 Wolfenstein The New Order is insane in the best possible ways, that won't come out as a surprise to anyone who's played it, it has been 3 years since The New Order came out after all. So why am I doing a review on a game that's come out that long ago? It's my way of excusing the fact that I spent 12 hours shooting Nazis in order to prepare for another 12 hours of shooting Nazis in the face in Wolfenstein The New Colossus which is coming out in October of this year 2017. What an exciting time to be alive and to shoot Nazis. A history lesson is in order before I move on to praising and critiquing the myriad of elements that make up The New Order the game that it is. I never got to play Wolfenstein 3D or any of the other 90s releases in the series because you see, I was in no state of playing anything. I didn't even exist until 95. Not a good year for humanity considering. And yet none can deny the pivotal role that its software as Wolfenstein 3D played in putting the FPS genre front and centre in nearly every PC game's mind. Right there alongside Doom. It's such a treat to live in a time that sees the reimagining of these two franchises for an entirely new generation. Generation in terms of technology and in terms of players as well. The New Order is excellent at keeping the stakes high. From the starting sequence that climaxes in what is emotionally an impossible choice between a draft veteran and a promising new recruit to the slaughter of innocents in an insane asylum. The motivations to pile Nazi bodies as high as the sky grows stronger and stronger. Tension is a palpable constant companion. No matter where you in the shoes of William B. G. Blaskowitz go. The lorded scene in The Train to Berlin is the height of just such narrative tension. For angels introduction serves a chilly reminder of the sick conviction of purity and superiority that the Nazi ideology has always put front and centre and at this point in the timeline has turned almost religion-like. The events of this game take place 15 years after the end of the war and things are not going particularly well for the world. You know if by particularly well you mean that the entire world has been controlled and taken over by Nazis. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Well, I don't know about you, but I was all too happy to reveal myself to that old witch for our Angel. A certainty that I was of the Aryan master race was repulsive. Torturing our dear for Angel, both physically and emotionally, has become something of a favourite pastime, in fact, and with the way Blaskowitz leaves things off with her in the new order, I am more than looking forward to new and imaginative ways for us to maim and abuse each other come October. But enough about the story. While it is fun and engaging and it embraces unexpected risks, few of us play shooters, for the narrative, or for the narrative alone at least, now there are more important elements than those. Gunplay, enemy and level design, even boss fight. Tentatively that last one, but we'll get to that conversation a little bit later. Let us start off with the gunplay. And it is impressive. One of the greatest strengths of the new order, gunplay is an absolute joy. Whenever you fancy your run of the mill semi-automatic or a sniper rifle, that doubles as a laser gun. Everything in your arsenal packs one hell of an impressive punch. My own playstyle in shooters often includes picking a shotgun and cleaving my way through hordes of enemies until no one is left standing. Or I run out of bullets, whichever comes first. Since I have a bad shot, it's usually the latter. Try using only your shotgun here for example, and you might often find yourself dying a quick and painful death courtesy of armoured enemies who shoot shrapnel bullets from their shotguns, which you really can't blame them for, can you? And they do so at a close distance in tiny, tiny spots and they rip your part of the seams. The beauty of the arsenal you have is that it easily allows great flexibility and it allows you to switch weapons on the go constantly, quickly and efficiently. Wireset pieces call for a quick shift between your sniper rifle and assault rifles, and with enemies constantly drawing closer you might pick the shotguns, which does shrapnel mode, and tear a Nazi limb or two away. I mean you have to get out there and enjoy yourself. Using weapons as the occasion calls for them is, I think, one of the most important and impressive things that Wolfenstein has achieved, this ability to shift gears whenever the circumstance calls for it. Speaking of shrapnel mode, which I, you might have noticed, mentioned earlier, each gun has a secondary firing mode. That way your machine gun doubles as a grenade launcher. Your sniper rifle into a projectile laser weapon and your actual laser cutter doubles as something that can, by the last couple of levels, easily melt just about every unpleasant enemy in your way. Granted you've got enough energy and so on and so forth. Dual wielding is immensely satisfying and cutting through dozens of Nazis with two laser weapons on a secret facility on the moon manages to hit just about every awesome factor you can imagine. And it does so in a major way as well. From what I gather, dual wielding is not too useful on Uber, that is the highest difficulty setting you can pick, and it is a difficulty that all but demands much greater accuracy and loads of headshots if you want to live that is. If you don't, well whatever. What is invalid criticism however is that dual wielding should have offered this greater accuracy with scoping and all that. You don't get any accuracy penalty when you dual wield, you only get the ability to zoom into the scope taken away, which is a very reasonable trade-off to holding two weapons. I only wish that you could press one button and have both weapons fire, instead of having to press the left mouse button for one weapon and the right mouse button for the other. I suspect it's done to conserve ammo, and that's perfectly reasonable of course. Can't really blame them for that, it's just my own personal little oak. Ammo-wise, I feel that shotgun shells in particular are a bit too rare, not nearly plentiful enough for all my shotgunning needs. But that's alright, it's fine. The secondary mode for shotguns is, as I mentioned, shrapnel shots, and those are perfect for shredding enemies, especially in confined spaces. Need of firing mode is too efficient against armoured enemies though, if you've got access to them I'd advise you to use your laser weapons to pick off any armoured villains that you see instead. It's good that the game offers upgrades in secondary firing modes, because just before they start being introduced I must admit I got slightly, just style a bit, bored with the normal modes as it were. But developer Machine Works seems to have a very fine grasp on all of that, because they introduce what's basically half a dozen new weapons that freshen up the combat halfway through. They don't do it all at once, which gives you plentiful time to experience all kinds of fun-wise-to-murder