Wolfenstein: The New Order

Blazkowicz wakes up to a world unrecognizable from the one he was last conscious in. The Nazis, dominant after World War 2, are a global power, their technological prowess unsurpassable. They were the first to develop the atomic bomb, which they used to force America to surrender. They conquered Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. They’ve embarked on space exploration, colonizing the moon. Cities levelled as the Nazis invaded have been rebuilt with concrete mega-structures – London, which features heavily in the story, is unrecognizable. Every citizen is under constant surveillance, with German citizens living in relative peace and comfort and every other race and nationality subject to routine invasions of privacy. Anyone attempting to push back against the Nazi regime is put to death or shipped to concentration camps. Blazkowicz, who has seen and done so much to halt the advance of the Nazis, who has sacrificed and killed and made horrific decisions, is forced to see that it was all for nothing.

It’s completely, utterly engrossing. I found myself drawn into the alternate reality of the game’s world, desiring to see and learn as much as possible about a possible timeline where the Nazis are victorious. The game’s history is drip-fed through newspaper clippings, personal diaries and conversations with other characters, revealing the struggles of the resistance efforts, the advance of the Nazis across the globe and the eventual change in reporting as newspapers in conquered regions are commandeered to advocate the superior Nazi way of life. The campaign sees Blazkowicz united with an underground resistance effort determined to take down the Nazi regime and it offers numerous standout moments. As the story jumps around, I found myself tasked with stealing a U-boat, infiltrating an enemy castle (stealth gameplay is executed brilliantly), boarding a train dangling from a destroyed portion of a gargantuan bridge running between Gibraltar and Africa and even walking across the surface of the moon. One standout mission saw Blazkowicz sent into a concentration camp to free a prisoner – a particularly dark moment in a campaign that has no shortage of pain and suffering. Standing inside the camp, watching as distant chimneys belched smoke into the night, hearing those enslaved wonder where their relatives and friends, whom they were separate from, were was affecting, to say the least.

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Though Blazkowicz is now a defined character, he’s not the only one – The New Order features an excellent supporting cast. The resistance effort is stocked with characters from various parts of Wolfenstein’s fictional world – some returning from prior games, others brand new. All are fully realized and well-acted, with Blazkowicz’s interactions with them offering a deeper understanding of the human cost of the war effort – each has their own reason for wanting the Nazis destroyed, and these layers add up to a satisfying, ragtag group of survivors. Quiet moments between some of the more action-packed missions task Blazkowicz with walking around the resistance headquarters, assisting them with menial tasks. It’s a welcome reprieve from the intense story, letting the characters and narrative take a few breaths before throwing the player into the next chapter. On the Nazi side of things, Deathshead offers a satisfying main antagonist, his robotic creations hounding (sometimes literally, in the case of the Panzerhunds) Blazkowicz throughout the campaign. Frau Engel fills the role of antagonist in the sections without Deathshead, first meeting Blazkowicz on a train to Berlin, and later cropping up at the concentration camp. She is a cold, calculating woman, who claims to have done her part for furthering the German master race by producing six Aryan children – indeed, she comments on rather ironic fact that Blazkowicz is a perfect example of the Nazi’s ideal physical attributes: incredibly handsome, physically fit, blonde haired and blue-eyed. She also gives a rather scary face to the dogged determination of the regime to exterminate or control every undesirable member of society.

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That face, like the rest of the game is nicely animated. Many cut scenes are pre-rendered, and look great, with excellent direction, while those that use the in-game engine showcase some nice texture detail and character modelling. Overall, Wolfenstein: The New Order is an attractive game – it won’t blow you away, but it manages to convey its environments well, offering appropriate scale to the Nazi’s grand engineering works and throwing some interesting conceptual designs for what 1960s Nazi design would look like. The same is true for the sound, with gunfire, Nazi soldiers, voice acting and environmental sounds combining to drop players fully into this alternate vision of history – even down to little touches like Nazi-inspired propaganda rock ‘n’ roll and pop songs, which can be found throughout the game, offering a fascist slant on the culture propagated by America in reality.

Ultimately, however, Wolfenstein: The New Order is simply great fun to play. There’s nothing revolutionary here, nothing that other games can take inspiration from and use to advance the genre, but what The New Order does, it does very well. The highlight is the game’s narrative, which sucks you in and holds you, riveted, until the dramatic, cliffhanger ending, but the gameplay that binds it all together is solid, enjoyable, even if it is decidedly retro. What’s more, there’s very little distraction. Replay-ability is handled with five difficulty levels, two possible storylines (though both end in similar ways) and a multitude of collectibles to find in every level. However, unlike its peers, there’s no multiplayer. MachineGames wanted to focus exclusively on a well-crafted single player game, which is precisely what they’ve achieved, but Wolfenstein will ultimately suffer as a long-term purchase because of it. Regardless of that, it’s still worth your time. If you’ve exhausted every game you own and are desperately waiting for the summer drought to be over and the glut of Fall releases to arrive, fire up your respective console or PC and jump into Wolfenstein’s world, experience its alternate reality – even if it’s just to answer that most burning of questions: What if?

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Wolfenstein is available on PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox and PC.