Video Game / Wolfenstein (2009)

Yeah, it's like this.

"Who would dare oppose us?"

— Deathshead

Wolfenstein is a First-Person Shooter using a modified version of the Doom³ engine developed by Raven Software. It's the sequel to 2001's Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

The game's plot features, once again, American super-spy B.J. Blazkowicz, in his attempts to foil a plan by the Nazis to harness the power of the Black Sun, an ancient alternate dimension which the SS are using to create all manner of Super Soldiers and monsters. Besides an arsenal of World War II-era firearms and several experimental Nazi energy weapons, B.J. is also assisted by a magic amulet that allows him to tap into "The Veil" between dimensions and harness special powers such as Bullet Time and an energy shield.

Wolfenstein takes place in and around the fictional German town of Isenstadt, and uses a partial Wide-Open Sandbox system, with the player traveling through the town, buying weapons from the Black Market, interacting with residents and members of the German resistance groups Kreisau Circle and Golden Dawn, and traveling to specific areas of the town (i.e. Warehouse, Cannery, Dig Site) to take part in story-based linear missions.

Followed by Wolfenstein: The New Order.

Check the character sheet.

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Recurring tropes from the series include:

• America Won World War II: Even though the German resistance plays a big role, they still do, and prevent an entire city from being destroyed in the process.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Plays a role in a number of situations:
  • The quickest way to defeat a Heavy Trooper is by shooting the glowing blue armor vents on each shoulder, followed by the emergency vent which then extends from his back.
  • The Drache Trooper is vulnerable to being shot in his flamethrower tanks.
  • The Geist Queen is vulnerable to attacks on her egg sacs.
  • Several boss battles require BJ to target equipment components in order to destroy a machine and/or cause said machine to backfire on its creators.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: General Zetta. Deathshead after him, though he still doesn't directly fights the player.
• Boss Tease: This game has Hans Grosse, who's seen in a Bar Brawl which takes place at a cutscene in the middle of the game, then at Deathshead's castle where he appears as Strasse's bodyguard and seemingly executes Caroline Becker, and then is fought at the very last level when he gains a Powered Armor.
• Diesel Punk: Mixed with a heavy dose of Ghostapo.
• Elite Mooks: The black latex wearing female Elite Guards are back, this time with magic powers and the ability to resurrect killed enemies as Despoiled.
• Fat Bastard: General Zetta.
• Gatling Good: To date, the only Wolfenstein game without the traditional example in the SP arsenal. However, it can be argued that the Particle Cannon is in fact this weapon dressed up like a hand-held Wave-Motion Gun. The rotating capacitors can conjure up memories of rotating barrels. The functionality as a heavy machine gun is similar too.
• Ghostapo: The Paranormal Division is back, and takes this trope even further with extra-dimensional travel, Nazi mages, energy guns and yes, Nazis with jetpacks.
• 100% Completion: Collecting all intel, gold, and tomes of power. Getting all intel grants you free weapon upgrades, all tomes of power grants you free Medallion upgrades, and gold... does nothing, but you'll want to get all of it to buy things.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The classic set - "Can I play, Daddy?", "Don't hurt me!", "Bring 'em on!" and "I am Death incarnate!" - with another instance where the difficulties are also described with one word as, respectively, "Easy", "Normal", "Hard", and "Über".
• Large and in Charge: General Zetta in his Veil form, and the Geist Queen. Subversion with Hans Grosse: he's tall, yet he's The Dragon to the game's Big Bad.
• More Dakka: This time, the emphasis is more on the supernatural weaponry, but the trope still makes his presence, what with the large anti-air cannons the player can use, and the upgraded MP40 and MP43.
• Nazi Gold: Required for buying upgrades at the Black Market. They come in the form of bags of presumably gold coins worth $100, bars of gold worth $250, and ornate relics worth $500.
• No Swastikas: Removed for some releases.
• One-Man Army: Though this time he works with La Résistance, most of the time you face every mission on your own, with very little help.
• Those Wacky Nazis: With energies and beings from Another Dimension being present, this was expected:
  • The Elite soldiers can create Despoiled and use Veil-powered weapons.
  • There are various encounters with Veil-powered beings and the Veil itself allows you to see the Veil-exclusive Geists.

