Wolfschanze 1944: The Final Attempt

Wolfschanze 1944: The Final Attempt
Protagonist(s): Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg Genre(s): First-person shooter Rating(s): PEGI: 16+ Platform(s): Microsoft Windows Release: Original April 28, 2006 Remaster February 4, 2015 Engine: IC Engine Developer(s): Calaris Studios Publisher(s): Akella (original) Calaris Studios (remaster) Country: Poland Series: Wolfschanze Successor: Wolfschanze II

Wolfschanze 1944: The Final Attempt (simply known as Wolfschanze) is a 2006 WWII-themed first-person shooter video game developed by Calaris Studios and published by Akella. The remaster was released in 2015 as freeware.

Wolfschanze is based on the life of Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, who conspired against Adolf Hitler, attempted to assassinate him and tried to organize the military coup against the Nazi leaders.

The game was considered one of the worst Polish games of all time, one of the worst FPS games of all time and even one of the worst games of all time.

However, despite the negative reception, the game received a remaster in 2015, which was also negatively received.

Plot

Player takes on the role of Claus and the game starts with the assassination, which fails, and the 20 missions are spent exploring an alternate history in 1994 in occupied Poland and Germany, where von Stauffenberg fights against Nazi soldiers while attempting to murder Hitler a second time. As in the real events, he will be helped during the game by people who conspired along.

Gameplay

The gameplay is about reaching the very end of the level, the opponents are other soldiers that the player has to shoot at and who respawn, he has a whole lot of weapons at his disposal and can also use his own limbs and also has a sausage that he can feed the dog for example. The final opponent is Adolf Hitler himself.

Why The Final Attempt Failed

1. Awful graphics. The game looks more like a product that was released in 1997 game for PS1/N64 than 9 years later. Ugly textures, the characters look as if they were made of clay. And the special effects are gifs pasted, and the flowing blood is a few drops that does not fly from any part of the body, but from the air after defeating or blowing up the enemy.
   • The characters are poorly designed. The main example is one of the characters you meet at the beginning of the game, which looks like he has no neck.
2. Awful animations. In general, animations do not run smoothly in 60FPS, they are made of few frames and are stiff and they look like they came from a PS1 or N64 game.
3. Like in Monkey's Adventures, the lip-syncing is too fast and in the last sentences in which they speak, they close their mouths as if the developers synchronized them in a hurry, not caring if the character's mouth is moving all the time while speaking.
4. It takes a long time to load the game due to outdated engine. The loading screen takes between 15 and 30 seconds, even on the most powerful computers and clearly shows the developers' incompetence in optimizing even such simple graphics and level design, or unwillingness to do so.
5. God-awful Polish video acting. In the game, you will only hear one voice actor. The actor's voice does not match any of the characters and the voice-over who can be heard in the intro. Worst of all, as in Longsoft Multimedia's Pinocchio, the female character was also played by a male voice actor if the developers had such a small budget, they couldn't even afford to hire more than one actor.
   • English voice acting may be better than Polish, because although the female character is played by a female voice actor, but it has a weird death sounds and the dubbing itself is so-so.
6. There is useless zoom in the game. Even if it has a K43 sniper rifle, it only approximates the position you are in, instead of switching to the scope mode, in other words, the developers did not even know the activity of weapons at least from those times, and yet they decided to create an FPS set in those times.
7. A few useless weapons.
   • The grenade that has completely broken physics. When you throw the grenate to opponent next to the barrels, he will be blown up and his arms or legs will remain. And if you throw a grenade at him, which is not next to the barrels, only fire appears and the enemy burns.
   • A sausage (Yes, this "weapon" really exists in the game), a weapon that was to be used for the dog we meet, but the dog rarely reacts to it.
8. Terrible artificial intelligence.
   • The opponents are either standing and doing nothing, or they are so accurate that they can't miss you. And if you crouch, they can't shoot at you (although this is not always the case).
   • Dog's intelligence also is bad. A dog hardly reacts to your sausage throw or charges at you, despite throwing this "weapon".
9. The intro offered by the game is not a cut-scene or inscription, but a clip from the chronicles of the Second World War, which has nothing to do with what is happening in the game it clearly shows that the developers did not even review the plot they wrote themselves and did not want to fit absolutely nothing into it.
10. Video clips: intro (showing chronicles from the Second World War), animated developer's logo (the logo does not appear in the remaster, only jiggle) or outro (which is a cut-scene, surprisingly), are presented in extremely low resolution (for those who have poor eyesight, for them will be a high difficulty) literally, the developers did not even want to set a decent resolution, they just chose the first better resolution, probably to release this game as soon as possible .
11. At the end of the game, you beat Adolf Hitler and you need to shoot something in a balloon plane, this plane will be burn. It is very confusing as it is not known whether he was set on fire, including the plane, or escaped from the plane which is quite a weak and lazy ending because the player is not, for example, declared a hero or find peace or anything just a falling plane..
12. Horrible looking main menu. After the intro, for a moment there is a wasteland with trees and dilapidated buildings (of which only walls remain) with an accompanying train (which we cannot see), which carries a tank and a few companions (which one smokes a cigarette and the other stands with a sniper rifle). After looking at this intricate design, a menu appears that looks like from a Unity game in the Alpha version. The options are weirdly ordered. The "Controls", "Video Modes" and "Sound Menus" are as separate options, instead of putting them in "Options".
13. The sound effects are of course copied from their engine. Sounds of destroying objects (for example a box), walking or shooting that could be heard in Mortyr and this can already be considered a copyright infringement if they were copied without the permission of the original authors and incredibly huge laziness that is hard to imagine.
14. The control is imprecise. When Claus moves diagonally, the slo-motion mode is activated. Seriously, how did the programmer have to be unintelligent enough to come up with such an idea? Apart from this strange patent, a protagonist moves slowly in other words, the developers didn't even manage to do the FPS controls well, which is the simplest thing that can be done in a game of this genre.
15. Claus' kick is so mighty that it kills the enemy at the first kick, and can even blow up a tank after a few such kicks which is ridiculous and unreal because it's impossible to blow up a tank or kill someone with one kick.
16. To lengthen this game, the developers decided to add a absolutely terriblr feature that is a respawn of opponents. What's the worst thing, they can respawn at tree (mainly behind you) and it does nothing but artificially pump up the difficulty level.
17. Illogical elements and plot holes:
    • The main protagonist, Claus von Stauffenberg, was a war invalid (he lost left eye and right hand) and in this game he carry most two-handed weapons.
    • Somehow during the game, you meet a small river, there are a few small fishes (but where they come from?).
    • A talking dog.
18. In single-player games, the screen is usually frozen when you pause the game, but like in MindJack, the game still runs, which can be a hindrance or the opponent may accidentally meet us, eventually killing us why is there no pause in this game and if you think i can't even leave the game when opponents are around and because of this respawn even when they are not.
19. The text wall looks hideous. It looks like it was made in Microsoft Paint using the rectangle tool and this shows that they didn't even have more complex programs to create something really interesting and they used the simplest possible program to operate.
20. The gameplay itself is frustrating, even on easy mode and it can be considered as such that the developers did not even test this game, they just made it in a hurry, even without going through it, which makes the game literally almost impossible to pass.
21. Sometimes there are grammar and punctuation errors in both languages which is ridiculous because you can see that the developers didn't even bother to check the coherence of words in sentences.
22. The remaster is still as bad as the original, because the bugs and other anomalies have not been fixed, but the graphics have been improved (which still doesn't look good).

