I’ve got to say that I’ve never been a big fan of Nazis. Watching Harrison Ford blow scores of them away in the Indiana Jones movies in numbers as high as the popcorn I would consume was always highly enjoyable. When I decided to buy my first gaming P.C instead of a new car ($3000 for a 486sx33 with a cdrom drive and SoundBlaster card) Wolfenstein 3d was pretty much the selling point that convinced me that THIS would be more enjoyable than air-conditioning and comfortable seats.

I stuck with my trusty Ford Escort and blew a fat wad of cash on the P.C and never looked back. Mowing down Nazis in Wolfenstein 3d was the birth of P.C gaming as we know it today and what better way to further expand the library of awesome Xbox titles than with its latest incarnation?

In Return to Castle Wolfenstein : Tides of War (RTCW) you play as B.J. Blazkowicz, an American soldier sent into Germany during WWII to basically get to Heinrich Himmler and blow his ass back to World War I. The game begins in a new Xbox exclusive level, with you and your partner in Egypt finding out what the Nazis are doing at an Archeological dig site. Pretty soon you find yourself up to your armpits in the undead and other foul beasties as well as fending off scores of Nazi storm troopers. Your discovery takes you into Germany where after a plane crash you awake in Castle Wolfenstein to escape only to find your partner the subject of Nazi torture and from then on in its killing time! This level is basically where the original P.C version began and the new Egypt levels are a nice addition.

Now having never met a Zombie, I can’t say that I share the same ill feelings towards them that I harbor towards the Nazis, so the really enjoyable bits of RTCW for me weren’t so much all the underground caverns and zombie blasting but more the levels that involved popping the Germans left right and centre. The Nazis display some competent A.I (mostly) and the zombies, being well, brain dead zombies always just seem to popup and shamble towards you the same way over and over and over again. Having said that, the Nazi soldiers will duck for cover and exhibit a few more examples of self preservation but the stock standard grunt soldiers wont pose too much of a problem for hardened shooter fans. The real challenge comes later on in the game facing the leather clad bondage disciples, I mean the female elite troops as well as the X-Creatures which are the results of Nazi experimentation from their quest to create the ‘perfect soldier’.

Naturally as with any good shooter you have access to a large arsenal of weapons. Your trusty knife is always at hand and along the way you get access to Thompson M1A1 submachine guns, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, grenades, flamethrower (that has an awesome flame effect), dynamite and your trusty colt pistol is always at the ready. Not being the ultra fussy elite SAS type B.J is quite happy to pick up any weapons that the Nazis drop so you also get to use the German MP40 submachine gun, a nice powerful silenced Sten Gun, a Mauser rifle, a German Paratrooper automatic rifle, the Panzerfaust RPG, the nasty Venom gun and the Tesla gun that fires guided electrical fields. There’s definitely a large choice of weapons and they all look great and where needed are animated extremely well.

The one thing that is missing from all the punishment that you are dishing out is that being based on the Quake 3 engine, RTCW has no modern physics engine and no ‘rag doll’ physics attached to the objects in the game. In a heavy firefight with a large number of Nazis in the heat of battle sometimes it can be pretty hard to quickly see who you’ve shot as the death animations are just a tad too long. Spray and pray seems to work pretty well though so if they’re still moving just shoot them again to be sure. To be honest that is probably the only criticism that I will point at the graphics. RTCW is definitely not some rushed port!

The textures are all sharp and nicely detailed, the Nazis, the undead and the X-Creatures are all highly detailed, and the levels all look great with some nice architecture. Some of the underground ones are very dark but that’s to be expected in catacombs I suppose. It would have been nice to see the lighting used a bit more effectively (the Quake 3 engine limits that) but the levels are all very moody and look great. All the characters are animated very smoothly but do spawn at the exact same points so after a few attempts at some of the harder levels you remember where they will be coming from which kind of lessened the surprises.

The audio does a great job with 5.1 fully supported and the voice acting is pretty good overall as well. From time to time you will come across soldiers having a conversation and you will get a few chuckles from what you hear. The music sets the mood nicely as well but some of the weapons could have done with some meatier sound effects to give them a bit more ‘weight’.

Now you might be thinking that RTCW sounds like a pretty bog standard first person shooter? Well if you played through the P.C version years ago then there really isn’t a lot of new stuff on offer here. What may sway you though is the excellent multiplayer side of the game that supports an awesome Co-op mode as well as system link death match and full Xbox Live support!

Now while Xbox Live is only just about to start its Beta test here it won’t be long before RTCW is an XBL favorite. RTCW supports 4 versus 4 players over a number of different gameplay modes such as :

Objective : Both teams have objectives to meet, the first team to fulfill them all wins.

Stopwatch : The same as Objective but after each round the teams switch sides and have to beat the team’s time from the previous round.

Checkpoint : The two teams battle for control of checkpoint flags. The first team to control every flag at the same time or the team that has the most flags when the time runs out wins!

Elimination : Classic team deathmatch.

You also have plenty of options such as time limit, player voting, team kill as well as plenty of others to customise your online games as well and with full communications going on over the XBL headsets RTCW is going to be heaps of fun online. Reports from overseas indicate that as with most other XBL games there is next to no lag (if you play with local players) and the voice communications rival mobile phone quality.