazi Germany due to their defeats on the Eastern Front and in North Africa. The Chief of the Nazi SS, Heinrich Himmler, had been researching possible ways to win the war through science and black magic and read a few stories about the German prince Heinrich I and his Dark Knights, becoming interested in them, especially since they were so powerful. Heinrich Himmler believed that if he could bring Heinrich back to life, he could win the war for Nazi Germany. Himmler then founded an SS Paranormal Division and sent them to Northern Egypt in secret and hoped that they would find some ancient tablets.

Meanwhile, the Allied intelligence office got word of this and sent British Agent One and US Army Captain B.J. Blazkowicz to capture Helga von Bulow, a high ranking member of the SS Paranormal Division. They tracked Helga to an ancient tomb filled with the undead, but both the agents and the Germans escaped, including Helga. After this on March 15, 1943, Blazkowicz and Agent One were sent to follow her to Castle Wolfenstein, but were shot down by the Luftwaffe along the way and captured by the Germans.

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This killer game is really two games in one. The first is a single-player adventure through a Nazi stronghold filled with violence, mythos, and mystery. The second is a multiplayer romp using World War II hardware, one that fans of Saving Private Ryan will enjoy tremendously. They've both great.

The game’s premise is simple. You’re an American soldier who has escaped from a cell in the mysterious and eponymous Castle Wolfenstein. At first your exploration reveals whatyou might expect — loads of Nazis. But as you progress through the game (using the save feature a lot, if you’re smart), you find that unusual Nazi experiments have tainted the castle with a supernatural tinge. The suddenshock gameplay and cut scenes make these eerie phenomena readily apparent.

Graphically, if your system is up to it, Wolfenstein brings a lot of rewards using the powerful Quake III engine. Cleverly designed and well-animated creatures, both natural and supernatural, populate its very detailed architecture. Texture work is immaculate, with convincing environments, indoors and outside. The initially confining castle environs open out into much more ambitious levels.

As you move through the game, you’ll assemble quite an arsenal of weapons, from simple Luger pistols to volumetric and pyrotechnically impressive flamethrowers. Ballistically accurate hand grenades backup the point-and-shoot weapons nicely. Tossing a grenade around a comer and then ducking to safety is tremendously satisfying.

The single-player game can be tough, but perseverance is all that’s really required to finish it. We’d argue, however, that you’ll never quite finish the multiplayer game, developed independently by a company called Vibe, because the possibilities are nearly endless.

Multiplayer mode lacks zombies, concentrating instead on regular war stuff (like strategy). You choose to fight with either the Axis or the Allied side, picking from a number of player classes, including medics and engineers. While the latter classes can fight, their real job is to help the soldiers and lieutenants by curing fallen (even dead) comrades or blowing up walls. You can, of course, be a lieutenant or a soldier and attack in a more gung-ho fashion, but the introduction of true character classes adds acres of strategy.

While standard team-based games leave you in boredom as you guard a base or flag, in multiplayer Wolfenstein you get to man staticmounted machine guns, hide in ventilation shafts, and defuse explosives, among many other things.

If the game has failings aside from its hefty system requirements, they lie in its irritating, molasses-slow, counterintuitive interface, which has the sadly typical multitiered useroption screens; also, the single-player version has some occasional slow parts. Othenwise, it’s great value and great fun.

O’Connor, Frank. (August 2002). Return to Castle Wolfenstein. MacAddict. (pg. 42).

Download Return to Castle Wolfenstein for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 9.1 up to Mac OS 10.4

Compatibility notes

PowerPC CPU (300 MHz or faster, 450 MHz recommended)
At least 128MB of RAM
Mac OS 9.1 - Mac OS X 10.1 to 10.4
3D Graphic Acceleration required with at least 6MB of VRAM (ATI Radeon or Nvidia GeForce)
OpenGL (included in the installer)

 

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver