Return to Castle Wolfenstein

I love the [id Software] universe. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is at the top of the list with the Early 2000's FPS genre. Played RTCW countless times since it released. Its another game where I still own the original CD's for it. Now Steam and GOG releases as well as the PlayStation 2 & Xbox versions. The game still holds up fairly well but you need to do some tweaks to get a little modern flair out of it.

It WILL play on modern PC's and if you are experiencing the Black Screen and Crashes at start-up. Follow this.

- Search for "Markshan Return to Castle Wolfenstein v1.42d" and download his patch. Its in a 1.57Mb zip file. This will address some known crashes and some bug fixes. Open the Zip and drop those in the base folder of where you installed the game.

- go to the install director [Return to Castle Wolfenstein\Main\] and open wolfconfig.cfg in a text editor.

- Change the following Lines for Widescreen support (change XXXX and YYYY to your prefered resolution i.e. 2560 and 1440)

seta r_customaspect "1"
seta r_customwidth "XXXX"
seta r_customheight "YYYY"
seta r_mode "-2"
seta cg_fixedAspect "2"

- Change your Frame Rate [Warning - playing at anything above 60fps on modern PC's will impact the Enemy A.I.'s ability to fight against you, blame the engine for actually utilizing the CPU. They will be more accurate and aimbot-like. It would be advised to keep the frame rate between 30 and 50 fps] IF you dont mind the challenge you can go up to 91 fps without needing support from a mod.

seta com_maxfps "XX"

Change this to prevent a Video glitch with the left corner of the screen taking over the entire screen. Set it to "1"

seta r_glIgnoreWicked3D "1"

Add this line to prevent Frame Drops in modern PC's

seta r_primitives "2"

Explanation and reason you want to lock your FPS to lower than 60fps -

Today we have gaming PC's running at least 10x (4Ghz and Greater) that on top of the amount of running anywhere from 4-16 cores in the CPU and playing at frame rates greater than 60 fps. This turns many of the more difficult enemies into essentially aimbots; like Snipers are a lot more deadly being able to track, aim quicker and fire more accurately. This also makes the Flamethrower Soldier, Fire Zombie, Loper, Occult Priest, Proto-soldier variants, Venom Gunner extremely dangerous and difficult to fight because the damage happens faster. Especially the Loper's where their Electric attack damage actually causing damage faster taking huge chunks of your health even in the easy difficulty mode.

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With all that being said. The graphics still hold up and at higher resolutions like 1440p and 4K, its astounding how well many textures are detailed and actually in a super high resolution from back then without using any HD Texture Packs.

Audio is great and the sound track great.

Story is well fitting for the [d] universe.

I havent tried the Enemy Territory multiplayer since the servers were brought back but i remember that portion being real fun back in the day.

I still give this game a 8.5/10 despite some of the nuances from modern PC's affecting the gameplay.

The first shooter I ever played. I remember watching my dad grind this shit 23 years ago. Nothing better than killing Nazis. Fun for the whole family. (9/10)

Best wolfenstein game before the reboots. You're playing "missions" so that the nazi's cant unleash a sort of mythical power. If you want to buy this you must realise it doesn't work out of the box and you will need to do some thinkering yourself.

26 minutes of gameplay? Bro I have thousands since 2001 outside Steam and for a good reason, this game is a masterpiece

This game turns from 'stealthy, atmospheric espionage' to 'crack, cocaine' really quick. :D
One of my favorite WW2 games. <3

Great shooter to this day, fun and simple. Easy recommend for 5 bucks.

But please bring back Wolfenstein 2009. (and prey...and heretic 2)

Challenging! Not just a FPS. Lots of secondary missions to be completed, tools/plans to be located etc. Have spent 30mins trying to finish the level after killing everyone.

a classic wolfenstein game, recommend RealRTCW mod on steam to play this game with

one of the most fun games ive played, way better than its sequels imho

This game is a classic but it has difficulty running no modern hardware.

For $2 it's a no brainer. Get this game and install the RealRTCW mod on the steam workshop. That mod includes lots of quality of life fixes and improves the game to run stable on modern hardware.

Wolfenstein Is The GodFather Of Computer Games. Bar None, It's Hard To Find A Game That Started On "Floppy-Disk", and It Ran Thru "DOS". and Still Considered One Of The Best FPS. This Is The ONE, Got Me Playing {i-386} Computer Games.

Fantastic game from my childhood, it gets much better after the first missions.
If you change settings and the game doesn't open anymore, do the following:
in your steam library, right click on the game, then click files, then local files, and in the "Main" folder delete "wolfconfig".
Now if you open the game, it will create a new "wolfconfig" file with the default settings, so you can try again and try different settings.
What would probably give you problems is the resolution, so try going up one step at a time until it doesn't allow you anymore

Overall: B- ***campaign review***

Enjoyable? Yes
Recommended? Yes, to classic FPS fans. Would also recommend playing it with the RealRTCW mod, downloadable on steam!
Replayability: Medium-Low (w/mod)

+early 2000’s supernatural, sci-fi-ish
WW2 era FPS
++level/environmental design and variety
++great combat and extensive weapons log
+secrets/in-game collectibles - incentivizes exploration

- lower tier story with anticlimactic moments, parts of it are decent— at least it wasn’t detrimental to the overall experience

Steam Deck compatibility: ✅
Wide screen compatible (w/mod)

A great shooter, one of the only WW2 shooters I genuinely had a blast through and through, it's not realistic like Call of Duty (2003) but it has it's own charm and fun that's unique to Wolfenstein.

Great 2000s remake of the original Wolfestein 3D of 1992, which i played when i was a kid. I never had a chance to play this remake, and to be honest, i wasnt dissapointed. Its not a revolutionary title like Half Life, Unreal or Halo, but its ww2 setting and the crude humour behind it make it an quite an enjoyable experience.

The ending was too easy for my taste. Some early levels were really hard in comparison. Level design is good for its time. Scripted events, animations and voice overs are top notch. And thanks for not censoring Nazi memorabilia. It helps a lot in the immersion of the story.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☑ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☑ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☑ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☑ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☑ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☑ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

I remember when this game came out my PC wouldn't run it, so I played it couple of years later. Had it on some scratched CD, name of the game written on it with a permanent marker. That's how we did it in those days. I replayed this game probably 3 times at least back then. It's a real classic that makes me full of nostalgia and that's why I bought it on Steam to replay it again.

this game is... well it is great for it's time but it is as hard all hell! play this if you love bethesda or quake

Overall, a fun retro FPS. The various levels are all unique and offer quite a bit of variety - from mountain top castles to german airfields, crypts, and secret bases. The last few levels were a bit of a downgrade overall, resulting in some extremely cheap deaths from auto-aiming AI and a final boss I just couldn't finish.

Worth checking out if you like an older era of 3D FPSs - just keep in mind there's a little jank and you should save often.

Sexy nazi babes is something i'm glad society has moved on.

but hey perfect fun game to this day if you ignore that awful forest.

This really deserves some of the love the other iD software games are getting. A genuine classic and the greatest Wolfenstein game.

Might be the last game that truly understood fun. Its like Indiana Jones on crack.

Works perfectly on modern hardware. No crashes or anything. Enjoy your nostalgia trip!

I recognize at the time of its release, every media was talking about this classic. just going to say; I am lucky to have finished it after 20 years.

man goes around blasting nazis

Such an iconic game

This game gets the fallout new vegas treatment, IT WON'T LAUNCH.

The best Wolfenstein game (please this game is old and geriatric make a remaster someone) (not a fanmade one)

Game quits to restart regularly. Also, no description of what to do nest. I am stuck finding a 4th out of 4 before I can exit the level I'm inl

One of my fav games. For me, it ranks up there with Half Life, Deus Ex, and No One Lives Forever. It has the old school feel, but in a good way.

