Wolfenstein 3D is considered to be one of the most important games ever made. It was one of the more well developed games made for home computers, and it was one of the first games to take place from a first person perspective. Looking back at it now it’s pretty outdated, but for the time it was revolutionary. A majority of games at the time took place from either a 2D perspective or top down view, but Wolfenstien took the flat pixels we usually stare at and made them feel 3D. You got to walk freely around rooms, see the walls and ceiling, watch enemies walk around said rooms, and shoot from a distance now that you were able to see what is up ahead. This game was also one of the first ever first person shooters ever made. It wasn’t the best, but what came out shortly afterwards is what boosted the genre to success. Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, Half-Life and everything afterwards wouldn’t have come into existence if it weren’t for the inspiration and influence of Wolfenstein 3D. The game quite the legacy, and with it came attempts to adapt it for each generation. Each audience, each group, each potential buyer possibly looking for an intense first person shooter with the historical tone and balls of Wolfenstein. What’s the problem? They didn’t exactly know how to adapt it for each generation which is what led to troubled reboots.
The first reboot was Return to Castle Wolfenstien, which is considered the best reboot. Return was a good start as it was the most tame modern adaptation and maintained the original’s tone. Then you have the 2009 reboot simply named Wolfenstien, where they tried to combine a serious tone with over the top wacky eldritch wizard magic. None of it particularly made any sense or blended well together with the historical fictional themes. Then you have the latest adaptation of the Wolfenstien franchise by Machine Games, the current developers of the Wolfenstien series. The Alternate Timeline Saga, a trilogy which asks the bizarre question: “What if the Germans won World War II and gained control over the world?” You get a depressing reality, but it could be an interesting setting to tell an epic adventure about revolting against a fascist government and sparking hope. The first entry in the saga, The New Order, had a really rocky development period. The team who made Wolfenstien struggled to figure out how to bring it back, and problems got worse when the parent company ZeniMax got bought out by Bethesda Softworks. Who asked the developers if they were willing to rework their ideas. They didn’t want to face the same problems they had with the 2009 reboot, but they still needed a concept that would work.
Eventually this led them to Wolfenstien: The New Order, which was their most fleshed out concept. A mature story that explored a nazi controlled world, and every race and religion lived in fear for the rest of their lives. Creating a game that was both depressing and humorous at the same time. The New Order didn’t receive glowing reviews when it came out, but it does have a cult following. There were a handful of players who liked this game and how it managed to combine aspects of old school shooters with modern day shooter aspects. It was a refreshing take on the shooter genre and they wanted to see more of it. That’s how we got the sequel three years later and several spin-offs. Wolfenstien: The New Order is almost nine years old now, and all you may be wondering if it still holds up today. The answer is: Why isn’t this awesome to me!?
Anticlimactic, I know, but honestly I wanted to love this game. It had everything it needed to be an awesome video game and the premise of it is thrilling. You are a one man army capable of carrying multiple guns at once. You give hope to the people, save the world, and become an icon practically a god. You fight nazis, the most evil thing in the world, everyone would want to kill and mutilate a nazi when given a chance. I would’ve used that chance to unleash the rage I have pent up inside me, but now I feel nothing. I’ve been reviewing games for four years now and during that time my tastes have changed. This feels like the game younger me would have enjoyed, but playing it now it doesn’t really vibe with me in the same way. Do I hate this game? No, in fact I would say The New Order is a fine shooter. It has solid gunplay, combat, and an enticing story. However, there are problems with it that I don’t think other people are willing to bring up. Today we’ll be talking about Wolfenstien: The New Order and why it’s just fine.
Story
You follow BJ Blazkowicz, all American hero and captain in the US army. BJ hopefully stands for Billy Jay rather than what the rest of you dirty minded fools are thinking of. A few weeks ago BJ snuck into a highly guarded German fortress named Castle Wolfenstien to retrieve a file telling them where SS commander Wilhelm “Deathshead” Strasse would be heading next. The mission was dangerous, BJ lost an ally, and witnessed some horrifying events but he grabbed the file and scurried out of there. Now he and a special team of soldiers are storming the complex Deathshead is stationed at. They manage to break in and find the complex is filled with labs and gruesome experiments. Deathshead has been mutilating human bodies and trying to forge robots with the fighting spirit and mindset of a German soldier. Hence why there are so many killer robot dogs outside, and your group was just attacked by what appears to be a mecha nazi. You manage to survive the mecha nazi before Deathshead knocks you and your friends unconscious. Soon torturing one of your two friends to death and leaving the rest of you to die in a bright fiery explosion. You manage to escape the complex, but the explosion lodges a shrapnel into your skull. Knocking you out and preventing you from controlling your body. BJ is left out to drift the raging seas, but a group of sailors manage to rescue him and bring him to safety.
The next fourteen years are rough for BJ. He’s practically now a vegetable being rolled around in a wheelchair. Unable to scream in pain or interact with the world around him. He’s sent away to a psychiatrist asylum in Poland where he witnesses the world revolve around him. New patients each day and the loving family who run the asylum do their best to treat the mentally ill. Sadly there are still nazis about and they come in every once in a while to take a small selection of the ill away, most likely to kill them. BJ sits, watching, and surprisingly he sits there not losing any of the muscle mass he had during the war. One day the Nazis come in and are given an order to shut down the asylum. Killing all the disabled and mentally ill people within it. The family who run the asylum try to fight back, but are shot to death by the soldiers. Their daughter is knocked out unconscious and one soldier gets ready to kill you, the potato in a wheelchair. However, you manage to steal a knife while they weren’t looking, and with rage coursing through your veins you manage to get up and stab that nazi bastard to death. You take his gun and slaughter the Nazis in the vicinity. Saving the woman who was kidnapped and explaining who you actually are. The woman’s name is Anya, and soon you figure out the Nazis won World War II. They made more technological advancements than the United States, and dropped an atomic bomb on the country. Forcing them and every country to surrender to German control. BJ asks if there is some form of resistance trying to go against the Nazis, and this leads him to London where the Nazis are currently stationed. From there BJ goes on a wild adventure to kill all the nazis. Attack their complexes, blow up their property, meet fighters with hearts of passion, and kill the SS commander he failed to take down years ago.
Gameplay
The New Order is the most old school modern first person shooter I’ve played in awhile. I want to consider it old school due to certain mechanics and how gunfights are focused more around aggression rather than playing safely, but at the same time it’s still modern due to certain aspects. You run through each mission pursuing objectives, fighting waves of enemies, and picking up an assortment of guns. Unlike a majority of shooters where you can only carry two guns at a time here in Wolfenstein you can carry multiple guns at once. Giving you a multitude of options on how to take down enemies. You have a pistol, machine gun, automatic shotgun, double barrel shotgun, a laser rifle, a marksman rifle that can transform into a plasma rifle with a quick button press, and don’t even get me started on the upgrades. How the laser rifle can be transformed into a rapid fire long range cannon which can melt foes apart, how the pistol can earn a silencer, or the assault rifle unlocks an under barrel rocket launcher. You have throwables like knives which are quiet but have an arch, or grenades to blow up groups. There’s also an option to dual wield certain guns to deal double damage.
Another old school aspect is health and armor. Instead of having a regeneration health bar, you can instead loot health kits and armor pickups. Armor acts as a secondary health bar. Limiting the amount of damage your actual health bar gets or soaking up the damage entirely. Health on the other hand is what you mainly rely on and determines how long you’ll survive in a fight. One unique mechanic is overcharge where if you consume a health pack when you are already at max health you gain temporary increased health. This increased health will go down overtime, but you can use this to your advantage and soak up a couple extra bullets. There are a variety of enemies to face along your journey and some foes will require special strategies to take down. You have the basic goons who usually come together, but then you have these heavier armored foes which take more bullets and deal heavy damage with a shotgun. The mecha nazis with heavy artillery and really sturdy defense, but move rather slowly compared to other enemies. The drone which flies around and dogs which run up to you. The metal dogs who run around as well but deal extreme amounts of damage, and the mechs who require a lot of bullets to take down. Just keep firing, it'll work.
Alright let’s see what else I have to explain. (Flips through pages) Sh*t, that’s literally all I had to say. This game is as straightforward and mindless as it gets. I could explain stealth, but everyone should know how stealth works by now. Plus you won’t even be spending a majority of your time stealthily killing enemies, because they spot you quickly and you’ll be forced into fights a lot. You just run around and shoot things with the occasional downtime moment which lasts a few minutes. It’s just nonstop combat and any exploration leads to lackluster rewards. Hey, some people may like that kind of stuff and that’s fine by me. Hopefully you can defeat Deathshead.
Thoughts
The best word I can use to describe The New Order is “confident.” It’s a confident game and did what a lot of games didn’t want to do. Take a ridiculous idea and explore the horrifying nature of it. A lot of people will enjoy this game for what it is, and seeing how it came out in 2014 which was a pretty miserable year in gaming I’d say it’s aged better than a lot of other releases. I don’t think this is an excellent game though. It felt excellent at first, but as I got to witness more of it my appreciation went downhill. The story is good, but it stumbles around at times. It’s a serious mature story full of death, despair, depression, and sadness. Hopelessness is around every corner and it takes a lot of work just to foil one German operation before they hunt you down, put a bullet through your head, and then order a robot to crush your lifeless skull. The game has a lot of disturbing moments, and you sit there in awe wondering how they got all of this green lit. When the story of The New Order is bold and has the balls to explore its themes properly it’s pretty good. Why does this story stumble around? Three reasons: the protagonist, the pacing, and how they try to cram in humor. Everyone besides the protagonist is more interesting, and after a while BJ transforms into this blank slate of a character. It’s not until the second game that they develop him a little more, but overall he’s just a blank vessel. Another muscular figure for the player to embody and feel like the only thing driving the revolution forward. Which is weird because the troubles the other characters face are more devastating and interesting.
