Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot Review

With everyone talking about punching Nazis, it made me want to check out Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot from 2019. Sure, there’s a more recent game I could have looked at, but I wanted something in VR.

It’s a first-person shooter set in an alternate 1980, and the French Resistance has enlisted your help. It doesn’t involve sneaking around, and it doesn’t mean getting your hands covered in gun oil, they have a special task for you. Utilising a Nazi control room, you’re going to hack into various mechanical units and use the Nazi’s war machines against the Nazi war machine!

Throughout the course of the less-than two hours you’ll spend in the four levels and intermissions, you take remote control of three different machines as they shoot, zap, and set fire to the various enemies you might encounter in the other Wolfenstein games developed by MachineGames. This title was mainly developed by Arkane Studios, but with input from MachineGames to ensure it fit in with the other titles in the franchise. But no, B.J. Blazkowicz doesn’t appear, or even get a mention.

You get your marching orders from Maria and Jemma, members of the French Resistance, one of whom speaks to you through speakers, the other via text on a monitor. The interactions are fine, but a bit awkward to keep having to look over at the screen, which occasionally will move in front of you, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason when it will do so.

Events of the game take place shortly before Wolfenstein: Youngblood, so they get referenced in that game, in case you played that already and were confused who or what the Cyberpilot was. Well, it’s you, the one remote controlling the robots and blasting Zeppelins out of the sky. Sure, you can only do that in one level, but dang did I feel powerful when I took a shot at one not expecting it to do anything.

I did have a couple of issues, the strangest being how menus are used. When a menu appears in my face on a monitor in a VR title, I’m used to jabbing at the options — but in Cyberpilot you have to use the thumbstick, with the triggers selecting or going back. It’s a weird decision.

The first level also made me feel quite motion sick, even with the motion vignette set to high. Afterwards, I changed the controls so that the camera wouldn’t follow my right controller, which seemed to make things better for the rest of the game.

When you’re not gunning down Nazis, Cyberpilot has you preparing the mechs for battle. It’s a nice bit of worldbuilding that has you crowbar off a panel so that you can reprogram a data card, instead of the job already being done for you. After each level you also unlock toys of one of the enemies or robots, which is entirely unnecessary and I love it.

Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot is a fun distraction which lets you kill Nazis, but at under two hours of playtime it’s tough to recommend at full price. It’s a good addition to aid the lore for MachineGames’ alternate timeline, so fans would definitely get something out of it, but it’s probably not for everyone.