Tropes exclusive to Wolfenstein include:

• Abandoned Hospital: The Hospital mission is set in a hospital that, while not quite abandoned, fits the look quite well. It's been commandeered by the Nazis, and by the time you get there, the place has been ransacked, and most of the patients and staff have been either abducted to serve as test subjects for their sick medical experiments or eviscerated by the invisible, Ax-Crazy assassins that prowl the hallways.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: There's no way to upgrade hand grenades in real-life since they're a one-use weapon. Also modifying a gun's chambering mechanism to chamber larger ammunition wouldn't really benefit it even if it was possible as long as you still collect the same ammo.
• Action Bomb: The Explosive Sniffer.
• Airborne Aircraft Carrier: The Zeppelin. It carries not only airplanes but other Zeppelins, in addition to hordes of Nazis and their dimension-warping superweapon. Needless to say, the parasite fighter planes do not last long, dangling miles in the sky with a saboteur on board...
• Another Dimension: The Black Sun dimension. The Veil acts as a frontier between the real world and the Black Sun dimension.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Empower allows the player to shoot through Scribe shields and other Veil-powered force fields. Upgrades allow the player to shoot enemies through increasingly thick walls and barricades.
• Artificial Stupidity: The enemy players will not react to you at all unless you are within a certain distance of them (at which point they will know where you are with unfailing accuracy) meaning that, once you've got the sniper scope, you can snipe groups from a distance and watch as the Germans show absolutely no reaction to their comrades' heads exploding.
• Attack Its Weak Point: The Heavy Troopers can withstand an absurd amount of damage (it takes more than 200 bullets from a fully upgraded assault rifle to kill just one), but can brought down rather quickly by shooting the cooling cylinders on their armor, causing them to simply overheat and explode.
• Attack Reflector: The aptly named Reflective Crystal upgrade for BJ's Shield power causes incoming fire to be redirected back at the shooter.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Zeppelin's design is woefully wasteful, seemingly for aesthetics. Half the aircraft's weight must be the massive metal doors everywhere. The other half is composed by the tons of swastikas - you could sew together another Zeppelin from all the Nazi flags it carries. Still, it's not as if you could mount the Thule portal on anything smaller...
• Ax-Crazy: The Veil Assassins. The horrific experiments that empowered them with the ability to use the veil at will has also completely destroyed their mind outside of the desire to sadistically kill anyone they come across.
• Bag of Spilling: Justified at the end, when BJ tears apart his Thule Medallion in order to destroy Hans' own by driving the crystals into it, thereby guaranteeing that this item will not show up in any sequel.
• BFG: About half of the player's inventory is made of huge, silly and highly satisfying weapons:
  • The Leichenfaust 44. A Nazi superweapon powered by extradimensional energies. It fires large globules of said energy that cancel out gravity within their area of effect and reduce enemies to piles of scorched bones.
  • The Particle Cannon, a Disintegrator Ray that will kill any Mook in a single hit. It's powerful enough to cause BJ himself problems when wielded by the Heavy Troopers.
  • The Panzerschreck rocket launcher, which can be modded to be multi-shot and fire guided missiles.
  • The Tesla Gun, a Lightning Gun that will automatically hit targets in front of the player within a certain distance. Properly upgraded, it will even chain lightning from mook to mook.
• Blatant Item Placement: The city is veritably littered with large bags of money, gold bars and similar. And you can pretty much help yourself - nobody seems to mind your nicking their stuff right before their eyes. Mostly because you've got a huge gun.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Generally plain old bullets are much more effective than the flamethrower or the fancy superscience weapons you get. The latter suffer from having a windup time before being fired, short range, and can't be aimed for precise shots. And when bullets really aren't enough, bullets with the Empower on will work.
  • Defied with the Particle Cannon as Heavy Troopers use the same weapon, enabling you to farm ammo from the ones who respawn in the hub. One of the upgrades even removes the windup time, and all of its upgrades serve to make it a viable heavy machine gun option.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • Scribes from the SS Paranormal Division in the early game, before you acquire better Veil powers.
  • Veil Assassins can be particularly difficult if the player encounters them unprepared, without the right weapon equipped.
• Bulletproof Human Shield: The opening cutscene has BJ use a nearby mook as one of these.