Redeeming Qualities

1. Fine soundtrack, which gives the atmosphere of WWII.
2. There are a lot of weapons, such as the Walther P38, MP-40 "Schmeisser", Mauser 98 rifle, MG-42 Machinegun, K43 sniper rifle, Panzerfaust 30, Stielhandgranate 24 and the Flammenwerfer 41-P.

Reception

Ratings

Publication	Score
Absolute Games (ag.ru)	10%
CD-Action	1/10
Shooterplanet	17/100

Critical reception

The game received overwhelmingly negative reviews and it was often considered one of the worst games ever developed in Poland, both in Polish and foreign press but not only that, the game is also considered to be one of the worst FPS games off all-time if not one of the worst games of all-time.

The Polish magazine CD-Action gave it 1/10, saying: "Unfortunately for me, the Wolfschanze turned out to be a surprisingly long game (by the standards of Kaszanka), which made the torture work a good few hours before I managed to get to the embarrassing finale in spasms and convulsions. I will probably start demanding subsidies for work in harmful conditions. But what, such a profession. I was tired. Fortunately, you don't have to, so take my advice and stay away from this devil as much as possible."

The Russian website Absolute Games gave 10%, summarising: "Water is very unusual - an almost flat jelly surface that glistens plainly in the rays of a pseudo-sun. Nondescript sprite effects convey warm greetings from the distant 90s (in Duke Nukem 3D, the fire was a little worse). Havok was still lying next to the 1944 Wolfschanze physics, but only out of laughter at the sight of manipulations with the ubiquitous boxes a la Gordon Freeman and kicking of rare items. Chic set, right? Tasteless, dreary, ugly misunderstanding."

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