I was among the crowd of skeptics in the gamer community
every time new screenshots or details emerged prior to the release of Machine
Games’ “Wolfenstein: The New Order.” Like so many others, I felt that the 2001
release of “Return to Castle Wolfenstein” was the high point of the venerated
series and that every release since simply failed to capture the same great
experience. Despite this feeling, The New Order started to gain some critical
and commercial momentum, so I decided to give it a try. It has definitely left
a fantastic impression on me, and I am looking forward to seeing it all
continue in some form after the revitalization The New Order has bestowed on
the Wolfenstein series.
When I say impressions, the most literal – and arguably the
most impactful – sense of it comes through The New Order’s visuals. The art and
architecture of the game is simply breathtaking. A truly creative visual design
team with vast imaginations turned in some of the finest work I’ve ever seen in
a videogame. Throughout the game’s diverse locations – from sewers and prisons,
to lunar research labs and Nazi work camps – players can’t help but think about
what the world of the 1960’s would resemble if the Nazi’s had won World War II.
Towering walls of concrete and the sprawling infrastructure of Berlin give
players the sense of choking confinement, a visual tone that carries over to
the story as well in order to solidify the impression that the Nazis control
the world with a tightening iron grip. There is no escaping it. Besides the
visual sense of confinement and control, the design team further immerses
players by re-imagining popular 60’s culture with a German-influenced twist.
For example, players can find albums in the world from a fictional band called
Die Kafer and play their hit-song “Mond, Mond, Ja, Ja” from the pause screen.
(The band’s album jacket is eerily similar to a famous photo taken along Abbey
Road.) While the audio-visual presentation has no bearing on the core gameplay
overall, the loads of subtle details in The New Order really show the
development team’s dedication to crafting an immersive experience, and it truly
pays off.
As with other noteworthy first person shooter games, the
main attraction often involves pointing guns at enemies and squeezing the
trigger, and The New Order fully satisfies this essential gameplay demand. The
gunplay feels smooth and responsive, easily on par with FPS greats like Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare and Halo. Adding to those series’ winning formulas,
however, Wolfenstein also offers alternate fire modes for every weapon – which
range from simply attaching a silencer to a pistol or selecting the rate of
fire on an assault rifle all the way to loading incendiary shells in a shotgun
or blasting rockets from an underslung launcher attached to your machine gun.
Throw in the option to dual-wield two guns of the same type and The New Order
lets you experience some truly brutal gun battles. There aren’t many games that
let you barge into a room full of Nazis, shouldering two fully loaded machine
guns, and tear everyone to shreds in a tornado of bullets. If you get a little
too in over your head, however, thankfully The New Order has a useful cover
mechanic reminiscent of the Killzone series’ combat design which lets you pop
out and shoot safely. (Just don’t stay too long as enemy fire will wear cover
away in time). If stealth suits your play
style more than running and gunning, The New Order also has some mechanics
built in to reward sneaky players. By infiltrating a zone full of guards
undetected, players can knife officers so that alarms will not be triggered
once all hell inevitably breaks loose. There is no pure stealth option to
gameplay, however, as I don’t think it would match the hero’s penchant for
Nazi-slaughter. The designers at Machine Games have a way of guiding every
action scene back to the gun, it seems.
Unfortunately, one of the guns featured prominently in the
game ended up feeling the most useless and unnecessary. About 1/3 of the way
through the story, players receive the Laserkraftwerk (which we’ll just call
The Laser), which comes in handy for cutting through fences and crates to
reveal secret areas and items, and by finding upgrades for the Laser, it can
also become a very powerful weapon. But there’s a catch. Apparently the Laser
projects so much energy through its beam that it can only fire once – twice if
you’re lucky (I could never understand this inconsistency, actually) – before
it runs dry. You better not miss! Thankfully, there are plenty of wall nodes
scattered throughout the levels to recharge its ammo for free, but I often
found myself unrealistically running away from firefights to recharge when I
felt compelled to melt Nazis with the Laser. In retrospect, the game would have
been more fun if I had just holstered the damn thing and use a more
conventional Nazi-slaughtering tool.