• Bullet Time: One of the special powers granted to the player by the amulet, Mire, allows the player to avoid shootings by slowing time up.
• Bullfight Boss: Your boss fight against the Altered in the Hospital mission. It's immune to all conventional weaponry, forcing B.J. to get him to run into a series of electrical pillars around the arena. Once they are destroyed, the Black Sun portal he came in through collapses and pulls him back inside, killing him.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Within the Veil, specific colors are used to draw the player's attention or convey important information:
  • Enemies glow yellow-green to make them stand out against the blue-green background, while enemies behind cover^note should the player have the appropriate upgrade glow yellow-orange.
  • Destructible objects like explosive barrels, weak spots on equipment or in the environment, and stone covers concealing Tomes of Power glow bright red.
  • The player model will have a certain hue when specific Veil powers are active - yellow for Mire and red for Empower.
• Concept Art Gallery: Cleverly used in many instances as in-game Intel.
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: Present all over the game. Your allies will nag you whenever they have the chance.
  • Any time you're supposed to rescue some captives they'll keep screaming their throats off that you should set them free. Even amidst the heat of combat.
  • In the Castle mission, you fight alongside La Résistance in order to save their leader. You'll be hearing this phrase (and variations of it) a lot:
    "We have to save Caroline!"
• Continuity Nod:
  • The Nazi officers sometimes cry out "Mein leben!" when they're killed, just like the SS Nazis did in Wolfenstein 3-D and Spear of Destiny.
  • Also, the loading screens typically show hints on gameplay and mechanics, but when traveling to the final level it will instead display the famous "GET PSYCHED!" line.
  • Later in the game the Kriege brothers manage to get their hands on a complete dossier of BJ's activities, whereupon one of Stefan's lines when talking to him has him idly wonder how much money the Spear of Destiny would go for now.
  • Towards Return to Castle Wolfenstein:
    • The Heavy Troopers are implied to be an offshot of the Ubersoldaten. Their creator, Deathshead, noted at the time how the armor wasn't up to his specifications; the Heavy Troopers are practically bulletproof now. If you can sneak by them undetected, you will also notice how it sounds as if they're breathing through a pump, just like the Ubersoldaten.
    • The 1946-model Ubersoldaten featured in Wolfenstein: The New Order can only be defeated by destroying that very same breathing pump, forcing the beast to remove its armored faceplate.
    • Wolfgang Statz, the SS General you assassinate in one of the side quests appears to be the same one seen speaking with Himmler in the ending of Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
    • In the SS Headquarters, you can find out that the Nazis have you pegged as the one who destroyed Operation: Resurrection and the Ubersoldat program.
• Cool Airship: The Zeppelin. It's gigantic, multitasking as a flying airport, cargo carrier, doomsday superweapon, troop carrier, laboratory, and all-around heavily armed flying fortress.
• Dark World: Moving through the Veil can cause some objects to look very strange. Examples include all light sources emitting a blue flaming aura, and brand new fighter planes looking as if they had already been shot down before they've even engaged in combat.
  • The city of Isenstadt itself looks very different as seen from the Zeppelin, through the Veil. It is full of what appear to be massive Ley Lines in a pattern not unlike a crater.
• Death from Above:
  • Some areas of Isenstadt itself feature heavy (and random) bombardment.
  • Jetpack Troopers are always airborne and will eagerly rain streams of rocket fire down on the player.
• Deflector Shields: One of the Veil powers BJ gains through the Thule medallion is the ability to project a force field around himself. Scribes have a similar ability to project force fields around either themselves or multiple fellow enemies;^note just not both at the same time additionally, the Nazis also make use of Veil-powered devices which project force fields for purposes such as barricading doorways or providing instant cover for troops in open areas. In all iterations, the force fields are impenetrable to conventional small arms fire.
• Degraded Boss:
  • Despoiled. Later levels throw more Despoiled at you, who are damaging enough to wreck your day, especially with a platoon of Nazis also trying to kill you on top of that.
  • The hulking, bulletproof Altered serve as the boss of the Hospital mission. You also encounter two of them in the Castle mission, but by then you have the Leichenfaust 44, which kills anything in one shot.
  • Most of the elite mooks are first introduced as a sort of Mini-Boss partway through a given level. Later inverted with an Elite Guard, who forms the core of a Mini-Boss battle at the airfield, long after you've dispatched a number of her compatriots with ease in Isenstadt.
