Wolfenstein: The New Order: The Review

Greetings once again, Dear Readers!

Today I'm going to talk about a game property that is very near and dear to my heart. I first played it as a little boy on his dad's computer and it managed to make quite the impression on me and many other little boys and girls at the time. I start with a bit of a history lesson before describing the game and then end things with my final analysis. So sit back, grab a cold one or light something up or whatever you like doing to relax and read my report on the latest re-imagining of an old favorite of murder junkies everywhere.

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There was a time when it was novel to shoot Nazis in a video game. Killing virtual Nazis was once so fresh and different it gave rise to an entire, new genre of video game: The First Person Shooter, or FPS. Thanks to the movie Saving Private Ryan video games saw a sharp rise in games with a World War II setting. I distinctly remember the period from about 1997 to 2006 in which four out of every five FPS games involved killing Nazis in some fashion.

It was thanks to this massive dearth of Nazi-killing games that Nazis and the second World War became incredibly cliché to the point where vidcon developers pretty much stopped making games with Nazis or World War II in them.

However enough time has passed since then that a savvy enough developer could probably sneak a Nazi game out as a form of irony and everyone would celebrate them for it. Well, I'm here to report to you that is exactly what has happened.

The game in question is Wolfenstein: The New Order. Yes, that Wolfenstein. The one that gave rise to the FPS genre and made Nazis the go-to bad guy for lazy game developers everywhere. The developer in question this time is not so lazy, thankfully, as this game is entertaining enough that it might just make Nazis en vogue again.

I was lucky enough to have caught the first wave of Nazi-murder simulating with the release of Wolfenstein 3D, the third game in an obscure series that was about to get a whole lot less obscure thanks to technical innovations and now-classic designs by then-fledgling start-up id Software.

The year was 1992 and home computer games were experiencing a renaissance as small, independent developers utilized the new-fangled Internet to connect with fans and share games with everyone. Wolf3D was a simple 2D maze game that, thanks to technical wizardry from id's lead tech guy John Carmack, was rendered in a 3D first-person view. The game ran smooth, looked gorgeous, was highly detailed and contained a multitude of secrets and hidden treasure for the OCD crowd to find.

Now you might be thinking this new game being called Wolfenstein that it's made by id or id's B-Team, Raven Software, but no, you would be wrong. This game is actually made by a newly formed developer made up of people with a stellar track record. Allow me to explain.

While most of the people at id Software would eventually go on to do many interesting things the company itself, sadly, would not. After making big splashes technology-wise with Wolf3D, Doom 1 and 2 and then the first fully 3D FPS Quake they made some attempts at competing with Unreal Tournament for the competitive FPS space with Quake 3. Eventually they went on to remake Doom and put out one other new, original property powered by impressive new tech, an open-world FPS called RAGE.

Thanks to their advanced technology id were able to make beautiful, highly detailed games that ran very fast on the right kinds of computers. This speed allowed them to make pure action games that played 90-to-nothing and didn't break a sweat. Their games were the original reason the consumer computer market kicked into overdrive as more and more people were buying newer hardware to make sure they could run the latest id game. Despite all this technical innovation somewhere along the way id decided they were only ever going to make one type of game: the pure action FPS. They are currently working on another Doom remake.

Sometime prior to id's first Doom remake, Doom 3, Swedish developer Starbreeze was working on a game based on an upcoming film property staring Vin Diesel. That game was called The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and was the first licensed game based on a movie property that didn't totally suck.

In fact, it was quite good on its own merits with or without Vin Diesel. Butcher Bay was really a first person adventure game in which the main character, Riddick played by Vin Diesel, the most sought after criminal in all the galaxy tries repeatedly to break out of the galaxy's highest security slam, the aforementioned Butcher Bay.

This was all about ten years ago on the very first Xbox and Starbreeze managed to make the game look about as good as Doom 3 before Doom 3 even had a chance to release for PC. In addition to looking as good as Doom 3 Butcher Bay was also more than a pure action game. It was actually more of a role-playing game with the occasional moment of action.

The game was centered around stealth and sticking to the shadows because your enemies were vastly overpowered. Butcher Bay also had a kind of virtual proprioception that occasionally pops up in the first person genre, which basically means you could look down and see your arms and legs. Add into the mix cinematic scenes that could have come from a Hollywood blockbuster and you had the recipe for a very engrossing, immersive experience.

