This game has gotten a decent amount of flak from the press and the fans – scores roughly average at 75 and the multiplayer has been widely panned – but there’s still a decent amount of enjoyment to be wrung out of the latest installment of The Only FPS Franchise That Can Stake An Accurate Claim To Possibly Being Older Than Prostitution.

The plot is the usual pulp-WW2 fun – unfortunately named American superspy BJ Blazkowicz is dropped into a German city to aid the local resistance to the Nazi occupation, and maybe stop a sinister occult plan by the Nazis to tap into an alternate dimension to acquire ultimate power if he has some spare time to kill. Sadly, Robo-Hitler once again fails to make an appearance, much to the dissapointment of everyone who’s been gaming since at least 1992.

Gameplay is fairly typical of the genre this series made popular – run from Point A to B while reducing increasingly ridiculous Nazi forces to kibble on the way – except between missions Points A and B are in a non-linear city. This is kinda cool at first, but quickly gets annoying when you just want to advance the paper-thin plot or upgrade your weapons without having to stop every couple of blocks to take out a small legion of angry germans and their friendly robot-dude-with-glowing-weak-points.

One feature that lowers the monotony is the Thule Medallion, an item you get very early on that enables you to briefly step into the Void (an alternate universe that looks exactly like ours, except everything is green and weak points glow) and activate special powers that you earn over the course of the game, like Bullet Time or temporary invulnerability. This helps both in overcoming difficult obstacles and finding new and interesting ways to kibble-ise brownshirts. And damned if kibble-ising brownshirts isn’t fun! There’s enough variety put into the gore effects and death animations that fights are exactly as fun as wanton Nazi slaughter should be.

As for multiplayer, I would tell you about it, but it appears that literally nobody was playing it when I checked. Which is always a good sign.

Overall, the game is fun but repetitive as hell, an average shooter slightly raised by slight signs of true quality that are ultimately quashed by the design-by-committee-ness of it all. I give it three out of five novelty difficulty levels.