Honestly, I really wanted to like this game, and I did for the first 8 or so levels. The guns feel good to shoot, the level design starts off really good, but once i reached the Forest and was forced into a stealth mission that you fail if even just one enemy catches a glimpse of you, in a game where most guns are extremely innaccurate. I realize Wolfenstein's earlier entries were primarily stealth games, but it is just not implemented well at all, and knowing there is another stealth mission toward the end of the game I'm just going to call it quits here. Honestly, take out the stealth missions and you have a very solid old school shooter

Edit: There is a workaround however, use the cheat to clip through the map and you can skip the level

part of my childhood was sucking at this game
the rest was starting the whole game over everytime i died because i didn't know how to save it

Has hot women but where are the hot men?!?!?!?

Number 1 in the world!

It's a simple, no - nonsense, fast - paced, old - school shooter, but it's also so bare to the point of being dull. Not to mention, they don't always get the difficulty balance right; sparse ammo and health drops at times, leading to tough sections which require upwards of 10 quickloads.

Also, what is it with god - awful sound mixing on older PC games? I needed to literally triple the volume during cutscenes just to hear the dialogue, and even that's almost drowned out by bizarrely loud music. Speaking of cutscenes, they and the mission briefs / documents slow down the experience with a hollow story.

lovely game

This and age of empires 2 were responsible for my PC game awakening, and I will forever love and cherish this game till the day I die.

Really epic game

Best game ever to come on planet earth
10/10

American unipolar moment, now just copy China.

This was such a fun shooter!

Return to Castle Wolfenstein may not be the best first person shooter of the early 2000s, but it’s certainly up there. This game is like every WWII action movie trope rolled into a single game, and for that it fucking rules. The plot is all over the place, mostly in a good way, and the atmosphere and music is fantastic. If it weren’t for a few annoying enemies and levels, this game would be pretty much perfect.

There’s something about this era of shooters and their atmospheres that is special. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a prime example of this, and fits alongside Max Payne and Halo: Combat Evolved. I don’t know what it is, but the sharp angled sparse environments, real photos slapped onto low-poly models, and light interactivity with the world just hit different compared to the densely packed environments games are capable of today. I think it’s that last part that’s key. Moments in this game that stand out to me are ones that are entirely the cause of my actions. Early on in the game, I was sneaking up on some guards in a castle hallway having a conversation so that I could get the drop on them when they were done. But as I was sneaking up, I bumped into a decorative set of armor and it fell over; at which point the guards immediately spotted me and raised the alarm, causing an intense firefight and chase throughout the castle until I made my escape. It felt like a scene out of Indiana Jones.

Speaking of Indiana Jones, the first two missions feel like they could’ve been the plot to one of those movies. Escaping an old castle filled with Nazis, then finding out that they released zombies and other supernatural creatures in an attempt to find an ancient artifact that ends up killing the “main” villain is just an incredible ride. Oh and don’t forget the team of hot Nazi special-ops witches that literally look like Elsa Schneider from The Last Crusade, but in spandex. I have never seen a game reach such insane peaks in just the opening hours. Unfortunately, there was just no way that it could’ve kept this pace going for the entire game.

By far the worst part of this game, and probably a stopping point for many who didn’t finish this game, is the third mission, specifically the forest level. It’s bad enough that the entire mission feels like a detour from what was just set up previously, but this level is also a horrible forced stealth section. It’s not the only one in the game, but this one takes place in such an open environment that it’s incredibly easy to be spotted, and the guards in the watch tower have an alarm right next to them so they can immediately trigger it after finding you; making it one of the most frustrating sections of the game. Still, the rest of the mission where you blow up a prototype rocket and steal an experimental jet is great and makes up for the bad intro.

This trend of “quality mission on its own, but doesn’t really fit into the grand narrative” describes most of the game. Each one of them feels like a plot from a different WWII action movie, but with the barest of plot bones connecting them in the form of boring exposition cutscenes. Part of the problem is that the stakes are set so high after the crypt that it’s so jarring to just drop it. Maybe if the missions were rearranged, it would flow more naturally.