So, the takeaway from all this reminiscing is this: id makes games that are all about the action, occasionally branching out of their comfort zone to do something a little different such as with Doom 3's horror themes or RAGE's lite RPG elements. Starbreeze makes games that are more about the adventure, the story and giving the player the sense that they are inhabiting their character fully in order to further ground them in the well-realized settings. Starbreeze made other games after Butcher Bay, such as The Darkness and more recently Syndicate, which continued these design trends.

A few years ago, after the release of Syndicate, several key players from Starbreeze left the company to form a new company called Machine Games. Machine Games were tapped by Zenimax, who now own id and all its attendant properties, to do a new Wolfenstein game. What happens when you take these different design philosophies, pure action and heavily immersive storytelling, and put them in a blender set to puree? You get something that looks like Wolfenstein: The New Order. The game is a strange creature. It is contemporary FPS design coming head to head with the design tropes of yesteryear.

It is health packs and armor pick-ups tucked away inside smashable crates. It is leaning around corners and aiming down the rifle's iron sights while having the sense of inhabiting the game character's actual body. It is linear level design with hidden areas and branching paths that loop back on themselves. It is taking cover for a few moments to let the slight auto-heal kick in and despite my awkward phrasings it is all quite fun to play.

B.J. Blazkowicz is a man out of time. At the game's start he is a war-weary Army Ranger who has seen too much death, destruction and annihilation or, as he puts it, “the undoing of life itself”. He dreams of a simpler time, before the war, of bar-be-ques and lazy afternoons with the family. He is also a nigh indestructible brick shit house who kills everything that stands in the way of his mission.

And his mission in this game is the same as it always has been in all the other games: Kill the shit out of every last Nazi scumbag and secure the world for freedom from tyranny.

After the opening cinematic we are in the role of B.J. as he awakens in the co-pilot seat next to pilot Fergus Reid in the cockpit of a B-52 bomber. The year is 1946 and WWII rages on thanks to advances in Nazi technology. They are approaching the compound of the game's head Nazi, General Deathshead, and this attack is their last hope of stopping the Nazi war machine from conquering the planet.

If you followed any of the pre-game hype you already know B.J. and Fergus fail at this mission. After an introductory level that plays out more or less like the WWII shooters of yore, but with armored German Shepherds and giant robots, B.J. is blasted into a coma and forgotten about by everyone for the next 14 years.

In the cinematic that follows we see he is slowly nursed back to health by a nice Polish family who run an insane asylum. We learn that Nazis come regularly to take patients away for human experimentation and oddly enough in 14 years time B.J. himself is never selected, probably due to being a vegetable.

Finally though, the Nazis return to purge the asylum of its patients and in a scuffle end up killing all but one of the staff. As B.J. the player is forced to sit there and witness the brutality of innocents being murdered, powerless to stop it. In the game's most poignant moment the sepia toned screen flashes with renewed color with each gunshot-induced murder. Then when it comes to be your turn you strike, or B.J. strikes, jumping up from the wheelchair and slashing the throat of that fascist with the cutlery from his dinner plate. Once that's done B.J. picks up the fallen soldier's pistol and the Nazi-killing resumes in earnest.

Though I am tempted to I will not describe the whole game in this fashion. I just wanted to make the point that even though this is just another FPS with a high body count it is also more than that because Machine Games, in that classic Starbreeze way, ground their games first and foremost in their narratives.

After escaping the asylum B.J. and his new ally break the captured resistance fighters out of prison and from there plot to take down Deathshead once and for all. The story takes the player through the horrors of a concentration camp, down to the depths of the ocean and all the way to the surface of the moon and back. It really is a whirlwind of a story.

Like a typical Starbreeze game The New Order is strong on setting and characterization. Machine Games write a story first with interesting characters and then use that as the foundation for the rest of the game. The result is a game that is all killer and no filler. Each level works toward some narrative purpose that fits into the overall grander scheme of things and there are few, if any, areas that are simply there to extend length.

Instead the game extends length in the ways that games should: By giving the player incentive to come back. At the beginning of the game in the first level the player is forced to make a choice that sets them on one of two different paths. The levels and mission objectives remain the same but each path has subtle differences. One choice means that the player has access to various health upgrades that they can find here and there throughout the game and at one point B.J. waxes philosophical with a brilliant former-Soviet mathematician-turned-resistance member on the nature of determinism and free will.

The other choice puts you on a path that gives you armor upgrades to find that increase the percentage of armor you get from armor found in the world and dropped by enemies. It also means B.J. plays guitar and drops acid with Jimi Hendrix after being told in no uncertain terms that the relationship between Uncle Sam and the black man in America is not too dissimilar from the relationship between Hitler and the Jews.

The brilliant part is that these little vignettes, like the upgrades and other secrets, are entirely skippable or missable if you're not the type to talk to all the characters every chance you get or explore every nook and cranny of each level.

Beyond this there are also four alternate bonus modes that can be unlocked by finding the secrets hidden throughout the game and deciphering codes. Those modes change the settings in profound ways that alter how you approach the game. One mode removes the heads up display so the entire view is unobstructed, another starts you off with 999 health and unlimited ammo while another removes all the health and armor pickups from the world. The last one has perma-death, meaning if you die at any point in the game you have to start all over from the beginning.

For fans of the pure action shooter these modes are a godsend because after playing the game once and seeing the story play out they're likely to skip most of the beautifully rendered, well-shot cinematics upon replay. Or at least, I know I did. Much as I enjoyed the game's narrative and setting, after I was done being swept away I was still hungry for gunning down more Nazis and the game was only too happy to accommodate me.

As for the gunplay itself it is quite punchy. All the guns go plink and pew and boom in all the right ways and each weapon, sans knife, has an alternate fire mode that turns it into a completely different weapon. Assuming, that is, you manage to find the upgrade for each weapon that enables its alt-fire mode. My two favorites were the assault rifle, which becomes a rocket launcher, and the sniper rifle, which becomes a laser rifle.

In keeping with the old-meets-new theme the game has a perk system that rewards and encourages alternate play styles. I played stealthily for most of my first play through but now I tend to be more of the dual-wielding type. Did I mention you can dual-wield all of the weapons? You can dual-wield all of the weapons, even the knives!

Suffice to say I greatly enjoyed myself. It's been a good while since I played an FPS where the bad guys could be blown into grisly giblets and every level had secret passages to find. The New Order is a sort of weird homage to all the current and classic FPS games fans of the genre have enjoyed for two decades now.

At the same time though, it's also an example of how stagnant things are culturally. It's almost as if FPS developers, and by extension everyone else in the creative industries, have so run out of new ideas that they are going back and strip mining the past. If this is true then it is a broader cultural issue and it feels unfair to knock the game for it.

Even though, for all the supposed major leaps and changes the world has gone through in the decades since the end of WWII is it possible that we are somehow living in a world that only has the appearance of change? That the details may come and go but the broader strokes stay the same? It would certainly explain the lack of new ideas in all aspects of our lives, from entertainment to politics and everything in between.

The Misfits declared that it was a static age we were living in and that was back in 1978. Punk music was able to self-examine to the point of reaching that conclusion. Maybe video games are reaching a similar point. Or maybe The New Order is really just more of The Old Order and any self-reflection is just something we're reading into it on our own.

Either way, Wolfenstein: The New Order is an entertaining pure action FPS with great characters and settings, an entertaining story and a lot of replay value baked in for good measure. It has an elegant, easy to use cover system that is absolutely necessary on the harder difficulty levels. Much of the cover available can be destroyed and this has the effect of keeping the player on their toes throughout the adventure.

Visually the game has a unique style though on the PS3 I experienced texture pop-in and muddy, low resolution textures in general. Despite being geared towards newer hardware the game still ran smoothly and without a hitch.

In the grander scheme of things I'm unsure if it's actually doing anything new or if it's worth talking about with people who aren't fans of the genre. I definitely felt like it was worth my time though and that counts for something.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is at least as good as Wolfenstein 3D and is better than Return to Castle Wolfenstein. If I were rating this on a traditional games rating scale I would give it extra points for not having a single zombie in the entire game. This has been my review.

Thanks for reading.