I was pleased to find that the variety of Nazis to slaughter
was fairly extensive, although a little sparsely utilized on the battlefields
themselves. What I mean is, while the artists were able to devise some truly
fierce opponents like the dog-tank hybrid “Panzerhunds” and the hulking, ironclad
Ubersoldats (meaning “super-soldiers”), the encounters with these monstrosities
were very limited. The Panzerhunds would attack in what felt like scripted
events rather than full-on action sequences, while the Ubersoldats would mostly
show up, unload their weapons in your direction while you ducked for cover, and
then politely stand in the middle of a room and wait for you to fire enough
shots at them from cover until they died. Most of the encounters in The New
Order involve variations of a single enemy type: the heavily armored Nazi
soldier. That’s it. While there’s no denying how fun it was to shoot them until
their corpses littered the world, it would have been nice if they posed more of
a challenge. Like the Ubersoldat mentioned above, I never once had to worry about
a squadron of Nazis chasing me down when I dove for fresh cover or retreated to
find my bearings and a stronger position. If players choose to approach the
gunplay in The New Order tactically, foregoing simply run and gun grit, then
this could lead to some serious disappointment. To truly enjoy the game, I
found it better just to dive headfirst into the battles like a true madman
would. 
The madman I’m referring to is none other than the
reincarnation of B.J. Blaskowicz, the long-standing hero of the Wolfenstein
franchise. The designers at Machine Games pay homage to the series roots by
designing B.J. as a beefy all-American boy who enjoys nothing more than killing
Nazis left and right. One might assume that he sounds like a caricature, and I
would agree to that assertion throughout every Wolfenstein game up until The
New Order. In this particular story, B.J. has been given a voice and a real
human soul. Throughout the story, he is often mumbling some truly dark and
existential ponderings. This is a man who has suffered and has witnessed
suffering and cruelty. His whole life has revolved around righting Nazi wrongs,
after all, and by the time players encounter B.J. in The New Order, he is
literally a broken man. Thankfully for B.J., though, he is not alone in his
struggles. He will encounter a wide variety of allies throughout the story who
share his desire to sever the Nazi’s chokehold on the world. These people
weren’t dropped in just to fill story roles. Every one of them felt human and
real, with their own desires and flaws. Every one of them had a clear
resolution and purpose in the narrative. (Even Max Hass, the strong
“Lenny-like” simpleton proved to be more than occasional comic relief. He had a
complete character arc, which – in the end – almost brought me to tears.)
While it’s true that each character had their own gestures
and voices that made them memorable, I felt that The New Order’s antagonist,
General Deathshead, was truly among the devious villains I’ve ever encountered
in a game story. While I would never personally condone eugenics or wholesale
genocide, the dialogue of Deathshead was written in a way to make it obvious
that he truly believed in the purity of his own megalomaniacal cause. Lines
such as “In work like this it is easy to be tempted to sense compassion… we
must learn that this is pointless instinct not fit for the master race!” and
“Can you imagine the splendor of… the intelligence of the human brain
amalgamated with the efficiency and obedience of the machine!” really characterize
him as a man defined by his agenda, and the horrific acts players witness him
perpetrate on screen will truly create a driving need to bring him to justice.
Sadly, I wish Deathshead had more of a presence in the game. He is absent for a
significant portion of The New Order. Thankfully, while he is “off-screen” an
equally compelling sub-villain named Frau Engel takes over for players to
direct their anger. Machine Games managed to nail down the eloquent evil of the
Nazi high command. Frau Engel commits some of the most chilling atrocities with
the warmest of motherly smiles spread across her wrinkled face. The effect of
the game’s evil characters truly makes the experience memorable.
Perhaps my single gripe with the experience overall is that
I could not accurately define the tone of the narrative. “Am I supposed to be
laughing?” is a question I had to constantly ask myself. There seemed to be a
bit of a disconnect between the heartfelt, soulful character interactions and
the on-screen, gonzo action. This confusion was only amplified by the constant
sense that I was somehow missing some deep meaning in the story, as if there
had been a big plot twist that was working beneath the surface throughout the
experience that was never paid off by the end, or maybe I was just too dumb to
notice. Either the game was trying too hard to have a deep meaning and it
became lost in its own ambiguities, or it was only pretending to have one it
knew it could not achieve. On one hand you’re a beefy Nazi-killing machine, emptying
mags full of ammo into a sea of Nazi soldiers, sinking throwing knives into
Nazi skulls from across the room, sneaking around and slitting Nazi throats
undetected, and then, after everyone’s dead, you stop to catch your breath and
survey the carnage before you realize: you are Nazi-death incarnate. This kind
of gonzo action, which piles literally thousands of Nazi corpses at your feet
throughout the game, makes the game feel downright silly… But then on the other
hand, you’re just a lonely man whose sole purpose in life was taken away.
You’re broken because you awaken in a world where the bad guys won, where you
must literally face the realization that everything you bled for in the war was
lost and all your friends died for nothing. It’s a pretty powerful foundation
for story, actually, and the game really does build something great on top of
it. In the end, however, I just didn’t know which tone to expect in the scene around
the next corner, and therefore I never quite knew how I ought to react emotionally
when it came.