    • That in itself makes the Elite Guard degraded mooks from RtCW. Whereas in the previous game they were more lethal and agile than regular infantry and made each fight a challenge, in Wolfenstein the arsenal you have at your disposal means they rarely stand much chance.
• Deliberately Monochrome: Used in two ways with regards to the Veil:
  • Whenever BJ runs out of Veil energy or is near a Veil Inhibitor, his vision fades to black-and-white.
  • The Veil dimension itself is mostly a uniform blue-green hue, both as a cue to the player that they are in the Veil and to allow important objects - colored differently from the background - to stand out.
• Disc-One Final Boss: During the first half of the game, players are led to think that Victor Zetta is the Final Boss of the game. That is, until they destroy him in the Cannery mission and the real Final Boss appears a mission later. It's not Deathshead, either - it's Hans Grosse.
• Disintegrator Ray: The Particle Cannon, which vibrates matter at such incredibly high frequencies that it instantly reduces enemies to green ash.
• Dual-World Gameplay: Real world and the Veil, once you get the Thule Medallion. It's a strange area between dimensions that can alter the appearance of the environment (i.e. brand new vehicles appear as years-old derelicts) and is what powers the Amulet's abilities.
• Dungeon Shop: Black Market locations are prolific throughout Isenstadt, so much so that it's not uncommon for a merchant to be just around the corner from enemy patrols. Special mention goes to the Intrepid Merchant who managed to sneak his way into the zeppelin hangar - the most restricted and heavily defended area of the Airfield level - and is quite happy to take a moment from looting German supplies to sell some to BJ.
• Dungeon Town: All missions take place in and around Isenstadt, with most taking place in specific buildings or complexes within the city. Even between missions, the streets are patrolled by increasingly powerful enemies.
• Eldritch Location: The Black Sun Dimension.
• Enemy Summoner: The Elite Guards can raise any Nazi corpse as a superpowered, fireball-throwing Despoiled.
• Escort Mission: Subverted. Sometimes you come across prisoners whom you need to free. However, freeing the prisoners involves simply untying them; they then tell you that they'll find their own way to safety from there.
• Evil Gloating: At the final point in the Hospital mission, Blazkowicz comes across a Nazi officer standing in front of a Veil portal. His gloating is interrupted when he is rather violently Killed Mid-Sentence by a giant, mutated abomination that destroys him.
• Evil Sounds Deep: The Nazi Scribes have very deep, inhumanly-resonating voices.
• Exploding Barrels: But of course! Lampshaded by an intel report you can find on the zeppelin, in which a Nazi scientist asks a commander to not let his men smoke around the red barrels, which have a tendency to explode.
• Fake Ultimate Mook: The Heavy Troopers are big and bulletproof, but their attacks are easy to dodge and shooting their easy-to-hit weak points makes them blow up.
• Force-Field Door: Appear with increasing frequency once the Veil has been introduced. Figuring out how to deactivate them - often from the opposite side of the door as the on/off switch - is a common gameplay element.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The front cover of the game depicts a flaming Nazi skull. Later on, you meet the Despoiled.
  • You find documents or hear Enemy Chatter describing several of the more powerful enemies before you meet them.
  • At one point you get to use a prototype Veil-powered tank weapon at a weapons factory. The Leichenfaust 44 is a portable version of the weapon.
  • Throughout the game, you are told by various Golden Dawn scholars that harnessing too much power from the Black Sun was disastrous for the Thule civilization. Then, during the Zeppelin mission, you find a document warning Deathshead that doing so will cause a power spike that might destroy the whole zeppelin. Of course, in his attempt to kill you, The Dragon does just that, with predictable results.
• Fragile Speedster:
  • The Veil Assassin is actually pretty easy to kill... if you can hit him, or see him, or avoid his two-hit kill.
  • The Elite Guards run at full speed all the time and have a variety of acrobatic dodges they can perform, but actually can't take much more bullets than regular Mooks and go down pretty quickly once you target them.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: The opening scene has your character stopping an onslaught of bullets with an energy shield that then erupts outwards, killing all the shooters. Later in the game, not only does the Shield itself become usable as a Veil power, but the fact that it disintegrates everything is also a purchasable function.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Some minor examples with the blueprints the player comes across, some of which depict either weapon upgrades that aren't actually available in the game or weapons that do appear in the game but which the player cannot acquire. This is in part due to the blueprints actually being concept art of the weapons and their fully-upgraded forms.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The Drache Troopers, the Veil Assassins and Heavy Troopers.
