Wolfenstein: The New Order

Wolfenstein: The New Order is the best shooter to come out in some time. All indications say that it’s a game from a smart new studio that knows well it won’t beat Call of Duty or Halo in a “let’s make things blow up bigger” arms race. They’ve made a singleplayer focused shooter that takes it’s time and also one that’s hard not to fall in love with.

Before I convince you to love The New Order, let me ask you something. Do you even care about the Wolfenstein franchise? If you’re a sane person, then the answer has got to be no. Sure, Id’s first entry in the franchise arguably invented the first person shooter and plenty of people hold Return to Castle Wolfenstein in high regard, but the Wolfenstein series has never been much of a constant in the video game world. No one out there – nobody that I’ve ever met, anyway – ever gets lost in the series’ larger universe or lies awake at night daydreaming about where the franchise will go next. When was the last time you saw someone dressed up as BJ Blaskowics at a games conference? My point is that Wolfenstein is not a franchise that holds much monetary sway within the industry and a new game in the series can really only be a passion project because a new Wolfenstein won’t sell on name alone. People would never line up for The New Order in the same way they do for the larger annual game franchises. There’s not an ounce of cynical financial decision making in this game and the level of quality shines through at every single turn.

At the start of the game, General Deathshead is the subject of an allied assault. BJ Blaskowics and his gang of merry men crash their planes in front of the Normandy style compound that Deathshead calls home. They intend to put a bullet in the general’s head and end the war for good. Needless to say, things don’t go so well. All of BJ’s friends end up dead or in prison, he himself takes a sizeable piece of shrapnel to the noggin, and Deathshead escapes unscathed and makes it home in time for dinner.

The rest of the war is a mystery to the player and to BJ as he wakes up 14 years later in a Polish looney bin. Just as the Germans come to clean house, Blaskowics wakes from his coma and starts his Nazi killin’ anew. He and Anya Oliwa, a nurse from the asylum, escape and decide to take the safe route out… straight into the heart of Berlin. After a quick but sloppy prison break, they meet up with a decidedly pitiful resistance movement lead by the wheelchair-bound Caroline Becker. The eal Wolfenstein starts there, and it’s a tour-de-force throughout all of Europe and beyond. The New Order will definitely take you to some weird places.

The highlights of the narratives are the interactive cutscenes. Though few and far between, they present some of the game’s most interesting scenarios and they achieve something far better than the typical quick time event. Some real creativity is applied here to make these moments tense and memorable, and they sometimes make you feel like you’re doing a lot more than just pressing x to advance the narrative. One moment in the early game presents you with a pretty impactful choice that has some lasting gameplay and narrative implications. Another presents you with only the illusion that your choices matter and in turn might just end up being the more memorable moment. Both are hard to write about without spoiling.

The game also has a solid foundation of good characters without which the whole of the story would be a complete and muddled mess, even after you factor in the narrative interactivity. It’s a good thing that the characters are fleshed out well, because there’s almost too many to get to know. In this case, the best tool for character development is good writing. There’s so much incidental dialogue here that helps to endear you to the game’s cast. The script is completely devoid of cheesy one-liners and in their place are genuine and believable moments of human interaction. We’re not talking about the Citizen Kane of video games, but what’s on offer is a cut above most video games and well above what you should expect from a game in which the main character is named BJ Blaskowics.

It also hits the sweet spot in terms of tone. The game is very funny and more often than not, completely ridiculous. When something impactful happens, however, the humor never gets in the way to ruin the moment. If there is a happy middle ground between comedy and self seriousness, that’s where The New Order sits - the only awkward tonal departure being some strangely poetic narration from Blaskowics. You won’t cry during the 12-14 hour playtime, but neither will you roll your eyes.

The story’s one principal failing is in plot. A lot of today’s games have all their levels and settings picked out before the story is put together. By the time the writers get a hold of these games, story decision have already been made that are hard to get around. By then end, the plot to these games feel hackneyed and cobbled together. Wolfenstein is one of those games.

For one thing, apparently BJ and his crew have the magical power of teleportation. One minute, he’s crashing out a massive death tower in Germany to end up in a Polish hospital the next day. London is only about a five minute drive from Berlin and so is Gibraltar. There are also a couple of half-baked ideas, like a suboceanic Israeli secret weapons facility and a Nazi moon base, that reveal themselves rather suddenly and have loose excuses for existing. They have little impact on the overall story and are mostly included because they look cool.

Story is a plus, but it’s not really why you bought this cool new game. You bought because you thought those mean looking Nazis on the front cover might be fun to shoot at. Good News! They very much are. If you expect the tight controls and twitch heavy style of Call of Duty, you’ll be sorely disappointed, but The New Order carves out its own shooting style very easily. The games guns are a little more imprecise than today’s typical shooter, instead opting for a weightier feel. Weapons are heavy, loud, and satisfying and they chew through Nazis like beef in a meat grinder.

Your enemies die quickly but so do you, so you’ll spend plenty of time leaning out from all the cover that’s hasn’t yet been chewed up by fully automatic shotguns. On the higher difficulties, you’ll approach every firefight methodically and the stealthier tactics are almost always recommended. The weapons are well balanced and each has their own use. Don’t expect to use one gun for every situation. There are appropriate and inappropriate times for dual wielding and by the way, you can totally roll with two of those fully automatic shotguns I mentioned earlier. Just keep in mind that you’ll eventually have to pull out a sniper… or two.

Wolfenstein has another advantage over Call of Duty in that it doesn’t ever funnel you down a glorified hallway. Encounters in The New Order take place in wide open areas and there is always some amount of latitude to how you dispatch with the bad guys. You can take out officers stealthily or go in guns blazing and have to deal with their reinforcements. In addition you can pick locks, hack keypads and cut through certain walls and fences to get around in the environment. You’ll sometimes be faced with a group of enemies who can’t be dealt with discreetly, but these moments are used sparingly enough and the pacing is such that the game never feels like a slog.

Enemy variety is another highpoint. You’ll see all the enemies that the game has to offer well before the end credits, but the way the games keeps reintroducing them keeps the firefights fresh and interesting. Stick the game on one of the harder difficulties and each new encounter will make the previous fight look like child’s play. There is a great difficulty curve to these encounters where the challenge is ever increasing, but also where you never hit a wall. Like in any good game, you can feel yourself getting better as you play.

The New Order is a good looking game with a solid overall level of presentation and a couple of strange shortcomings. It looks like and early generation game that’s straddling the line between the older consoles and the new ones. Textures are crisp enough and there is generally a good level of detail, but you’ll often find something bizarrely textured into the world, like a set of silverware that is part of a flat countertop or a giant pen that is inexplicably painted on top of the ground. Voice acting is the icing on top of a great audio package with the oddly subtle voice of BJ “mumbles” Blaskowics being the low point, but even he gets the job done fine. The soundtrack plays its part perfectly by never overwhelming and always striking the right mood, with an acoustic guitar often taking the place of the usual orchestral score. There’s also some fine cinematography during the games sparse, non-interactive cutscenes.

If I were to tell you about a World War II shooter that has a health bar and a lean mechanic, you would say that it sounds like a game from ten years ago. You wouldn’t be far from wrong. The New Order does indeed feel like a ten year old game, but apparently some ten year old game design could use reviving, especially when it’s this polished. It’s the first game in a long time where you could appropriately use the term “combat puzzle”. If you have any amount of nostalgia for games like F.E.A.R. or Half Life 2, if you like first person shooters, or even if you just like solid games, you could do a whole lot worse than Wolfenstein: The New Order.