Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War™ is an Xbox exclusive, and it's got its own subtitle to prove it. You won't find the phrase "Tides of War" on any other system, and you won't find the game's unbelievable depth or exhaustive multiplayer options anywhere but on the Xbox.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War trumps its PC cousin right from the start, by providing more than a half-dozen new "prequel" levels that take place before the original game's first scene. Xbox owners finally get to meet and interact with Agent One, a character who was dead on a slab at the start of the PC outing. These prequel levels explore the background of this key character and uncover the roots of the Nazi plot to create an army of super-soldiers through ancient magic and advanced technology.
B.J. meets and greets while Agent One takes aim.
Agent One also appears as a playable character in the Xbox-only Co-op mode. Two gamers can tackle the game's challenging single-player campaign at once, playing the game's hero, B.J. Blazkowicz, and Agent One as a team. This means you have twice as many eyes exploring the environment and twice as many guns trained on the enemy, but the same number of ammo and health power-ups—so alter your strategy accordingly.
Co-op is just one of the Xbox-only treats that Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War has in store. Players will experience cutting-edge Xbox graphics and lighting effects; face formidable new monsters, like the Occult Priest and X-Shepherd; and employ new items, such as the Holy Cross (great against magic-spawned abominations), the EMP (fries robotic enemies), and the X-Shield (an energy bubble that protects you from just about everything). A totally new prologue campaign of seven levels has been added, where B.J. meets his partner Agent One, learns about his new assignment with the OSA, and is put on the trail of Helga von Bulow in a remote Egyptian village.
It'll be a cold day in hell ...
By far, the most exciting feature in Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War is its multiplayer capabilities. With full Xbox Live support, console gamers now have the kind of epic team battles that made the PC game so famous. Up to 16 players can join in, to compete on more than a dozen maps in four separate game modes. In Objective mode, one team has a goal, and the other team has to make sure they don't achieve it. Stopwatch is a timed contest to see who can accomplish a set goal in the shortest time, and Checkpoint is a CTF variant with lots and lots of flags.
Elimination is a last-man-standing deathmatch with a special twist, courtesy of the game's coolest Multiplayer innovation: character classes. Each participant in a Multiplayer game must choose a character class, which then determines what kind of weapons they can use and which special abilities they will have. Each can fight, but their extra skills are what makes them useful in a firefight. Soldiers can use any weapon, but have no other special ability … but being the only one capable of using the flamethrower or the rocket launcher is pretty special already. Medics don't have the same kind of offensive punch, but they can generate health packs for their teammates and even revive a "dead" soldier, so that he can continue the game without waiting in the reinforcement queue. Engineers can plant explosives or dismantle enemy bombs, carry more grenades than the others, and repair the heavy stationary guns you'll find scattered around the battlefield, while Lieutenants can hand out ammo or call in air strikes. (Toss out a smoke canister and stand clear.) Balancing these character classes with the abilities and disposition of your teammates is definitely the key to success because there are no power-ups in the Multiplayer maps. You have to rely on your teammates' special skills to generate health packs and ammo, and then stay close enough to support each other as you take it to the enemy.
Showdown in the courtyard.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War was specifically designed to make the most of the Xbox and XboxLive, to give gamers an unparalleled multiplayer first-person-shooter experience. Choose a character class, put a team together, and prepare to be impressed.