• Glass Cannon: Most of the special enemies can't take much more damage than the regular Mooks, but can deal heavy damage very quickly. This is especially true for the Elite Guards.
• Gun Accessories: The game had extras for every weapon, from the mundane like carrying more ammo, through the utilitarian like loading the Kar 98 with stripper clips instead of single shots (something it should do anyway), to the extremely silly such as building a magazine-fed Panzerschreck that fired homing missiles and didn't require the bulky blast shield. Some weren't visible, like shortening the laser gun's charge-up time from one full second to half a second.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way: Several of the upgrades for the game's real world weapons are either nonsensical or at least incompatible with one another:
  • The MP 40 can mount both a silencer and a recoil compensator, however the former works by trapping gasses escaping from the muzzle, the latter by venting them in a specific direction.
  • The Kar98k was generally reloaded via stripper clips... except when a telescopic sight was mounted, as the scope^note usually sat directly over the bolt and the stripper clip guide, blocking access to it. In game, both can be used at the same time, with the reload animation showing the clip inserted at an angle that wouldn't work in real life.
  • All three of the game's basic firearms have a "Big Bore" upgrade. Not only does the description seem to conflate increasing the barrel diameter^note i.e. actual bore size, allowing for a larger caliber bullet with increasing chamber size,^note allowing for a longer cartridge, but doing either would make the gun incompatible with standard ammunition... which BJ continues to have no trouble using even after buying said upgrades.
• High-Pressure Blood: Blowing off a Nazi's head with the upgraded Kar98 results in an enormous fountain of blood spewing out of the guy's neck as he slowly slumps to the ground.
• Historical Badass Upgrade: The Kreisau Circle was a small organization of twenty-five aristocrats and intellectuals who opposed national socialism but limited their actions to sharing information with Allied intelligence agencies. They never planned or carried out any military or paramilitary operations.
• Hold the Line: After the Castle mission, you return to Isenstadt only to find that the Nazis have been building radio towers. While Erik Engle places the explosives on one of these radios, you get to keep the Nazis from reaching both of you until he completes the tower.
• Hub Level: Isenstadt, a Hub City broken up into several districts in which the player can interact with various resistance groups, buy weapon upgrades, and tangle with random Nazi patrols between missions, which are for the most part set in their own unique levels. Also, all locations in the game are either in or around it, and can be accessed via its streets or sewers.
• Hub Under Attack: Inverted. Isenstadt, the city which comprises the game's Hub Level, is attacked during the entirety of the game, however, halfway through the game, B.J. kills General Zetta, an event which sparks a city-wide revolt that lasts through the rest of the game.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: By the end of the game, you'll be carrying three real-life guns, a rocket launcher, a flamethrower, a Tesla Gun, a particle cannon, and a Disintegrator Ray.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The Black Sun not only fuels the Nazi war machine, but it's home to a variety of very nasty native species that the Nazis experiments are allowing to come into our world. Also, traveling to the Black Sun and back tends to turn humans into insane mutated monsters unless the jump-gate is perfectly attuned (which it usually isn't).
• Humanoid Abomination: General Zetta. The other soldiers under his command even comment there's something unnatural about him - the way he moves, the way he eats. And then there's his boss fight.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Used to prevent the player from accessing areas until the plot requires it, such as unreachable ladders that may later automatically get lowered, plot locked doors, unclimbable ledges, impassable barricades, and flaming wreckages, which may be cleared by a higher power such as a tank.
• Interface Screw: A minor example - the screen will fade to black-and-white if a Veil Inhibitor is nearby.
• Interface Spoiler: The weapon menu. To a lesser extent, the list of unlocked upgrades at the end of a mission as well.