people. Nazis, Nazis, Nazis aren't people, right? The encounters feel that much richer and more satisfying with your newly minted arsenal, of course, in just in time for the last couple of missions. Now let's turn our attention to the chapters, and there are indeed 16 of them. Most of those are designed around giving the players different avenues of approaching combat, and while using guns to clear the way is certainly the most satisfying way to go about it, there's some limited stealth options for any of you sneaky, sneaky enthusiasts. A slow stalk forward and a cut throat can help reach your objective that much more easily, and can often save you a couple of hundred bullets. The level design is such a pleasant break from the corridor levels familiar to most players of games such as Call of Duty and Battlefield. This isn't some uninspired, tacked-on single-player mode. It is a return to form where root and weapon decisions make all the difference all of the time. Choices. Choices are key. Gens Mati's creative director on the new order, as well as the creative director on the new colossus, is all about making choices, strong decisions that you stick to during the entire making of the game. Take that choice between two characters really early on in the new order. You might remember I mentioned them at the beginning when I was talking about the narrative choices made. It doubles the workload of the whole development team, because making that choice basically created two states in which this game and the next one exist. Is this prioritizing of decisions about features, but take a long time to implement that is the foundation of this dual narrative in a storyline sense, as well as the foundation of what I consider is very good level design and some of the most solid gunplay I've had the pleasure of playing in a long time. Now I've seen enough phrases I think. Let's move on to a portion of the game that I didn't enjoy. Not at all, I'm afraid, the boss battles. Not only did I not have fun with those, I was actively annoyed and I dare say the last mission you kind of, kind of let down on that base alone. Take the both battles that games end. You battle one of the villains of the game, Death Head, in a large mech suit. My first issue and my lesser issue with this fight has to do with the fact that there isn't all that much to make me care about Death Head as a villain. He is introduced in a very threatening cruel way which sets him up well, after which the good Nazi doctor disappears for the rest of the game only to show up when, at the very last chapter. Sure we get several flashbacks of the aftermath of that first narrative state-defining choice and those try to create a strong enough antagonism within you, the player. But honestly, I just didn't feel like there were enough, though I dislike Death Head absolutely. Though I feel towards him the antagonism that I feel towards Frau Angel, after several tender scenes with her throughout different sections of the game, not even close. It's just that by the end of the game any of that threat that Death Head's introduction created, it has well evaporated. The boss battle itself has two stages, both of them annoying. The first most own account of Death Head's invulnerable shield, almost non-stop fire rate, and you having to run from one corner of the map to the other, twice in order to blow up the Zeppelin energy sources, the power of the aforementioned invulnerability shield. It's almost like spitting in the face of that great gunplay and movement and level design, because the stage of the battle is a gigantic cubicle, very uninspired, absolutely very much so. Now then, the second stage of the battle is best described as bullet spongy. Once the shield is dropped, Death Head's mech goes down a tunnel. Eurus Blaskowitz gives chase and we proceed to shoot each other for 5 to 10 to 15 minutes while Volves starts spraying fire and making the entire arena very difficult to operate around. It makes for an interesting battleground at least, despite the fight itself being, again, boring, frustrating in its nature. You can run out of bullets at one point and have to sprint through the level, hopping to get to one of the several batteries and recharge your energy, weapons before Death Head gets in position from where he can make french cheese out of you. He does drop armor every once in a while so you can use that to tell that you are doing something, some sort of damage, minor damage, major damage, who knows. I only wish that he changed his pattern of attacks, gave some indication this something different showing my progress. If he did I imagine the battle would have been a better ending, a less tedious one, a more interesting fight. Certainly, as it was it gave the new order a somewhat dull anticlimactic ending only partially redeemed by the last cinematic. Before I wrap this up, a few words on the collectibles. There's some really good fluff in the form of newspaper cutouts and tapes, as well as loads of achievement-bate collectibles rolled over the different chapters of the game. Going out of your way to collect them all helps you realise just how much work has been put in the design of some of those levels, in particular. My favourite tidbits of information have to be the newspaper cutouts, which give a lot of back story, a lot of information on the state of the world on how basically all big player countries fell under the Nazi ilk. And on what happened during these 14 years that Blaskowitz spent into a coma? There's information on Britain, on Germany, Japan, the United States and more. Short descriptions that give a look at how the German war machine managed to crush all the resistance. Oh and there's one particular piece about the failing popularity of unhealthy fish and chips on the British Isles and the rising popularity of, you guessed it, German cuisine, bursts and all that, yum. In summary, Wolfenstein, the new order, or Wolfenstein if you'd rather, did far more right than it did wrong and that shows very, very well. I had loads of fun with all these elements I praised repeatedly, the gunplay exploring the chapters and the story touched me on a deeper level than I expected. The excellent marriage of mechanics and narrative strengthens both in several cases and creates a game that's truly a thrill to play. What score would I give it? Well, I've never much liked the idea of scoring games, but if I had to, I suppose I would go with 78 out of 83 Nazi bears. I'd love to give the new order another 5 of those, but they are sadly out of my reach due to an impregnable energy field powered by Led Zeppelin music, which makes the task somewhat more difficult. Thank you for watching and if you enjoyed this, please subscribe and leave a like. If you disagree with me on any of the points I brought up, let me know. Let's get a conversation going, exchange ideas, points of view. That seems to happen less and less lately, but it's a great way to building something constructive, informative and useful. I'll see you next time. Bye! And that's a cut. Good job everyone. Oh, oh, he's actually dead. Oh my.