The weapon and enemy variety are both pretty great. Each weapon, besides the pistol, feels like it serves a purpose in combat and there is plenty of overlap between them all so it doesn’t feel like a combat puzzle game. While the majority of weapons are your standard WWII era weapons, the fictional experimental ones look and feel awesome. Enemies range from all sorts of military personnel to paranormal and sci-fi monsters. However, the weapon accuracy and enemy damage feels all over the place. Firing in bursts generally works, but I should never not drop a standard enemy after mag dumping them at point blank range. Yet that happens quite a bit near the end of the game, and I can’t figure out if it’s because the weapon accuracy is bad or if enemies in those levels suddenly got a huge health buff. Grenades also look and feel incredibly weak. BJ Blazkowicz has a laughably weak arm in this game and can barely chuck a grenade more than 3 feet.

Since this game is old and runs on an old engine, there are definitely some compatibility problems. None of them are particularly hard to deal with, and there is a fan patch that fixed the crashing that happened every time I died and also added widescreen support. I used ioRTCW as it is much closer to the original experience, but RealRTCW is a borderline remaster that fixes a lot of bugs and adds new features as well. Both are great options, the important thing is that you play this game because it’s some of the most fun you can have killing Nazis.

I view this one as a nice mix between Medal of Honor/Old CoD X Half-Life when it comes to gameplay. I know Wolfenstein as a franchise is the father of all that, but this entry is without a doubt comparable its contemporaries. I played the game without any additional content, but via ioRTCW, the sourceport realRTCW is based on. I think it's worth a playthrough or more because it is fun. I can only speak for the vanilla experience and it's certainly a good game that can stand on its own, but it feels old especially when it comes to the enemy AI. If you can't bear dated AI, maybe try the mod.

Long story short, you get to slaughter hordes of nazis. Can't ask for more, shooting down fascists with style never gets old.

If this game got remastered, it would have potential to be the greatest video game of all time and im not even overexaggerating

is good

Start of the Iconic Triology.
This is my opinion one of the best originals that they have made to the sequence that has followed and has gained so much traction, I remember playing this as i was growing up and was efatuated with everything that it had to offer from the german mad scientists that seeked out the great mysterious relics that were to give eternal life, to the final boss. That they made super hard at the time. Probably not anymore now. This game will always live rent free in my head of all of the good times I had and have played this game.

It's still fun.

Most guides will recommend installing RealRtCW through Steam, but my suggestion is to download ioRTCW, a source port, and Venom, a texture/graphical update that can be found on ModDB. Follow the instructions to NOT use Venom's updated AI--it makes the game a too difficult, imo, and is targeted towards people who have played the game before. RealRtCW is very good, many people might find it more enjoyable than the original RtCW, but it makes a LOT of changes to the game, so I don't recommend it.

RtCW is a Quake III engine game, which means the movement might be a little more glidey than folks used to more modern shooters might expect, but ultimately the game's still a blast. The gist isn't too complicated: the natsies are up to no good, and your job is to blast them and their diabolical creations, supernatural and sci-fi.

Some tips: The best way to stop enemies is to keep them at a distance. Your accuracy will always outclass the AI's, so you can dispatch natsies without taking too much damage yourself. Crouching improves accuracy immensely.

Overall, this game is primarily fun for people who remember it as a release title looking to relive the early '00s, but it still retains enough fun that it might be interesting for new players if you can catch it at a deep discount. I would recommend Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, which is free, and the 32bit ETLegacy (the most modern engine) for anyone curious for a multiplayer experience. There is still an active playerbase, and the team-based gameplay is still thrilling and takes better advantage of the Quake III engine's strengths. Just make sure you use the 32-bit ETLegacy, NOT the 64-bit, as all active servers play using mods that are not compatible with the 64 bit engine.

Legend.

Very Good!

Wolfenstein: Return to Castle

Its a very good game from the 2000s !

+ Nice history
+ Good maps to do the missions

9/10

You play on the wrong team