• Just Train Wrong: The proper gameplay begins on the Isenstadt train station. The trains are too narrow for an actual trains, have Janney-type couplings despite German and most European trains using a conventional turnbuckle coupling between a pair of fenders. These are present only on the front of the steam engine which not only lacks the tender but also any pistons. Instead, where pistons should be, there seems to be something remotely resembling an electric motor similar to the ones on the first electric locomotives which used jackshaft transmissions instead of tooth gears. The locomotive's cab also has entrance only on its left side and cannot be entered anyway despite having an open cab. The station itself is ridiculously small, containing a total of two tracks along desperately short platforms interrupted by a wall halfway through. No signal posts are present anywhere. On top of that despite it being a passenger station, all trains in there are freight.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: When Blazkowicz enters the area where the Veil Portal is under the Hospital, the Nazi officer standing in front of it is viciously torn apart by a giant hulking mutated beast that used to be a poor scientist who the officer tossed into the portal while proclaiming how powerful the Nazi army is destined to become.
• King Mook: An Elite Guard with significantly more health than normal is fought as a mini-boss in the first half of the Airfield mission. Even so, she only has slightly more health than a Despoiled and isn't too tough on her own. The real challenge in the fight are the several Despoiled who get spawned in throughout the fight.
• Laser-Guided Karma: In the Hospital level, a scientist explains to a Nazi officer that everyone who passes through the interdimensional portal comes back a monster, then notices Blazkowicz and cowers, demanding to be protected. The officer says, "No, it is you who will protect me!" and tosses the scientist into the portal. He starts a rant about how the superior Nazi war machine will destroy the allies, only to be ripped in half seconds later by now horribly mutated said scientist emerging from the portal.
• Layered World: The Veil. Viewing objects through it may be different than viewing it normally, such as brand new fighter planes and generators appearing derelict to the point of crumbling, and a regular old mountain appearing as an active volcano.
• Lightning Gun: The Tesla Gun. It produces an electrical discharge that arcs out at any targets that come within range. If nothing or no one is nearby, though, it just kinda throws sparks.
• Ludicrous Gibs: The fate of every soldier who got in the way of the Panzerschreck.
• Made of Plasticine: Enemy soldiers die in 2 or 3 shots (1 or 2 shots once you upgrade your weapons, and one with Empower on). Throw on lovely damage models, like mashed faces or torn-off limbs. While this is reasonable by real-life standards, by action-movie First-Person Shooter standards, it's rather weak. The game makes up for it by throwing squads at you, and with the semi-occasional Elite Mook.
• Mana Meter: The charge on the Thule Medallion.
• McNinja: This time, the female Elite Guards were turned into agile, ninja-like martial artists. There's even a piece of concept art that shows they were supposed to carry swastika-shaped shurikens, but unfortunately, they ultimately went unused.
• Misbegotten Multiplayer Mode: While the previous entry in its series was known for its excellent multiplayer, this game managed to completely ignore the majority (if not all) of the innovations RTCW brought. No wonder, just about every fan of RTCW's/Enemy Territory's multiplayer consider the 2009 game to be a complete joke in this regard. Heck, the team responsible for the multiplayer component getting fired on release speaks volumes.
• Mooks: It's raining Nazis!
  • Giant Mook: The Heavy Soldiers, equipped with Powered Armor and a particle beam cannon.
  • Super Powered Mooks: The Nazi Scribes have the same Veil abilities as the player (mostly super-speed and indestructible shields) as well as a unique cloaking ability. Most of the higher-end enemies also have some variety of magic powers.
• Muggles Do It Better: Most of the interdimensional beings can be killed by World War II-era machine guns.
• Mythology Gag: The Tomes of Power have identical appearance and name to a power-up item in Heretic, also developed by Raven Software.
• New Skill as Reward: New Veil powers are granted when the player finds the Thule medallion or crystals for it, though unlike more traditional forms of this trope, the items in question are typically only halfway through a given level, requiring the player to fight their way back out with the help of their newly gained ability.
• Oddly Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo: This game is a sequel to an entry in its series named Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: When not commanding troops, Scribes recite Latin phrases in their deep, inhuman voice. These are actually pretty stoic quotes from Cicero and Lucan.
• Over Heating: The quadruple cannons found, among other places, in the Airfield and the Castle. Mounted MG42s as well.
• Plot Lock: Used to keep the player out of mission specific areas and newer sections of Isenstadt until called for by the plot.
• Portal Cut: You instantly die if you leave the Veil while halfway through a Veil Door.
