I went into Wolfenstein: The New Order with a sour attitude. The series has a long-standing tradition of mediocrity and generally just isn’t my cup of tea. That’s why I was surprised by how good The New Order is. Best game of 2014? Not even close. But it’s still a pretty damn solid Nazi shooting experience.
So here we are, back in the shoes of the ironically Aryan B.J. Blazkowicz who is once again out to thwart the Nazis’ wackiest scientist, Deathshead. Wolfenstein’s timeline at this point is kind of loose. It’s hard to say whether or not the game is a true sequel to 2009’s Wolfenstein. Characters act like they have a history with one another, but there’s also people who died in previous games that re-appear as though nothing ever happened. I would think of the series like Zelda, there’s a timeline there if you want it bad enough and make some of your own logical jumps. The game does have a rather big plot twist that emerges shortly after the opening credits. I didn’t follow the game all that closely before launch so I’m not sure how much has already been revealed in promo material but if you’re dying for spoilers you can head to the game’s Wikipedia article.
Frau Engel and her Bubi are particularly excellent newcomers to the series.
The New Order prides itself on restoring classic first person shooter staples. There’s no giant arrow pointing you towards your mission objective, instead a good old fashioned map will have to suffice. Your health does not regenerate to full capacity, instead you’ll have to pick up medkits and armor to keep you at full strength. While some of the choices enhance the game, others remind you why we left some of these elements behind to begin with. Is there really any reason I should have to press a button every time I want to pick up some ammunition? Usually after clearing a room of enemies I would find myself just running around mashing the interact button until I was satisfied I’d picked everything up. There’s no limited inventory, so why be discerning on what you collect?
The nicest old-school callback arrives in the form of your weaponry. Blaskowicz is not confined to carrying two rifles, no quite the opposite, he can carry two of EVERY rifle. Nearly every gun in Wolfenstein can be dual wielded (yes even sniper rifles), although ammunition is oftentimes scarce so I found that in most situations it made more sense to use a single weapon and conserve. Still, there’s something very satisfying about running around Nazi castles with two rocket launchers in hand.
Two sniper rifles? Why not?
New to the series is the “perks” system. Performing certain actions in game will open up new upgrades and abilities for your character. What’s cool about this is the perks are unlocked based on the way you play. Opening up the stealth tree requires that you perform stealthy actions. If you find yourself running and gunning instead then you’ll start unlocking the action oriented tree. The game does force stealth segments upon you, so for the most part you’ll probably find yourself earning all the important perks no matter what. It’s a cool system that really makes you think about how you play the game, I do however wish it was just a little bit larger. I was pretty much done messing with perks around the halfway point of the game.
The game looks great and ran very smoothly on the PS4 that I played it on. I’m not sure that it merits its enormous installation size but There’s not a lot of replayability here so it doesn’t really have to eat up any of your HDD past its roughly 10-11 hour runtime.
Bathroom stealth, a highlight of all good first person shooters.
Gameplay vacillates between full blown shooting segments and slower paced steath ones. In some missions the stealth is required but more often than not its optional. The game implements a leaning mechanic which allows you to peer around corners and spot enemies without being seen. Other than that there’s not really much to assist you when it comes to avoiding enemies. The first person view makes it difficult to figure out where enemies are and oftentimes I would have my cover blown by someone just out of my field of vision.
Maybe I’m getting old but I also found it difficult to spot some enemies at a distance. You’ll find yourself in a number of long distance firefights and enemies tend to blend into the background. I almost never found aiming down the sights of my gun helpful, instead I would just aim from the hip like normal and wait until my reticle would turn red so I knew I was targeting the right spots. Could just be a personal problem, I guess I should go get my eyes checked….
You don’t need amazing eyesight to see someone was sleeping on the job when they made this texture.
In between missions BJ will oftentimes find himself back in his home base. Here you can interact with your allies and even do little side missions for them. Most of these missions involve finding lost trinkets spread about the level, the problem is that you don’t get any markings or hints on your map as to the items location so really you’re just scanning every nook and cranny until you hit gold. I spent a lot of time searching for some missing toys for a character named Max thinking that upon completion I’d get a nice reward, like a piece of a gun or something. Instead I found that all my hard work had done was unlock a biography of Max….great….
Wolfenstein: The New Order is probably my biggest surprise of the year. I doubt I’ll be remembering it come January, but it certainly did its job in holding me over during our traditional summer video game drought. I appreciated the callbacks to shooters of yore and if you’re looking for something nice and challenging to grind your teeth on this could definitely be the ticket.