The pacing on the other hand is done quickly. Normally I enjoy quickly paced games, but at the same time there are moments when a game is going too fast. Meaningful conversations ending abruptly or suddenly appearing in another location without much build up to it. Third problem is the humor and I feel this is a problem all the modern Wolfenstien games face. For a game with a serious tone and dark setting they try really hard to occasionally plug in absurd humor. None of it actually works and can ruin certain moments of the game. Like there’s a scene halfway through the game where you’re called in by Anya to a private room and have loud rowdy sex. All your friends can hear it and hanging pictures are falling off the wall. It was random, but I didn’t find it funny. There wasn’t any build up to the scene, it felt like having sex for the sake of quickly getting a reaction out of the audience. In fact, that’s a majority of shocking scenes in this game. How much shock value can we get out of the audience before they go and shoot more things? That’s the only emotion I ever got out of this game.
The gameplay is fine. It’s certainly well made, but due to how they are trying to blend aspects of old school shooters with modern shooters some elements conflict with each other. They wanted to make really aggressive combat. Enemies hounding you from every direction, cover not always being provided, and the wide selection of guns you have available allows you to always keep up the pressure. However, you still need to manually reload your weapons which can be really hectic during busy fights. They also don’t do what Half-Life 2 or Shadow Warrior 3 does where if one weapon is out of ammo and you swap over to another weapon that has a full clip that gun which was empty automatically refills while you are using the other gun. Reloading is a standard in shooters now and it gets the player to consider when to get behind cover, distance themselves from enemies, and to take their time. For the aggressive approach to combat though, reloading doesn’t exactly work especially with weapons with long reload animations such as dual wielding weapons. Another aspect that doesn’t exactly work is having to manually loot ammo and items off the ground or shelves. You are constantly on the move, so the last thing you want to do is stop, loot some objects, be heavily exposed to enemies, and take a bunch of damage. This is even worse when you are facing off against heavily armored enemies and you need to pump round after round into them. Almost every shooter I know automatically collects ammunition when you run over a gun containing it, because they know how inconvenient it is to grab it.
Stealth isn’t that great either. It’s not terrible, but as a secondary option it’s pretty useless half the time. A majority of spaces aren’t designed around stealth, and there are a lot of occasions when the game forces you into fighting. Don’t even try to use the silenced pistol, because it’s not really silent and when you shoot an enemy it immediately alerts everyone else. Graphically the game still looks good today, but the color palette they choose doesn’t always help out during combat. There’s a lot of gray and black used, and every nazi you faced wears gray and black. It can be difficult telling where enemies are coming from or where you are being shot from. There’s even this one level where you are on a bridge and while it’s the coolest piece there are enemies hiding in the environment. Most of the guns are fun to use. They all pack a punch and give you different strategies on how to tackle a fight. I wouldn’t say that many of them are unique though. Besides the Laserkraftwerk and quick switch marksman plasma rifle, everything else is really basic or has been done before. The assault rifle with the barrel rocket launcher has been done already in Half-Life and dual wielding existed in Halo 2. The weapon wheel you can pull up at any time is big, but it doesn’t always work in your favor. Every dual wielding combination, gun, and small throwable object is mapped onto it and trying to select exactly what you want can be confusing. There were times when I was pointing exactly to the weapon I wanted to use, but the game detected it as something else and swapped to a gun with no ammo. My last complaint is that this game really isn’t replayable. It’s short, there’s only sixteen missions, and none of the side content is truly worth seeking. Collectibles don’t do anything mechanically, and there are no hidden objectives with extra rewards like Doom.
Do I hate this game? No, remember I think Wolfenstien: The New Order is a fine experience. It doesn’t do a whole lot wrong, but it doesn’t do a whole lot of things spectacularly well. I’d say go in and form your own opinions. A lot of people are probably disagreeing with this review right now and I’m not angry at them. I think my views on this game would have been different if I had gone in with a different mindset. Back then I was more edgy, immature, and seeked games that would give me the most extreme adventure possible. Now that mindset is gone and I can’t really handle games like that anymore. I like games that are more laid back, and if they are hard or challenging they better offer a sense of satisfaction and personal triumph. I like games that aim to be art or push what the medium can handle. The New Order is not one of these types of games. The ones I enjoy and that’s fine. It has its own audience and I don’t have to be part of every single audience. I give it a 7.5/10 for just being okay.
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