• Power Crystal: The plot revolves around the Nachtsonne Crystals mined outside Isenstadt. Unlike most examples of this trope, the crystals themselves are inert, but can be used as "lenses" for Black Sun energy, giving off various effects depending on the type of crystal used.
• Power Nullifier: The Veil Inhibitors, which block BJ's access to his Veil powers within a certain radius of them (and cause BJ's vision to become black-and-white as a side effect) but are easily destroyed by gunfire or melee attacks.
• Put Down Your Gun and Step Away: In the Castle mission, Deathshead and Hans kidnapped Caroline and when Blazkowicz saw them, he's asked to pull his gun aside.
• Recycled Title: Even though it doesn't have the "3D" in the title.
• Regenerating Health: The only game in the Wolfenstein series to play it completely straight, in fact. Lampshaded by Hans Grosse during the final boss fight.
  "That should have killed you, Blazkowicz!"
• Right-Handed Left-Handed Guns: The MP 40 model depicts it as a closed bolt rather than open bolt mechanism.^note The bolt is shown forward when not firing, rather than cocked back. Both it and the StG 44 are shown with charging handles on the left, however this is true to life in both cases.
• Shield Bash: A variation. The Reactive Crystal upgrade to the Shield power turns it into a one hit kill melee attack for most unarmored enemies - BJ simply has to walk up to them with the Shield active and they will die on contact with it. The downside, of course, is that this quickly drains his shield power.
• Shoot the Medic First:
  • Aim for the Scribes first, otherwise he'll shield enemy soldiers from your attacks as they generously pump you full of lead. In fact, saving him for last means he can now spend all his time shielding himself, which just makes killing him that much harder.
  • Shooting the Elite Guard first is also advised, as they can resurrect dead mooks as Despoiled.
• Shout-Out:
  • Some of the Nazi special units seem a whole lot like those found in F.E.A.R., particularly the Powered Armor-wearing Heavy Trooper with a gun that disintegrates people and the acrobatic, cloaked Veil Assassin.
  • The Tomes of Power hidden across Isenstadt look exactly like the items of the same name in Heretic, another game Raven Software was responsible for and which was in some way a follow-up to an earlier id Software title.
  • The Isenstadt tavern is called the Raven's Nest and is adorned with Raven Software's logo. There is also an ad for Raben Bier (Raven Beer) above the doors of the black marketeers' Downtown hideout.
  • After escaping an ambush in which they are boxed in by force fields and attacked by numerous enemies at close range, the player can find a crude diagram of the trap. Said drawing is reminiscent of a Wile E. Coyote sketch, while scrawled across the top is the phrase, "It's a trap!"
  • The Veil bares more than a passing resemblance to the Resonator dimension from From Beyond.
  • The Leichenfaust 44 works like the Bio Force Gun from the Doom film, as a huge energy cannon that fires swift projectiles that disintegrate multiple foes. Like in the film, you obtain the experimental weapon from a specially designed display room. It doesn't melt through walls for gameplay and/or engine limitations reasons, however.
• Shown Their Work: Oddly for a game featuring heavy Ghostapo and Stupid Jetpack Hitler elements, a number of the more realistic weapon upgrades (such as the silencers and scopes) are based on actual German designs. Additionally, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment during one cutscene shows BJ using a German parachute to escape Deathshead's exploding zeppelin - the parachute in question has its risers come together at a point before connecting to the shroud lines, a design quirk of chutes used by World War II era German paratroopers.
• Silliness Switch: One of the cheats unlocked by beating the game turns all character heads into pumpkins.
• Some Kind of Force Field: While they don't actually try to poke the force field (except by shooting it) it's pretty much a given one or more mooks will say a variation of "He's protected by some kind of shield!" whenever BJ has Shield active.
• Splash of Color: The Veil dimension is mostly a blue-green monochrome. Anything not that color is typically something worth shooting at.
• Stripped to the Bone:
  • What both the Particle Cannon and the Leichenfaust 44 do to enemies.
  • The Medallion's Shield ability also does this, when upgraded with a Reactive Crystal. The same counts for the Mire ability and one of it's upgrades, but only when activated.
  • Use of Veil energy can do this to someone, and promptly bring them back as super-fast skeletons. Elite Guards can make them as well.
