Wolfenstein: The New Order review: Satisfying, straightforward Nazi hunting

Wolfenstein: The New Order begins with an assault on the Baltic Sea stronghold of General Deathshead, the villain from 2009’s Wolfenstein. The Allies are losing the war, owing to advanced Nazi technology like giant robot dogs, huge tripod robots that shoot lightning bolts, and jet fighters protecting the base. The New Order establishes its sci-fi credentials early, breaking from the tradition of the last few Wolfenstein games, which were more concerned with the undead and occult magic.

The fight through the stronghold reveals a castle behind its walls, complete with secret passages, bowls of dog food that grant health, and golden treasures to find, the start of an homage to the original Wolfenstein 3D which runs throughout The New Order. The fight through the castle ends in a gore-ridden Nazi research facility in a sequence that feels like a horror movie, accompanied by an appropriately grating, static-laden music score.

Before you know it, Wolfenstein series hero B.J. Blazcowicz is taking a header out a castle window thanks to a huge explosion, catching some shrapnel in the skull and waking up 14 years later. The war is over, and Nazis are spreading their alt-history dominion across the globe and into the solar system. It’s up to you, as Blazcowicz, to help free Earth from the scourge in what ends up being many hours of killing Nazis in fun and interesting ways.

A brainless yet serious narrative

The New Order takes its storytelling seriously, though it can’t help but be a meat-headed action movie most of the time. During the opening sequence, for instance, as the Allies are flying their aircraft toward Deathshead’s Baltic Sea base, one of Blazcowicz’s comrades jumps out the side door of a transport plane and somehow manages to land on the wing of another, neighboring transport plane that needs a new pilot.

This sort of ’80s action movie nonsense, often set to a rock-and-roll soundtrack that would be right at home in a Zack Snyder film, pops up at regular intervals. Characters that we’re obviously meant to care about die melodramatically, but they end up feeling two-dimensional and ultimately irrelevant. The most interesting character for me was Blazcowicz himself. His incessant whispers during levels sometimes annoyingly give the player a hint as to where to go, but sometimes his personal quips were as funny as anything Schwarzenegger had to say in the movies of his heyday.

What mostly made Blazcowicz interesting for me was the fact that The New Order seems completely aware of how absurd he is as a character throughout the entire Wolfenstein franchise. There are frequent references to Blazcowicz being homicidal, or a maniac, or an otherwise almost-unhinged killer of Nazis. Even General Deathshead rants at Blazcowicz toward the end of the game about how many people B.J. has slaughtered, ironic considering the source of the comment.

None of this is a strike against The New Order, though the Sly Stallone-esque moments often felt odd when juxtaposed against the more mature risks MachineGames took with the story. The Nazis in The New Order aren’t just cartoon cut-outs to be shot down because they happen to be there. There are constant references to the systemic racial purging and genocide you’re fighting against. The first time you see any persons of color in the game is in a forced labor camp in Croatia, in a level that sees you tortured awoken inside a person-cooking oven, with a trio of emaciated corpses surrounding you.

Last-gen gore, next-gen difficulty

“…like ripe melons…”

Complementing the disturbing imagery and thematic content is some intense gore during combat. Enemy soldiers will virtually disintegrate, coming apart like ripe melons when they’re hit with rockets or laser weapons, making a wet, squishy sound as they splatter all over the wall. Between the gore and the narrative content, I have never played a video game that deserved its Mature ESRB rating more than The New Order.

Wolfenstein: The New Order runs off the id Tech 5 engine, the same engine that powered Rage. That might explain why playing The New Order on my Xbox One didn’t look all that much better than playing Rage on my Xbox 360 back in 2011, with plenty of aliasing issues on the edges of objects. None of this took away from the quality of the actual gameplay, but it was disappointing as someone still looking for that graphical oomph from a new hardware purchase.

I tried to play my entire review playthrough of The New Order on “I Am Death Incarnate” difficulty, one step down from the maximum. I finally had to abandon that attempt and turn the difficulty all the way down to power through the last third of the game and get this review together in a timely fashion. Surprisingly, even with the difficulty turned way down, there were still times when I took the game too lightly and got myself obliterated.

At the higher difficulties, the enemy AI is especially intense. Soldiers will aggressively attack your flanks, sliding into cover as they leapfrog from position to position, and every sizable encounter will take place in an area that has multiple potential pathways and approaches. If the difficulty is turned up enough, trying to simply hunker down and stop-and-pop from a safe spot is tantamount to suicide. You’ll need to keep moving.

Stealth and slaughter

Dual-wielding on the moon is never not fun.

Which brings me to my only real problem with The New Order on a mechanical level: you have to manually pick up ammunition and armor. This “feature” ostensibly exists to prevent you from accidentally picking up health packs when you are already at your maximum, which leads to an “overcharged” health bar that slowly ticks back down to the standard maximum.

It only made sense to take advantage of this ability if and when I wanted to barrel through a fight without worrying about cover or tactics, so there were times when I indeed wanted to run over a health pack and not pick it up. It’s a shame that the manual item pick up system also had to be applied to ammo and armor, though, because the seconds you lose picking ammo boxes, dropped weapons, and armor pieces up in the middle of a tough fight can get you killed.

Despite the modern FPS convention of only carrying two primary weapons, B.J. Blazcowicz is still a walking battleship. Almost every weapon class is dual-wieldable. When and if you decide to just wade in and drop the hammer, the amount of firepower you can put out is insane. Still, if you have the difficulty turned up, just peeking into the open can be extremely foolhardy. Stealth played a surprisingly large role in my playthrough, as I was forced to use knife throws and silent takedowns to whittle down sentry patrols and to kill officers who would otherwise call for significant amounts of backup if they detected my presence.

Strong performance in the game automatically unlocks perks that support the way you’re playing, and my line of “Stealth” perks was almost entirely filled out by the end of the game. A playthrough on easier difficulties will probably favor the Tactical, Assault, and Demolition perk trees which reward the use of conventional firearms, berserker-type tactics, and having fun with explosives, respectively.

Spray and pray.

In keeping with Wolfenstein 3D, The New Order is also loaded with secrets and collectibles besides the aforementioned golden treasures. Enigma codebooks that you discover during the game are used in the Extras screen to put together code breaking puzzles that I couldn’t make heads or tails of, meaning I was never able to unlock four available bonus game modes. There are letters to find and read and newspaper clippings tacked to walls or lying on desks all over the place which tell the story of The New Order’s alternate timeline. In a level that takes place in a museum, I even paused to listen to audio recordings on a self-guided tour about the Nazi colonization of the moon.

The ferociousness of the action in The New Order alternates frequently with sizable periods where the game can slow down to a crawl, although much of that change comes due to deliberate player choice. The unavoidable slowdowns mostly take place in a resistance headquarters in between most of the game’s levels, as B.J. talks to other characters and the often silly narrative unfolds. When The New Order revealed the source of General Deathshead’s advanced technology, I groaned; foreshadowing for obvious narrative payoffs felt like a waste of time. There were also in-level sequences, like piloting a one-man submersible through the sewers of Berlin, which felt like crawling compared to the action sequences and which could not be skipped.