Wolfenstein: The New Order

Release: 2014

Developer: Machine Games, id

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Genre: First Person Shooter

Gameplay Stats: 23 hours, 50/50 achievements, Wyatt then Fergus

Destroy some Nazi's! Underwater, hidden in the mountains, even on the moon! What's not to love? Apparently a lot if you are a gamer these days, but Nazi sympathizers have no place here. To say it upfront, I played through this game about 1.8 times to get all of the collectibles and achievements. The first time I played through on hard, then I played the first two-thirds of the game on easy to get collectibles, and then played the end on very hard to finish up.

Visuals: This is pretty clearly a game made almost a decade ago. I don't think that anyone will be writing home about the graphical fidelity here. I bet this looked a little better than average at release, but it hasn't aged especially gracefully. I think that's the case for pretty much every game that was trying for something realistic in the graphics department, it's trading short term hype for long tail praise. The visual communication was okay. They used a lot of "follow the light" type of pathing to show you where to go, but they didn't showcase secrets very well at all. The game gives you maps, but they aren't very helpful on their own. You need to check them several times to see which floor or area of the map you are on. It's relatively unhelpful if we're being honest. The game starts by putting the collectibles on the map as "?" but it pretty quickly abandons that approach for just letting you explore every single nook and cranny to find all of the things.

Audio: The music here is pretty good! I especially enjoyed the covers of 1960's music in German because the Nazi's won the war in this timeline. It was an unnecessary but very nice touch. The voice acting is pretty flat, everyone seems panicked OR testosterone fueled for 90% of the game. Each character is in one of the two camps, there is very little crossover. Depending on yoru choice in the early game you get one of two companions, Wyatt or Fergus, and I can't recommend enough that you pick Fergus. The voice actor for Wyatt is annoying as fuck. He's apparently a 16 year old in a 30 year old's body. The sound effects here are fine, but lacking a bit of base. It could be my headphones, but I did feel like they were a little lacking.

Plot: The Nazi's won WW2, so now the whole world has been taken over by the Third Reich! What will you do??? Well, kill a whole lot of Nazi's of course! The plot of this game starts out being unobtrusive, but definitely crosses over into obtrusive. I think I was hoping for a no-nonsense slog through an ongoing Nazi bloodbath, but probably 25% of the chapters happen without even seeing more than a handful of enemies, just focusing on the characters. I didn't dig this. I didn't think the characters were written well and I think it messed with the pacing of the game pretty severely. I guess because the game was partially developed by id and published by Bethesda I had my heart set on Doom. I did enjoy the broad strokes, but I wish they didn't try to force life into these husks of characters.

Gameplay: The gun play here was quite enjoyable! Lots and lots of shooting. A bit more strategic than Doom, but a bit less tentative than my understanding of CoD. There are little perks that carry over across chapters and reloads that can improve your character's power/arsenal in a variety of ways. I really enjoyed having some secondary goals in mind while killing unknowable amounts of enemies, it kept the game from getting stale. It was a pretty nice way to shoehorn in a skill tree in a way that felt pretty natural. There really wasn't much grinding, just asking the player to experiment a little bit. The collectibles were a little bit stinky because I didn't feel like they were telegraphed well at all, relying on some very mild platforming, but the game is inconsistent in when you can do this platforming. There are a lot of objects without hit boxes or that represent invisible walls, and then there are some things that are quite solid and extremely out of the way that are concrete and hold some of the secrets needed for completion. I'm a bit embarrassed about it, but I did have to look up how to decode the enigma codes that you can pick up throughout the game. Looking back, I saw all the clues that I needed (I even talked to my wife about how puzzling they were) but I didn't make the necessary connection to see how they would decrypt the extra play modes through the menus.

Overall, how was this game? Eh, it was okay. It gives me some interest in the rest of the Wolfenstein reboots, but I would have a hard time recommending this game to anyone in general. The game was fine, but it didn't really age too well. In 2020, I think I'd give this game a [5.5/10]