• Stripperific:
  • Once again, the Elite Guard dress in skin-tight leather/latex outfits, often unzipped nearly to the navel, and complete with Combat Stilettos. The effect is subverted by the fact that their skeletal structures glow through their skin when they use their abilities.
  • When BJ breaks into the bedrooms of Nazi officers in the Officer's House mission, he typically encounters a number of young women wearing very little.
• Stuff Blowing Up: By way of exploding barrels, dynamite being planted at certain places, and heavy projectiles such as rocket launchers (the Panzerschreck), this is to be expected.
• Stupid Jetpack Hitler: It wouldn't be a Wolfenstein game without it. In this case, the Jetpack Troopers.
• Temporary Party Member to Villain: Subverted: Roughly a third into the game, B.J. Blazkowicz, after retrieving the Thule Medallion for the Kreisau Circle, meets the Golden Sun trio, whose leader, Leonid Alexandrov, distrusts you from the beginning. After the seemingly death of Caroline Becker, the trio disappears. Aboard the Zeppelin in the climax, we learn that Alexandrov was in league with the Nazis all along, talking with Big Bad Deathshead about how easy he did things for the regime, starting with intercepting B.J. at the beginning of the game. Then he's promptly executed by Deathshead's second in command.
• There Was a Door: Scripted encounters with Heavy Troopers will frequently begin with them bursting through a wall; even when they do "use the door," their entrance will obliterate said door and a decent chunk of the surrounding wall anyway. It's practically their signature move.
• Truce Zone: In the Tavern level, the player has an opportunity to approach various German soldiers while they're drinking and overhear their conversations. If you deliberately try to talk to them however, one will find almost every one of them less than hospitable.
• Unique Enemy: Mostly, there are only 7 to 8 of each of the special enemy types in the entire game, even though most of them are only slightly tougher than a regular enemy. Contrast this with RTCW, where Elite Mooks would make up the entire enemy force on several of the levels.
• Useless Useful Stealth:
  • The game gives you ostensible stealth options such as a couple of suppressed guns and the ability to silently knock someone out from behind, but just about any action you perform causes every enemy in the vicinity to come down on you, so it's rarely even worth bothering with stealth, and unlike RTCW there are even no missions taking advantage of these abilities.
  • The silencer's description states it makes it harder for people to see you after taking the shot. It's rather hard to miss someone's head exploding into a slushy mass, even if the gun was silenced. The silencer makes it harder for enemies to spot you after you've fired. At best, the silencers are useful only for picking off a handful of soldiers before the rest figure out what's going on.
  • In-story, Blazkowicz's cover is blown the moment he arrives in Isenstadt, thanks to some moles in the resistance ranks.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: The game allows the player to be exceedingly cruel to anyone on the opposite end of the barrel. Options include simply shooting them to exploding limbs with high caliber weapons, burning, blowing up, stabbing them in the throat with bayonets or vaporizing with one of the rayguns. All of it's excused by them being Nazis (and by the looks of it the worst psychopaths from all branches of the Heer and SS).
  • The player also gets the option to mow down defenseless scientists, SS secretaries, and prostitutes. The former two are somewhat justified, obviously.
  • Player stats tracked by the game include number of enemies electrocuted, immolated, dismembered, or dissolved using various of the games more powerful weapons.
• Voice of the Legion: The Scribes' voices sound like this.

• Wave-Motion Gun:
  • The Zeppelin, on which the Thule portal is mounted, has a mechanism which allows the portal to be pointed downwards. Then, when the Black Sun is harnessed, the energy gets shot at the ground.
  • BJ gets access to some man-portable versions in the form of the Particle Cannon, capable of disintegrating most human enemies, and particularly the Leichenfaust 44, which can disintegrate whole squads of mooks and involuntarily levitate any fortunate enough to survive the blast.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: The game uses a hub-based system centered around the entire town of Isenstadt, which you can explore for collectibles and scripted sequences involving the townspeople, all while fighting Nazis throughout the streets.
• You Don't Look Like You: B.J. looks quite different in this game compared to all the other games in the series. It appears that in this game he was based on the cover art of Wolfenstein 3D, whereas Return to Castle Wolfenstein and the Machine Games trilogy all based B.J. on the in-game sprite from Wolfenstein 3D.
• Zeppelins from Another World: One is hovering over Isenstadt for the duration of the game. Naturally, BJ destroys it in the end.

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